This assumption, in semiotic terms,
the indexical nature of the photograph, forms and pervades all of our
assumptions regarding representation.
This assumption needs to be interrogated further, as archeology suggests
new understandings of the nature of the transmission of culture.
An approach that seems to make
sense for a discussion of the photograph, and its transmission of culture is a
combination of evolutionary and diffusionist approaches.[1] It seems most useful to think of the object in
terms of its relation to time within the cultural context. Wissler’s age-area hypothesis notes (bringing
together diffusionist and evolutionary paradigms) that objects in a culture
tend to move from the center outward, with the oldest objects being located at
the periphery. In this model, the
evolutionary leaps tend to happen in the center of the culture, and then
diffuse throughout the periphery. At the periphery of culture, then, are the
institutions, where normative behaviours and ideologies are located, as
objects/cultural material (in our examples, the photo-objects and their implied
contexts) transmitted and located themselves.
The
problem, of course, with the photograph is that it folds itself back into
culture in ways that other historical objects do not, reappearing and
redeploying itself as an indicator of power relations. The photograph functions as a visual text
itself, its veracity shored up by its history as index, and also situates
itself within culture through the context in which it appears. This relates directly, of course, to how we
encounter the art-object (and the context in which it is placed as it is
photographed). One doesn’t have to look
any further than ArtForum to encounter a particular semiotic of art
display, with art being displayed in clean, white, well-lit rooms, organized in
a rational synthesis of design and educational strategies. The diffusionist function of art has been
bolstered by the presence of the photograph, which states (through a circular
logic): this is how things should
look when one looks at things.
This awareness of looking and its reproduction (in cleanly designed
magazines, monographs, etc.) has led to a transformation of the gallery space,
from salon to “white cube” to an ostensibly newly hybridized (but no less ideologically driven)
space.
Problems in the
representation of artwork parallel the questions of archeological
representation suggested by Stephanie Moser in “Archeological Representation.”[2] Moser’s semiotic read of the work of
representation conjured the question of objects being seen in contexts. She notes, “archeological representations
‘make meaning’ because they employ devices that are not used in written and
verbal communication. These devices can
be described as conventions that appeal to our sense of reasoning in ways that
text cannot.”[3]
We have seen this critiqued in ethnography and film; Michael Taussig writes of
both in his discussion of Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo:
Then what of Werner Herzog’s delirious effort in his
film Fitcarraldo, set in the early twentieth century Upper Amazonian rubber boom
and constructed around the fetish of the photograph, so tenaciously, so awkwardly,
clutched by Fitcarraldo, the visionary, its great ear-horn emerging from under
the armpit of his dirty white suit, Caruso flooding the forests and rivers, the
Indians amazed as Old Europe rains its ecstatic art form upon them. Bellowing opera from the ship’s prow, it is
the great ear-trumpet of the phonograph, an orchid of technology in the thick
forests of the primitive, that cleaves the waters and holds the tawny Indians
at bay as the patched-up river-steamer wends its way into this South American heart
of darkness.[4]
The “delirious” re-contextualizing of the art-object (in
this example both Caruso and the phonograph) serves as an site of power. Therefore, it is not merely the
culture-object which is moving/diffusing throughout cultures, but it is the
power structures and Western ideologies which are being attached to the
object. We see this same
recontextualizing in the contemporary museum experience, in which the
culture-object is presented less as an object, and more as a force that “holds” us (in the utopic parlance
of the visual designer), and more often than not “holds us…at bay."
[1]I
am most interested in Steward’s work suggesting a distinction between a
“cultural core” determined by environment and evolution, and the “total
culture”, which contains elements of culture susceptible to diffusion (Barnard,
56).
[2]
Moser, Stephanie. “Archeological
Representation,” in Archeological Theory Today. Ian Hodder, Ed. Pp. 266.
[3]
Ibid. pp 268-9.
[4]
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and
Alterity. Pp. 203. New York:
Routledge, 1993.
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