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Seeing Visual Culture - Coggle Diagram
Seeing Visual Culture
Visual Violence
Visual Invisibility
Claudia Rankine, excerpt from Citizen (2014)
"Yes and in your mail the apology note appears referring to "our mistake." Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion.
Ralph Ellison, excerpt from Invisible Man (1952)
Paul LaFarge, “Colors/Black,” Cabinet Magazine 36 (2009-2010)The color of refusal, emptiness, etc
“I was going to write, the color black, but as every child knows black isn’t a color. Black is a lack, a void of light. When you think about it, it’s surprising that we can see black at all: our eyes are engineered to receive light; in its absence, you’d think we simply wouldn’t see, any more than we taste when our mouths are empty. “
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Jared Sexton, “All Black Everything”
“There is perhaps no color freighted with as much meaning as black; what makes this significant, as art students will remember, is that black is not a color at all, merely the absence of wavelengths of visible light. To truly see black would require the loss of any visible light, meaning in fact that all would be black.”
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Shawn Michelle Smith, “Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” American Quarterly Vol 73 (1), 2021, 25-52.
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Dawoud Bey, “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2019)Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky), from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017.
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Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching the camera to see my skin”
“ In some pictures, I am a mud brown, in others I'm a blue black.”
“I understood that some of this had to do with harmonizing the basic components of great image-making from the gear: film speed, aperture, and the ghost we all chase, light.”
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Week 5 Lectures
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Theft
Carol Mavor, excerpt from Blue Mythologies (Duke University Press, 2012)
"Kieslowski's Julie eats childhood: a flavour walled off in blue, like her daughte's now empty azure bedroom. She swallows her daughter Anna. Julie's eating of the blue lollipop is an eating of Anna in order to bury her within herself..."
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Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books, 1995) (1975), 195-228.A prision where the light of prison cells is stolen by the central watch tower
"The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen."
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Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” The New Inquiry, 2016.
"Visual culture has changed form. It has become detached from human eyes and has largely become invisible. Human visual culture has become a special case of vision, an exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop. The advent of machine-to-machine seeing has been barely noticed at large, and poorly understood by those of us who’ve begun to notice the tectonic shift invisibly taking place before our very eyes."
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Film: All light Everywhere (dir. Theo Anthony, 2021)
Light is stolen by police body cameras and coopted
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Week 10 lectures
Violent purity
Bleach
Franz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, eds. Les Back and John Solomos (NY: Routledge, 2000), 257-65.
"For several years certain laboratories have been trying to produce a serum for "denegrification"; with all the earnestness in the world, laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that might make it possible for the miserable NEgro to whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction."
David Batchelor, “Whitescapes,” in Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000), 9-20.
“There is a kind of white that is more than white, and this was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it, and that is almost everything. This was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that is not created by bleach but that itself is bleach. This was that kind of white. This white was aggressively white. It did its work on everything around it, and nothing escaped.”
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Le Corbussier, “A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin,” in Color, 82-84.“[Imagining] the results of the Law of Ripolin” where all surfaces are painted white
“There are no more dirty, dark corners”
“On white Ripolin walls these accretions of dead things from the past would be intolerable: they would leave a mark”
Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” excerpted in Color (MIT, 2008), 37-38.White is both terrifying and regal
"Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way"
"Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows..."
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Film: Blonde Venus (dir. Joseph von Sternberg, 1932)The performance of Race and Gender
Hilaria Loyo, “Blinding Blondes: Whiteness, Femininity, and Stardom” in Questions of Colour in Cinema, ed. Wendy Everett (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 179-196.
"The on-screen representation of Marlene Dietrich's whiteness in the Sternberg films follows, but departs from, this representational tradition to confer on Dietrich's blondeness meanings other than those of purity and moral supremacy traditionally conferred upon white women."
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Week 4 Lectures
David Batchelor, “Chromophobia,” in Chromophobia (Reaktion Books, 2000), 21-49.
“If colour is unimportant, I began to wonder, why is it so important to exclude it so forcefully? If colour doesn’t matter, why does its abolition matter so much?”
"As with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks a fear: a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable. This loathing of colour, this fear of corruption through colour, needs a name: chromophobia"
Is Seeing Believing?
