The act of looking

The aesthetic influence and the vernacular influence have one important thing in common: the act of looking.  The act of looking leads us to classify a visual artifact as participating within the aesthetic and/or participating within the vernacular.  It begins with a look. So, with this in mind, I start my blog response there, alongside Helmers.

According to Helmers, personal histories and “learned ideas about how and what to see” mediate all instances of looking (65).  She continues, “‘Just looking’ is never innocent, nor is it ever final.”  Point #1 about the act of looking: Looking is always mediated by context.  She describes looking as “a transactional process” (68).  In other words, a viewer’s response to a visual results from an exchange that takes place between the viewer, the specific culture, and the specific time of looking.  Point #2 about the act of looking: When someone looks, social exchange occurs.  When this transaction happens, the viewer enacts a narrative frame to make sense of what is seen (69).  Point #3 about the act of looking: Looking moves towards meaning through the construction of a narrative.  Finally, looking leads viewers to see possible interpretations of reality – “the way things could be” (84).  Point #4 about the act of looking: What we see through the act of looking does not mirror reality. (I might amend this a little and add…does not mirror reality for all lookers.)

When we engage in the act of looking, all of the points listed above happen simultaneously and, most often, without our conscious awareness.  However, I do think there are times when we are more aware of the act of looking.  When a visual participates within the aesthetic tradition – it pleases, engages, and inspires (Helmers 63).  When this happens, I think we are more aware of the act of looking.  We are aware of looking because it is this very act that leads us to react to the visual – our reaction exists because we are looking and is based on what we see.  On the other hand, when a visual participates within the vernacular tradition, it is more familiar to us and so the act of looking becomes secondary to the act of connecting.  The vernacular speaks the language of the everyday, and we connect with the vernacular when the language it speaks is our own.  This connection is deeper than a connection that might result from a visual within the aesthetic, and this deeper connection shifts our focus away from the act of looking.

A related (and also unrelated) example is from Baron’s A Better Pencil.  He writes about how technologies can become so commonplace and everyday that we cease to think of them as technologies; they, in a sense, become invisible.  He uses the pencil as an example of a writing technology that most of us fail to classify as a technology.  So, to connect back to the visual – I think images that participate within the vernacular can utilize language so familiar and everyday that some spectators stop being aware they are spectating.

There is value in both the aesthetic and the vernacular, and I think one of the reasons Norman Rockwell’s Civil Rights paintings were so impactful is that he combines the strengths of both. He took real life, everyday events (the vernacular) and gave them an aesthetic quality. In other words, his “topical paintings” (192) brought together the vernacular and the aesthetic.  The paintings were Rockwell’s artistic renditions of the events and he painted with the ‘Rockwell-ish’ style with which he audience was familiar.  In this way, they were aesthetic.  Yet, his paintings called viewers to question the everyday aspects of their lives and their personal stake in these events.  In this way, Rockwell’s paintings were visually rhetorical.  They were rhetorical because they had public significance: “The images make us recognizable to one another, providing the possibility of breaking out of the social realm of enforced norms and limited recognitions and into the realm where rhetorical efforts can achieve significance, even a share public voice” (193).

I have one final thought. The website of Jean Burgess (Associate Professor at Queensland University in Australia) talks about “vernacular creativity.” She explains that vernacular creativity “signifies the ways in which everyday creativity [i.e. scrapbooking] is practiced outside the cultural value systems of either high culture (art) or commercial creative practice (television, say).”  One of the values of this vernacular creativity is that it allows the public to participate more meaningfully in public culture.  So, this might lead us to consider how the vernacular opens up greater possibilities for the public by providing familiarity, points with which to relate, topics on which they have experience/opinions, and topics they find meaningful to their lives. Perhaps this is a point where the aesthetic and the vernacular come together.  When images that are vernacular accomplish this for a spectator, how they not also “edify [and] please”? (Helmers 63)

FYI: Burgess’s website: http://creativitymachine.net/2006/05/10/defining-vernacular-creativity/