Visual Hermeneutics: Rockwell's "Triple Self Portrait"
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The document discusses how to analyze and interpret visual texts such as images, photographs, paintings, and films. It explains that visual texts have both a literal and figurative level of meaning. The literal level refers to the basic formal elements, while the figurative level concerns the symbolic connotations and metaphors. To understand a visual text, one must examine both levels as well as the cultural and historical context in which the text was created. The document provides a framework for close analysis of visual texts, emphasizing objective analysis of what is present rather than subjective judgments.
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Visual Hermeneutics: Rockwell's "Triple Self Portrait"
- 1. Reading Image as Argument
- 2. Works of art speak to us in two ways: 1. Literal level: Their formal organization (lines, shapes, colors, etc.), and 2. Figurative level: The signs, symbols and metaphors that can be associated with them. Art is most meaningful if it evokes emotive reactions in the viewer. This occurs when we venture beyond a work's basic elements and how they are organized.
- 3. Images, photographs, paintings, billboards, advertisements, and films are all essentially arguments composed of visual-words: metaphors. Interestingly enough, things (like words) have inherent properties we tend to associate with cultural values or interpretations. Metaphors reflect this connotative level of implicit meaning.
- 4. Which shape is Bouba? Which shape is Kiki? How did you come to that decision? What qualities of the objects factored in?
- 5. Writers, artists, & directors use our senses (concrete details, experiences) and instincts (value judgments: fear and attraction, pleasure and pain) to construct visual arguments out of familiar objects/images. The ubiquity of these things and their connotative meaning is why it is so easy for people to identify them as good/bad. How many heroes are small? Weak? Disfigured? Old? Ugly? Unlikable? Complex ideas and emotions are abstract—hard to pin down or explain. They are, thus, represented by archetypal symbols or characters instead, as the only way to convey those qualities to someone else is by creating the same kind of feeling in them. This is also why definitions and descriptions are so boring. Art turns archetypes into visual texts in the same way that writers turn ideas into images.
- 6. How might an artist portray moral decay: goodness and badness within the individual? What is decency? Virtue? Character? Answers to questions like these are highly subjective and culturally bound, as is typical of all figurative levels of meaning (distinct from literal). However, there are certain universal conventions of representation in art. Authors, like artists, tap into these shared taste preferences to examine ideas about themselves, the world, and themselves in the world. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
- 7. Level 1—Literal Summary: the most obvious surface reading Level 2—Metaphorical Figurative: symbolic connotations that the literal things are meant to represent Level 3—Allegorical Holistic: Moral of the story, the main idea which is produced by combining all the parts (levels 1 + 2) into a narrative (plot) Level 4—Anagogical Global: universal or archetypal principles that apply broadly across all human natures and civilizations
- 8. Literal definitions are the denotative meanings of objects or words—what is visible, obvious. D for definition → denotation Figurative meaning is the connotative value of a word or symbol. These are emotional, cultural, social, or situational interpretations constructed through a various contexts (situations)—not fixed or permanent like a definition—what is submerged. C for cultural or contextual → connotation To understand a visual text, you need to understand both and the difference between them. The literal level serves as a foundation for the metaphorical.
- 9. Before you can engage an image, you have to know what you are working with. Start with a general theory about the main idea. ○ This is called a working thesis or a hypo•thesis because it is not a finished claim, but just below (hypo-) one Then define the major elements comprising the image to determine what its building blocks are. ○ To do an analysis requires breaking down the whole to find the parts. Before you can really discover what the moral of the Gestalt is, you have to figure out what its made of and how it works—how the parts functionally form the whole. Once a general interpretation of the whole and a detailed account of parts have been exposed, metaphorical qualities that exist between those two extremes become accessible. You have to get the ideas out and define, describe—model or map them out—to see their relationships.
- 10. You cannot form a sound assessment of the main idea until you have broken the text down completely, examined it, and then put it back together. You need to be familiar with it to evaluate it. This deconstruction gets you to the next step.
- 11. Even after identifying three levels of textual meaning, there is more. You’ve only just begun to read the image, to get to know it intimately. Once you now the text though, you want to try and use it like a detective to find the author and situation.
- 12. What is the artist trying to communicate? How does the artist attempt to convey his message? Is the artist attempting to conform or break with tradition? What are the artist’s motives? What are the major elements of the image: Subject or focus Foreground (framing) Background Conflict: obvious, hidden, fallacious Color & Luminescence Target Audience Explicit Text: font, color, placement Advertisements: More Explicit Art: Very Implicit
- 13. All communication reflects its particular time and place, representing a people’s cultural and social values, the limits of academic, intellectual, and technological developments, the environment, and the language. Without knowing the historical situation that a text arose out limits your ability to evaluate the success or failure of an author or artist to communicate his intended message to the targeted audience. We are all influenced by our surroundings and past experiences, knowing what major events might have motivated the author may also clue you in on who he’s speaking to.
