Visual Rhetoric and Context/History

While I anxiously await the response to my SRR last week where I wondered how crucial context is to visual rhetoric, I figure it’s best to put it to everyone reading this: how crucial is context in the case of visual rhetoric?

I asked the question very deliberately in my previous SRR, as I think this has become a crucial question for me in the past few weeks; can visual rhetoric exist without context? And can’t context make nearly anything visually rhetorical? I keep coming back to the examples we’ve seen this semester and feeling like the tie between context (or history) and visual rhetoric is hard to break, if possible.

Starting with the piece from (I believe it was Helmers) on defining visual rhetoric through fine art, we see how the context of the paintings in question made them rhetorical. The meaning they possessed and therefore the argument they put forth hinged on the time in which they were experienced.

Similarly, the example of the pictures mountain ranges in Montana on Dr. Yancey’s cell phone—they’re not rhetorical to her, but placed in a new context, they might become rhetorical, like perhaps a conservationist rally. In that same vein, using my previous blog example, a game like Sega’s Jet Set Radio becomes rhetorical in its initial context—it utilized cel-shaded graphics, a radical new visual style in games being used to explore a controversial art style (graffiti). In short, it’s hard to imagine how an image, in a particular context or moment in history, couldn’t somehow be rhetorical.

Thus, the problem I have is that while I like to see things through Blair’s perspective and avoid the “Everything Is _____” bandwagon, when shifts in context and history are taken into account for, I struggle to think of a non-rhetorical image. I don’t want to say I can’t think of one in such a way that it implies that none exist—but I literally can’t think of one.

So, in the coming days, I look forward to the comments I get back from Dr. Yancey and anyone else so kind/bold as to respond, but: can an image be rhetorical without context or relating to history in some way as a result? And can any image, given the right context or historical emergence, avoid being rhetorical? These aren’t trick questions. This is a matter of genuine inquiry, as I find myself hung up on both of these matters.