SAM lecture week 1 - Concepts of representation

1. Art Still Matters: Art in the Contemporary Australian Context
Shepparton Art Museum
2015
LECTURE 1: CONCEPTS OF REPRESENTATION

2. Lecture Schedule

3. Drew Pettifer, Mapping the Interior: In search of an inland sea
video still, 2013

4. Contact Details
Course Lecturer
Drew Pettifer
RMIT University and SAM Foundation
Email: drew.pettifer@rmit.edu.au
Web: www.slideshare.net/DrewPettifer

5. CONCEPTS OF REPRESENTATION
Rene Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933

6. REPRESENTATION
• No single, united theory
• Different theories from
different schools of
thought

7. THEORIES OF REPRESENTATION
Different theories in:
• philosophy
• literary studies
• linguistics/semiotics
• psychoanalysis
• aesthetic theory
• cultural studies
• and other fields

8. REPRESENTATION
The idea of one thing
standing in for, taking the
place of or representing
something else

9. THEORIES OF REPRESENTATION
WE WILL BRIEFLY COVER TODAY
• Sign theory
• Gaze theory
• Theory of the death of the author

10. SIGN THEORY
Sign =
Signifier: symbol, image, word or
sound that represents or
signifies
+
Signified: the concept to which the
signifier refers

11. Signifier: the word “tree”
+
Signified: the mental image of a tree
=
Sign: the meaning of “tree”

12. Denotation: the basic or literal
meaning of a sign
-eg. “rose” = a flower
Conotation: the secondary, cultural
meanings of signs
-eg. “rose” = passion

13. Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965

14. Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is not a Pipe), 1929

15. "Through looking we negotiate social
relationships and meanings. Looking is
a practice much like speaking, writing,
or signing. Looking involves learning to
interpret and, like other practices,
looking involves relationships of
power.”
-Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: an Introduction to
Visual Culture, 2009, p. 10

16. THE GAZE
• a particular perspective considered
as embodying certain aspects of
the relationship between observer
and observed
-Oxford Dictionary

17. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in
Narrative cinema”, 1975
• The gaze is gendered
• The normative gaze is the male gaze
• The female gaze only exists when a
woman adopts the male gaze

18. Robert Doisneau, Un Regard Oblique, 1948

19. Marcel Duchamp, Étant Donnés, 1946-66

20. Marcel Duchamp, Étant Donnés, 1946-66

21. Barbara Kruger,
Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face),
1981

22. Guerilla Girls, Naked (1988)

23. Mary Cassatt, Woman in black at the opera, 1880

24. THE POTENTIAL GAZES INVOLVED WHEN YOU LOOK AT A
FIGURATIVE WORK WITH MORE THAN ONE SUBJECT
1. You, looking at the painting;
2. figures in the painting who look out at you;
3. figures in the painting who look at one another;
4. figures in the painting who look at objects or stare off into space or have
their eyes closed;
5. the museum guard, who may be looking at the back of your head;
6. the other people in the gallery, who may be looking at you or at the
painting;
7. the artist, who was once looking at this painting;
8. the models for the figures in the painting, who may once have seen
themselves there;
9. all the other people who have seen the painting - the buyers, the museum
officials, and so forth;
10.people who have never seen the painting, but know it from reproductions.
-From James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: The Nature of Seeing, 1996

25. THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
“to give a text an Author is to impose a
limit on that text”
-Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, 1967

26. THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
The aim is to shift control over the
creation of meaning within a work
from the author/artist to the audience

27. Martin Creed, Half the air in a given space, 1998

28. Martin Creed discussing Half the air in a given space, 1998

29. EXAMPLES OF
REPRESENTATIONAL
METHODOLOGIES

30. Rachel Whiteread House, 1993

31. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA), 1991

32. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Perfect lovers),
1991

33. Marc Quinn,
Self, 1991

34. Damian Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the
Mind of Someone Living, 1991

35. Damian Hirst, The Physical Impossibility
of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,
1991

36. Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964

37. Magritte, The Human Condition II, 1935

38. Magritte, Not to be reproduced, 1937

39. Yayoi Kusama, Tender are the stairs to heaven, 2004