- 14. Never, never, never is our goal in an analysis to judge a text or its message according to our own tastes or beliefs (opinion, doxa). We are not analyzing how well it affirms or fails to validate what we want or assume to be true; that skews our observations. Opinions cannot be argued, so they have no relevance in the context of academic analysis. Only objective, provable, illustrative evidence should be addressed: what is there. Our goal is to speak exclusively about the HOW because its provable—discoverable within the text itself. how the author constructs his argument: ○ what tricks and techniques he uses and why, ○ what the author left out and why ○ what those parts of the whole suggest, how the author combines the parts to make the whole how successful the image/text is at getting its point across, and how the text matters in a larger, cultural context.
- 15. Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. —Norman Rockwell Reflect upon this image painted by the great Americana (a style) painter Norman Rockwell (1894-1978). Here, the artist paints himself painting himself watching himself painting. The image on the canvas we can see looks a bit more debonair. In the corner, there are self portraits of Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt, Picasso, and Van Gogh, all great masters. The artist has stuff strewn about, what look like smoke coming out of the waste bin, and surrounds himself with American and Greco-roman symbols. What does this tell us about the artist, how he sees himself, and how he wants to be seen? "Triple Self-Portrait“ (Feb. 30, 1960)Read about Rockwell here: Click Me!
Editor's Notes
- Look at the images. If you didn’t already know the story of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, the image would tell you who the good guy and who the bad guy were based on how they are postured, dressed, framed, the tools they have. Darth Vader is hard to empathize with in part because his human features are obscured: he wears a dehumanizing mask, has a cloak that disguises his form, and is larger than most people. (The reason for the last one, only us geeks will know…) By contrast, Luke is human looking, like us, and so we connect to him, feel for him. Heroes have to likeable or the audience won’t care about his struggles. He has to suffer and feel joy so we can relate to him. Characters who do not suffer at all are like angels and/or devils—beyond the plights of mortals. (continues below) Luke is also standing in a defensive posture, where Vader is aggressive. The hero, dressed in white as is typical of the pure of heart, thrusts his light saber up to block Vader’s attack. Villains are always the first to strike; it’s the mark of villainy to antagonize innocent people. To further reinforce this, Vader is dressed in black, the color of darkness, mystery, night, and thus also of those things we fear—what we cannot see to know. Light is what reveals; darkness conceals. Since we are not afraid of what we know, we feel comfortable with the light color and white light of the heavens, associated with goodness. Darkness, like one finds in a cave, in the earth—where we bury dead things—is frightening because we cannot see what lurks there in the dark: monsters? Death? Something we might trip and break a toe on in our blindness? Metaphors merely reflect our value judgments of things associated with feelings of pleasure or discomfort. Those properties of things speak to us, as if our bodies read the world figuratively.
- No matter which language you speak—Swahili, German, Yiddish, Cantonese—about 85% of respondents all over the world say that Shape A is Bouba and B is Kiki. The argument for this is the textual qualities (visual) of the object correlate to the phonemic qualities (auditory) of the names. Bouba has round, fluid sounds like the soft edges of the shape that have no points, straight lines, or angles; it is rounded and the vowel sounds of the word are also very round, easy to hold out, and even have consonants that are soft. By contrast, Kiki has cutting sounds to its name. Literally, the |k| cuts off the breath as it leaves the trachea and mouth, breaking against the teeth. The shape has this cutting quality with straight lines that cut suddenly in another direction to form an angle. Its points are knife like. Kiki has that quick movement of the short vowels after the sharp consonants too, which seems analogous to the jutting corners making those sharp corners. The physical and visual nature of things offers sensory based metaphors, which we are able to then build figurative associations and even more complex symbolic meaning on top of. This is also how poets and artists select every little detail in their work so every feature resonates with meaning.
- Something like “moral decay” is abstract. It has no physical correlation in the world, as in there is no forest where one can hunt down moral decay, no tree that moral decay grows on, no organ in the body whose job it is to secrete moral decay, no deep ocean ecosystem that moral decay thrives in. It’s an idea, not a physical thing. Ergo, to represent this idea, it has to be translated into something can be interacted with, discovered, experienced, otherwise, it is just a figment of imagination like all ideas are—existing only in the brain. Since the brain is where ideas live, but the body is where the brain lives, it makes sense that to know something, we often need to anchor it to something physical and experiential. This is what metaphors—symbolic representation—do. This is why Robert Lewis Stevenson made a character with split identities. He wanted to represent the inner conflict of good versus evil as a thing that exists within each individual, not as a force of nature out in the world. He didn’t make bickering gods or a heaven and a hell—things outside of oneself; he put them in one man, arguably to make the claim that he sees these forces as human, not otherworldly. Whether or not you agree with an author, how he reflects his ideas makes an argument about what he believes to be true. We might say, then, that Stevenson is making the argument that good and evil are within us, and because they are a part of us, trying to eliminate the one kills the other, as we carry these twin impulses as part of our nature. You don’t have to agree with him to then use the details of the story to prove that this is what the author seems to be arguing (what his text suggests).
