In his chapter "Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and Language" Mitchell says there is "a sense that postmodernism is an explosive breaking down of that barrier between vision and language that had been rigorously maintained by modernism" (217).
Throughout this chapter, Mitchell seems to suggest that this barrier was never actually impermeable, (and perhaps the barrier here may function like the semiotic barrier in that it is not what on either side of this wall that should concern us so much as the qualities of the barrier itself) communication remains in even the most abstract paintings of modernism -- "These paintings, no matter how abstract, are never merely formal or decorative" (223).
Again, to return to the theories of the Gutenberg Parentheses or the resurgence of myth after the Enlightenment, all things suppressed or pushed out will perhaps return with a vengeance. So, the "reopening of art ... to kitsch, mass culture, the mixture of media, political propaganda ... the resurgence of artistic impurity, hybridity, and heterogeneity" (239) may all suggest that we, as Latour argues, have never actually been modern. I'm not sure how helpful this is to the navigating the predicament that Mitchell finds himself in when he seems to want to say that we have moved beyond postmodernism but is unsure of what to call this moving beyond -- "the 'end of postmodernism,' if that word has any meaning as the designation of a period" (263). He says, "I have called the end of postmodernism, the era of the 'pictorial turn' " (417). In this sense, then, the pictorial turn looks a like a pictorial revolution, not only in the sense of the re-turning that revolution implies, but, it seems, even more strikingly in the sense of Jameson's conception of revolution as the moment at which modes of production become visibly (emphasis mine) antagonistic. This sense would also point us toward where Mitchell suggests at the end of the text we may need to venture to be able to engage the image -- "suppose we thought about representation, not in terms of a particular kind of object ... but as a kind of activity, process, or set of relationships ... a process in which the thing is a participant" (420). To look at modes of production would be one way, it seems, to achieve this thinking about process and not simply objects.
Mitchell suggests that we look at the processes (and instruments) of production as a revolution -- "[t]here seems little doubt that we are now undergoing a revolution in the technologies of representation that makes possible the fabrication of realities on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, we know that this type of revolution has occurred before, that it appeared previously in the inventions of writing and printing and engraving and mechanical reproduction" (423). I would argue that until it is much more widely understood that these processes have happened before, then we cannot critically approach our current time without a neophilic beliefs in the potential of the image and the digital technology that sends it circulating in an ever widening gyre.
Mitchell says, "Perhaps we have moved in to an area when the point about pictures in not just to interpret them, but to change them" (369). This interesting, especially in light of his "hope for new and critical pictures of the public sphere" (369). Although, it seems several pages earlier that Mitchell may be suggesting the foreclosure of the possibility of a public sphere in the Habermasian sense -- "the telescreen effectively eliminates the boundary between the public and private spheres" (365). Or, again, its diffused -- it's all, in a sense, public (or privatized, branded), with the disappearance through ever more sophisticated, and perhaps now totalized, techniques of surveillance in the Western world, there is no longer privacy in the sense it was once thought.
From this point, I'd like to spend the remainder of this post focused on Mitchell's suggestion in "Pictures and Public Sphere" -- that what we might be experiencing "the new world order of the theme park" -- and the possibilities this suggestion holds for rethinking simulation and our current political situation.
On one hand, Mitchell's description of Disney World, in 1994, echoes Baudrillard's description of the function of theme parks to make our daily lives seem more real. In a different sense, how do we consider Banksy's choice for Disney World as the place to display an effigy of a tortured Guantanamo Bay detainee? That Banksy's photographer for the "installation," who later became Mr. Brainwash and whose art may ask us to reconsider what Mitchell has to say about Warhol, abstraction and the processes of commodification, was quickly captured and detained in a back room of the park, suggests, as Banksy's art does, that there is a relationship between the camp and the theme park. This is not connection that I can fully articulate here but one which I would be interested in pursuing further in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment