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ENGL M50: Introduction to Visual Culture "Seeing visual…

- - - - An account of light in Los Angeles, California, and how it manifests a particular excitement found nowhere else in the United States.
        “Everything in this light is somehow simultaneously particularized and idealized: each perfect, specific, ideal little house, one besides the next. And that’s the light that breaks hearts in L.A.” p. 97
        
        The closer one traces a shadow, the closer one approaches its original object's form and nature.
    - - A visual account of the Santa Ana winds: a California phenomenon that elicits an almost mechanical uneasiness from city residents.
        “The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called ‘earthquake weather.’ My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete.”
      - The feeling of being followed and the fear of the Santa Ana winds are both almost mechanistic emotional responses!
    - - Colors are connected to our emotions.
        "One of [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe's most radical points was a refutation of Newton's ideas about the color spectrum, suggesting instead that darkness is an active ingredient rather than the mere passive absence of light."
      - Colors can sometimes elicit emotion from us without warning or apparent reason.
    - - Are colors productions of our own mind? Or are they entities of the natural world?
        "The use of color words...could be made a matter of public agreement and therefore...objective...[but] we have no means of verifying that the sensation [we] call red is the same as that which [our] neighbor calls red" pp. 281-283.
    - - The tyranny of whiteness is a "purging" of color to assume white's virtue.
        "For Blanc, colour could not simply be ignored or dismissed; it was always there. It had to be contained and subordinated--like a woman. Colour was a permanent internal threat, an ever-present inner other which, if unleashed, would be the ruin of everything, the fall of culture" p. 23
      - Both Batchelor and Dyer seem to oppose domination by the color white. There seems to be a connection between the physical color itself and what it is used for.
    - - *As seen through Dorothy's eyes, the colors in The Wizard of Oz* are sharp, saturated, and distinct.
  - - - As Albers puts it: colors are relative and are rarely seen as they physically are.
        “In much the same way as haptic sensation deceive us, so optical illusions deceive. The lead us to 'see' and to 'read' other colors than those which we are confronted physically.”
      - Rauschenberg's White Painting may appear white to us, but yet it may be experienced differently by others.
        Similarly, the palatte in Three Colors: Blue may blend together and shift away from the physical nature of the component colors.
    - - For a patient terminally ill with AIDS, blue has become the color of waiting.
        "Blue protects white from innocence
        Blue drags black with it
        Blue is darkness made visible" p. 114
      - Use of black and blue in Bey's Night Coming Tenderly, Black shows understanding of the role of both as both discomforting and liberating.
    - - For a mother who lost her child (Three Colors: Blue), blue is the color of lacerating grief.
        "Kieslowski's Julie eats childhood; a flavour walled off in blue, like her daughter's now empty azure bedroom. She swallows her daughter Anna...in order to bury her within herself," p. 135
    - - The black bodies in Lorna Simpson's piece experience a similar conflict to that described by Franz Fanon: a difficulty in the development of bodily schema.
    - - Blue marks the boundary where the invisible becomes visible.
        “The world is thus on the far side of an unsilvered mirror, there is an imaginary beyond, a beyond pure and insubstantial, and that is the dwelling place of Bachelard's beautiful phrase: ; First there is nothing, next there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue,” p. 120
      - Klein may have defined the boundary that we must cross in order to bring the invisible forward. In other words, we must endure discomfort and conflict if we are to reimagine our relationships with race.
    - - To reach a new sense of meaning, one must abandon their warmth and venture into the howling dark.
        "These brutal and brutally lovely landscapes suggest a further shore, one that to be reached, both the viewer and the artist have to negotiate their way by sight, by following the lead of colored pigment, hue, tone, shape, iridescence, and curiosity and then when finally alone, contemplating the vastness of these possibilities we come to know by feeling our way through."
      - Finding and seeing truth requires that one first shock themselves with the cold (or the light of the sun).
- - - - A fun story! A traveler's shadow frees itself and lives its own free life.
        “This was done, it might be from pride, or perhaps that the new shadow might cling to him, but the prostrate shadow remained quite quiet and at rest, in order that it might listen, for it wanted to know how a shadow could be sent away by its master, and become a man itself.”
    - - Black may be seen as a space for imagination, non-conformity, and resistance.
        “The space of refusal is also the space of imagination. You can sit in the darkness for as long as you like, staring blindly at nothing, and see what you will. Maybe that’s the reason why caves, which are the Fort Knox of blackness, were the first sacred places.” pp. 2-3
      - These complementary perspectives redefine a new dynamic in which black starts to take its role as the symbol of power.
    - - Black is a color of objectivity which is non-problematic and embodies equality and inclusivity.
        “Black is and is not (only) itself. To see or not to see is the question of blackness itself: “You could build a world out of need or you could hold / everything black and see.” p. 11
    - - Black consciousness becomes self-aware in a white-dominated world.
        “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness.” p. 258
    - - Darkness can be used to free the black subject from photographs dominated by light and whiteness.
        “Choosing photography’s dark side, Bey shelters his subjects under the cover of the night sky, representing their points of view, but not their persons. In this way, black subjects remain unbound by the visual forces of white supremacy instituted on the plantation and continuing in its wake…” p. 48
      - Darker and warmer tones are used to complement Gurira's skin tone and capture it in a way that is not accessible to previous historical color palettes.
    - - There cannot be any light without the dark.
        “There is a black beam overhead on the ceiling. Without it, the ability to see such light would disappear. The light is toying with you, and you like it. All of this because the darkness is now always overhead. That. That is what arriving means."
      - Despite the monochromatic appearance, spots of darkness must exist on Yves Klein's paintings in order to create a semblance of light.
  - - - Western visual culture is enthralled by its treatment of white as uncompromising and 'superior' color.
        “The idea that anything might protrude, bulge, sprout or branch off from this sheer whiteness was inconceivable. The inner life of this world was entirely hidden: nothing was allowed to spill out from its allotted space; all circuitry, all conduits, all the accumulated stuff that attaches itself to an everyday life remained concealed, held in, snapped shut.” p. 18
    - - Both works follow the experience of immersion: Jarman into blue, and Alma into light and shadow.
    - - Viewing light through one metaphor binds the viewer in that lens.
        “Man–on whom the technological light of “lighting” has imposed, in many forms, an ‘optics’ that goes against his will–is the historical antipode of the classical contemplator caeli and his freedom to gaze.” p. 54
    - - White tends to be viewed as a color of objectivity and unequivocal morality.
        “There may be people who think against a background of black. But the tasks of our age – so strenuous, so full of danger, so violent, so victorious – seem to demand of us that we think against a background of white” p. 84
      - This is a direct application of white as an attempt to be fully objective and reach beyond materiality.
    - - A hidden terror may exist in the color white that is not first apparent from its impressions (e.g. purity).
        “Yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.” p. 38
    - - The color white is a vehicle for repressing other colors, namely black.
        “The implication is that the situation evokes in whites the kind of irrational violence supposedly specific to blacks. Of course, being white means being able to repress it and this is what we seem to see in Alan throughout the film.” p. 466
    - - The "blinding blonde" in cinema made moviegoers aware of a social norm of white femininity that was otherwise invisible.
        “To become American was to become white, so much so that Europeans reaching the country, who had never been white before, would eventually become white at the price of losing their own identity.” p. 183
      - Marlene Dietrich: the "blinding blonde" that becomes an icon of white femininity during Persona