- To examine the levels of meaning within a text—visual or verbal—we can use the four steps of increasing complexity derived and contemporized from Dante Alighieri’s Il Convivio (ca. 1307). The first reading will only produce a basic level one understanding, sort of like if you look at an image for only 30 seconds and then are given a test on what is in the image; you don’t know it well enough to give more than a general summary of what it looked like. If you know a text very well, though, you can begin to see how certain parts have more than one meaning—a figurative layer of value where the literal things become symbols that represent other ideas. The third level emerges when the element of time comes into play, like in a story. Symbols are one-for-one items that have their meaning in isolation, even when they are not part of a setting or story. However, put together a bunch of symbols and connect them with action, you get a story—there is a beginning, middle, and end: this is how time and action produce narrative. When characters are also symbols for archetypes, those stories often produce a moral or lesson; this is what is called the moral. The main idea of any argument or text is kind of like the moral—what the author or artist wants you to get out of it: the point. At the most abstract level, the anagoge emerges. It’s really here just so you know there’s more out there, and there are degrees of meaning and complexity past four, which you can explore on your own if you study logic, but we’re predominantly concerned with levels one through three.
- Once you have described and defined what you see—identified and outlined the parts you’re working with—you can start to ask more complex questions about the rhetoric. This includes the most difficult but perhaps most interesting part of communication: trying to figure out what the sender meant to say. This is called authorial intention. Looking at these adds, we could logically infer—deduce—what the motives of their creators might have been: a paycheck, a personal experience, a sick family member, a tobacco manufacturer, parents concerned about teenagers’ choices. Each approaches the same subject in very different ways, with opposing viewpoints. They are on either sides of the argument. The top one uses a logos driven argument, trying to offer facts and evidence that prove their claim (buy our product) is sound. After research began to show the adverse effects of smoking in the 50s, companies tried to use science to convince their audience that their products were safe. They are arguing, persuading—this is rhetoric. The bottom ad is from a non-profit. It doesn’t use a logos dominant argument, but a pathos argument, trying to appeal to the values and emotions (here fear) of the target audience. They use an analogy to compare smoking to suicide, cigarettes to a gun. Instead of using facts, it uses scare tactics first (the gun silhouette is the first thing the eye sees) and then offers a bit of logos (facts: data, numbers) to support the main appeal, a fear driven argument. The images each use their visual details like adjectives. They create rhetorical devices, like the analogy, using images instead of words, but the purpose is the same—they are arguing a point and then trying to prove it using different visual rhetorical strategies. The goal: to convey the author’s main idea: smoking is good for you so you SHOULD buy our cigarettes v. smoking is bad for you so you SHOULD NOT buy or smoke any cigarettes.
- Consider how different the language, beliefs, gender roles, types of education, transportation, and sanitation were a hundred years ago, before television, automobiles, cellular communication devices, central heating. Even just fifty years ago, there were no satellites, no computers small enough to fit in a family home. Women made half of what their male counterparts made, if they were able to get a good job at all. Segregation was still a norm and sexuality was legally enforced. In the UK, the brilliant Alan Turing was chemically castrated for his sexuality, despite being the man who, according to the American president, single-handedly turned the tide of WWII to the allies’ favor. Twenty years ago, mixed race couples were so taboo that they were practically non-existent on television. Times change. Values change. Laws and beliefs and customs change. In Shakespeare’s world, for example, a man could be put to death for the version of Christianity he practiced. In Enlightenment France, even speaking of death and the king in the same sentence was treasonable offense that could cost a man his head. The biases and prejudices of each age imprint in the minds of those who live in that world and as such are reflected in their work. To account for the limits of past ages, we have to take all this into consideration. When people feel the need to communicate—to set thoughts down to distribute to others—it is usually to speak out against some wrong. However, not all wrongs are apparent to all ages. We have little idea in our own time what injustices will be overturned in coming ages, blind as we are to our own times. As such, when you read or examine an image, you need to keep in mind the world it was designed to speak to and all those discoveries not yet normal or known to that artist/author.
- I’ve given you a brief literal description of what we have here. To continue level one, I might define self-portrait and reflection. Sometimes the definition of a word reveals a hidden ambiguity or association that helps to unlock the image. On your own, imagine what the artist is trying to teach us, what lesson he wants us to learn. What symbols help to convey this? What does each literal thing that you see as symbolic represent? What in the picture supports your reading? Would Rockwell agree with you?