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/          

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?

Vernacular takes me home

No matter the context, the word vernacular takes me home immediately. Home to a place where I spent countless hours teaching students that their "vernacular" (specifically language) was worth something. I find the definition Bruce shares from Elizabeth "the everyday, the unschooled, concerned with function" to be close to how I situate vernacular, but I also see the vernacular to be dependent on place (and this suggests an importance of context as well). For me, the vernacular is definitely steeped with function...it is practical...it is useful. I also think of it in connection to dialects and literacy. This literacy of the vernacular is housed within each of us (I might argue). As many of you know... when I really care about something my "vernacular" or my "twang" really shines through. I as sit here reading this in my head...I hear my "twang" because I care about vernacular, and I am interested in how visual vernacular and dialectical vernacular coincide. I wonder if this point of connection could be found in place. 

In another since, aesthetics take me to another part of home... the fine arts. I have spent countless years roaming the rooms  of museums and being fascinated by my cousin's incredible drawings that frequently can be found on the wall in a gallery around town in a show. Obviously, the aesthetic is very prevalent in my dance life, especially the classical ballet. Classical ballet is created to please the eye--everyone moment is a "picture." I too point to Helmer's brief explanation of the aesthetic  quality of art "These works edify. They please" (63). I think this encompasses the central goals of many works of art, especially historical pieces, Georgia O'Keefe's flowers jump instantly to mind. But, there's another element here; yes, they are pleasing to the eye  and engaging, but they also are awe-inspiring. This quality transfers to the aesthetics of ballet... there are moments that are crystalline, gravity-defying, pleasing to the eye, emotionally taxing and awe-inspiring beauty.  

However, aesthetics of more contemporary dance and much current art (especially some of my cousin's drawings) are not instantly pleasing. They are terrible in the best sense of the word, but they are still filled with awe.  These kinds of visuals still fit into the conversation about the aesthetic, but not in the traditional sense...they are beautiful because they are provocative. Within these arena of aesthetic, context becomes incredibly important, and arguably, so does place/space. Think about graffiti and/or street art.  In fact, I think the space of graffiti and street art could situate the aesthetic and vernacular as a pair within a rhetorical space.

Huntington Dance Theatre "Nutcracker"

Let's pose another potential connection between vernacular and aesthetic.  Can vernacular BE aesthetic? Based on the definition of vernacular, I am reminded of the photographs from Berger that chronicled the everyday.  This could also build into situating the vernacular and aesthetic into visual rhetoric. It must be situated in the purposefulness (perhaps the difference between the presentation of a classic like The Nutcracker and a contemporary piece of the "everyday" ).

WV Dance Company "Bottomland"

The two images represent the difference (for me) between aesthetic (as something pleasing to look at) and vernacular and aesthetic working together to function a a visual rhetoric sense. The second image is still appealing to the eye, but it is doing more than that.


I'm wondering if perhaps place and context work together. They cannot be interchangeable, but they definitely work together. I agree, Logan, context is everything, and I think visual rhetoric highlights this in ways I had not thought of before. Vernacular and Aesthetic in visual rhetoric functioned for me through what the situation calls for as well as purpose and context. Place is important here, especially in relation to vernacular. I'm also wondering if it is also very dependent on the audience or community that engages with the  visual in the space of the vernacular. So many things to think about.

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.  

Completely Contingent on Context?

     I must profess that the terms aesthetic and vernacular are quite perplexing to me:  namely, when I try to think of various visual artifacts as examples, I sometimes have a hard time drawing distinctions between the two.  Beyond this concern, I also have a hard time pinning down a definition of the two.  Aesthetic, as I have always know it, is concerned with the beauty and carries more of a visually pleasing, emotional connotation.  Vernacular, however, truly confuses me.

      If any of you are so inclined as to google "vernacular in relation to visual rhetoric," you will find the 2010 version of this blog as one of the top listings.  Reading over the discussion of our predecessors was most helpful in me coming to understand the vernacular.  Elizabeth defined the vernacular as "... the everyday, the unschooled, concerned with function."  Once I settled on this definition (which seems quite well done I might add), I began to see some distinctions.  The aesthetic would seem to be more concerned with being pleasing to the eye; the vernacular is more set on accomplishing goals or purposes.  Yet, given this distinction, I think it only complicates the matter rather than making it more clear.

     Could a visual artifact be both aesthetic and vernacular?  It seems probably to me.  Furthermore, can a visual artifact that is either aesthetic, vernacular, or both be classified as visual rhetoric?  This is where Helmer's article "Framing the Fine Arts Through Rhetoric" came in useful.  Helmers contends that "Yet, because it is rhetoric and rhetoric is situational, a visual rhetoric cannot hope to be a unified theory" (65).  What I took from this article is that the rhetorical aspect of visuals is oftentimes highly predicated upon context.  Helmer's discussion of Winslow Homer's paintings really made this idea clear for me.  She made a convincing argument as to how the paintings were being displayed in a particular gallery having an effect on the interpretations and the visual "work," so to speak, that the paintings were doing.  I've oftentimes wondered about the relationship of the word to art (i.e. do certain paintings receive praise/criticism as a result of the words written about them) and also of how art is placed within a museum.

     Using Helmers as a guide, I was able to contemplate two examples that have come up in class:  Duchamp and Warhol.  Both artists created work that I believe could either be classified as purely aesthetic or, contingent on context, both aesthetic and rhetorical.  Duchamp's "Fountain" was merely a urinal with the signature R. Mutt, yet when he placed it in a Society of Independent Artists exhibit (New York 1917), it can be argued that it was functioning in a rhetorical manner of sorts.  Duchamp was rebelling and/or attempting to subvert common notions of what we consider art.  Regardless of whether it was effective or not (personally, I've never quite thought this piece was overly convincing), the placement of the work of art, and not the work of art itself, seems to add a rhetorical element to the work. 

     In regards to Warhol, I would imagine that much of his pop art would be similar in nature.  Both his "10 Marilyn's" print and his "Brillo Boxes" sculpture can be viewed as merely aesthetic:  they are both interesting visually, and I would argue quite beautiful.  However, if they were placed in a particular exhibit commenting on popular culture, '60s culture, etc., they would quickly take on a rhetorical component in my estimation.  Hence, the placement and context would be as important in a rhetorical analysis as the visual artifact itself. 

     When considering the vernacular, I actually thought of a recent bumper sticker I saw.  While one could argue that bumper stickers are by nature rhetorical, this particular bumper sticker had quite an interesting context surrounding it.  It was a Mitt Romney bumper sticker, as simple as can be; however, underneath of the bumper sticker was a white board with a hand-written diatribe about how Obama will harm women's rights by enacting Muslim laws.  Even more intriguing, this display was on the back of a horse trailer, which would seem to be a rather vernacular placement.  While the intention of this visual image is to persuade one to vote for Romney, the context in which it was placed had me contemplating conservative stereotypes and how the image, in the context it was placed, for me at least seemed to create an argument for cliché Republican rhetoric.  I could easily imagine Jon Stewart having a field day with this. 

     In the end, I think this discussion of aesthetic and vernacular has left me with more questions than answer, yet the complications Helmers provided in regards to context have enriched my analysis.  I'd like to know what everyone else thinks:  How vital is context to analyzing a visual artifact?