The Vernacular, the Aesthetic, the Rhetoric

     I think that Helmers, drawing on Perry, provides a fairly lucid definition of the aesthetic without oversimplifying the concept: “These works edify. They please” (63). For me, this speaks to the nature of art: it is both a standard against which other works or compositions are held and should involve some element of pleasure. However, and this is both my major issue and intense fascination with art and the aesthetic, the accepted standards of what evokes pleasure shifts across spaces, time periods, contexts, and framings. How we see today, and our understandings of aesthetic pleasure, are shaped by the simultaneously physical, material, spatial, ideological, and semiotic frames in which the artifact participates. For me, the aesthetic also implies that “pleasure,” or to return to Sontag, the allure of images, plays some role in this rhetorical process. However, and again this is working from Sontag’s theory, that pleasure is in capturing a subject and transforming it into an object, which is a little unsettling.

     I’m on board with Elizabeth-via-Bruce’s definition of the vernacular as that which serves a direct function or purpose (rather than just the pleasure of looking), which echoes Rosenblatt’s efferent response. I see Rockwell’s Civil Rights paintings, for example, as more vernacular than aesthetic because they perform a kind of work that, according to Gallagher and Zagacki, challenges established caricatures, allows for individuation and particularity, and provides a material representation of “American-ness,” all of which are clearly defined functions. Even today, the author’s argue, the paintings serve as a kind of epideictic rhetoric. This understanding, I think, culminates in a very pragmatic and functional understanding of images, one in which they only exist to perform some useful function. This is why, I think, we need Helmer’s continuum of aesthetic-vernacular rhetorics and contexts, because the continuum allows us to describe all images and the work they perform in different places, times, and frames.

   For both of these to be considered as visual rhetoric, they must do the kinds of work that we have outlined in class: they must participate in, respond to the needs of, and assist in the (re)establishment of a public. I think this definition provides a working answer for Bruce’s final question: how vital is context to analyzing a visual artifact? Context is everything. Without some insight into the public an artifact shapes and is shaped by, we are left with an incomplete understanding of its rhetorical functions and possibilities.