Country cousins, city cousins

I begin off topic, with a nod to Annette Kolodny who, in her famous 1980 feminist theory essay, “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” posits three powerful ideas about the nature of historical literary interpretation. These points are:
1. Literary history is a fiction. We construct history in our own time. She quotes Hoy: “this continual reinterpretation of the past goes hand in hand with the continual reinterpretation by the present of itself.”

2. Insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms. Reading is a learned activity. She writes, “...we appropriate meaning from a text according to what we need (or desire), or in other words, according to the critical assumptions or predispositions (conscious or not) that we bring to it (emphasis mine). And we appropriate different meaning, or report different gleanings, at different times--even from the same text--according to our changed assumptions, circumstances, and requirements.” Included in this discussion is Kolodny’s assertion that considering a work aesthetically unworthy of canonization “may be due not to any lack of merit in the work but, instead, to an incapacity of predominantly male readers to properly interpret and appreciate women’s text--due, in large part, to a lack of prior acquaintance” (emphasis mine). She continues stating that, “the reader coming upon [women’s] fiction with knowledge of neither its informing literary traditions nor its real-world contexts will find himself hard pressed, though he may recognize the words on the page, to competently decipher its intended meanings.”

3. The grounds upon which we assign aesthetic value to texts are never infallible, unchangeable or universal, therefore we must reexamine not only our aesthetics but also the inherent biases and assumptions informing the critical methods which in part shape our aesthetic responses. Here she goes on to write about “how aesthetic value is assigned in the first place,” suggesting that the reader who is unfamiliar with the figurative language of the woman writer (she uses Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers," 1917) is in no position to place such a value judgement on the work because he or she is unfamiliar with the form.

So, on pages 66 and 67 where Helmers credits Zizek (1989), Pearce (1991), and Manguel (2000), I’d like to give due credit to Annette Kolodny who, again, published “Dancing” in 1980 (emphasis mine; here’s a link to her essay: http://www.english-e-corner.com/comparativeCulture/etexts/more/feminist_reader/minefield.html ). I see Kolodny’s ideas in Helmers who applies them or variations of them to visual art rather than to literary art. This reading event, for me, brings to the front considerations of authorship, author genius, collaboration and framing. Now, on to the task at hand, which is to answer these questions: “what’s the relationship between two influences—the vernacular and the aesthetic—and how we see today? What’s the relationship between these influences and visual rhetoric?” First, the vernacular.

If you were to ask a Georgia potter why his wares are made out of red clay, he’d tell you it’s because the clay in Georgia is red. If you asked a southern farmer why he built a dog-trot house out of pine, he might tell you a story about oppressive heat and humidity and airflow, and gesture to the pine trees surrounding his home. Both of these people made do with the tools and materials they had on hand, in the places where they lived their lives, creating functional things with the knowledge they’d gained through experience. It’s also about context.

An aesthetically pleasing vernacular dog-trot house

Vernacular forms, like Georgia pottery, though functional and “everyday” need not necessarily sacrifice the aesthetic: the everyday and the functional can also
be beautiful. Moreover, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, who’s to say that something is not aesthetically edifying? Who gets to decide that?

As we read Goggin we learned that reading vernacular visual rhetoric, like understanding the exigence of the dog-trot house or Georgia pottery, also requires knowledge of tools, materials, and function (97). The aesthetic visual rhetoric of fine arts, according to Helmers, “derive from the imagination, rather than serve as illustration, entertainment, or propaganda” (a claim she later complicates when she writes of commissioned pieces by artists in the 18th-century), they “edify. They please” (63). They please whom? And why? And on what basis?

Curators, Helmers notes, “exert immense power in arguing that certain works of art should be preserved because of the cultural work they do” (78). In this capacity, they hold the power of canonization, much like the patriarchy about whom Kolodny writes in her 1980 piece. Curators tell us what art is important by virtue of what they include or highlight, and by omitting all other options. In a Burkean sense they define art for the lay-viewer. Curators not only frame art in the literal sense of showcasing certain pieces or collections through exhibitions, but in doing so, they also frame what we determine to be important art. Helmers refers to Bennet who claims that “all exhibitions and collections are dialogues between presence and absence, cultural capital...and the everyday” (82).

I find this true not only of fine art displays, but also of art exhibitions of the vernacular which by their very purpose of framing vernacular works, omit “high” art, while they also decide which of the vernacular pieces are worthy of display. One of my favorite museums is the Folk Art Center just off the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville, North Carolina. Here’s a link:  http://www.southernhighlandguild.org/pages/folk-art-center/general-info.php

I visit every year or two attempting get a bead on the vernacular of the area. Of course I bring to it my own perceptions, and view the work with emotion and structures of feeling (84), and make meaning using the knowledge I have, but also using the information provided by the curator of the collections on display, collections which tell me what to think--even of the vernacular--both by omission and commission. In this way, the vernacular pieces displayed at the Folk Art Center and other places like it, share a space of interpretation with their fine arts counterparts, their city cousins.They rise to the position of the elite, the big fish in the small pond, the most revered in their category, the less embarrassing of the country cousins.

What I have concluded is that the vernacular and the aesthetic are in no way opposites, any more than poetry and fiction are opposites. Neither has greater value over the other, any more than say modernist fiction and Victorian fiction have over one another (returning here to literary works in a nod to Kolodny, again). Like Bruce, I'm left with questions. Perhaps knowledge of both the vernacular and the aesthetic, and of how they are framed can assist us by helping us to recognize how they inform one another: what considerations of class, gender, social, and cultural issues are at play as we attempt to suss out meaning when we analyze visual rhetoric?