The necessity of light
Trinh Minh-Ha, “The Image and the Void,” Journal of Visual Culture (2016), Vol 15, Issue 1, 131-140.An Interstitial invisibility hidden in plain sight
“On the contrary, invisibility is built into each instance of visibility, and the very forms of invisibility generated within the visible are often what is at stake in a struggle”
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Week 1 Lectures
James Turrell, Roden Crater videoEmphasizing the "thingness of light"
"Who owns the light? You who look"
For the sighted, light is the clay of visual culture
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Hans Blumenberg, “Light as Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by D. M. Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30–54.
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Visual Relativity
Joseph Albers, excerpts from Interaction of Color (1963)
“In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is—as it physically is.”
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Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Color of Subjectivity,” in Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 273–83.
""Whether the sensation that I call red is the same as that which my neighbor calls red, we have no way of verifying." This was enough to disquality color as objective."
Albers Video
Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, (Cambridge: Belknap Press), 50-51.
"Children like the way colors shimmer in a subtle, shifting nuances....For them color is fluid, the medium of all changes, an not a symptom"
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Week 8 Lectures
Pure Red Color (Chistyi krasnyi tsvet), Pure Yellow Color (Chistyi
zheltyi tsvet), Pure Blue Color (Chistyi sinii tsvet). 1921.
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Robin Coste Lewis, Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson
“The unanticipated shock: so much believed to be white is actually—strikingly—blue. Endless blueness. White is blue. An ocean wave freezes in place. Blue. Whole glaciers, large as Ohio, floating masses of static water. All of them pale frosted azuls. It makes me wonder—yet again—was there ever such a thing as whiteness? I am beginning to grow suspicious. An open window.”
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Form and Filler
Whiteness as a base
Whiteness as an empty canvas, but one that wants to remain empty
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Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings (1951)
Yves Klein, Untitled White Monochrome (1958), Le Vide (1958)
Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29:4 (Autumn 1988): 44–64.White as the default
"...white is not anything really, not an identity, not a particularising quality, because it is everything - white is no colour because it is all colours."
"This property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational power."
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Color creating Richness
Carrie Mae Weems, Colored People, Slow Fade to Black
Film: Mother of George (Andrew Dosunmu, 2014, Bradford Young, Director of Photography)
Maria Popova, 19th Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion, The Atlantic (2012)
“....his most fascinating theories explore the psychological impact of different colors on mood and emotion -- ideas derived by the poet's intuition, which are part entertaining accounts bordering on superstition, part prescient insights corroborated by hard science some two centuries later, and part purely delightful manifestations of the beauty of language.”
“One of 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.”
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Week 6 Lectures
Goethe Color wheel
Stanley Cavell, “The World as a Whole: Color” in The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979), 80-100.
"These films discovered that color can serve to unify the projected world in another way than by direct reliance upon, or implication toward, the spacial-temporal consistency of the real world...a consistent region of make believe, so it is essential to their rightness that these films are children's tales
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Film: The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, 1939)
Week 7 Lectures
Creating Depth
Lorna Simpson, Darkening (2019)
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Film: Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztov Kieslowski, 1993) (On Kanopy)
Yves Klein, “The Evolution of Art towards the Immaterial” (1959), in Color, 120-122.
"'First there is nothing, next there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue.'
"Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colors are not."
Derek Jarman, “Into the Blue,” from Chroma: A Book of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 103-124.
"BLUE IS BLUE"
“Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits”
Film: Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
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Seph Rodney, Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice
“In other pieces, “Specific Notation” and “Source Notes” (both 2019), the composition is centered on the faces of figures who read as Black women — gender and race as key signs from which we often draw interpersonal meaning despite these aspects existing, so to speak, above the water line, while the rest of our being (the deepest and most primal parts) lie submerged and unseen. And here is the torsion that the whole show hinges upon: between the deep and abiding logocentrism that Simpson has incisively exploited for most of her artistic career, and the elsewhere that these paintings take her to.”
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Week 9 Lectures
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Light creating form
Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook” Santa Anna winds are the medium in which the LA light travels
“They sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.”
Lawrence Weschler, “LA Glows,” The New Yorker, Feb. 23, 1998.Light that creates form
“..the haze that fractures the light, scattering it in such a way that on many days the world almost has no shadows….Really peculiar, almost dreamlike…”
"Here the light draws you inward"
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Week 2 LecturesNauman's Clear Sky and LA Air
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Counter-argument
Christopher Turner and Victor I. Stoichita, “A Short History of the Shadow: an Interview with Victor I. Stoichita,” Cabinet 24.Children cannot recognize that a shadow is not a substance until 8 or 9
“Plato’s point was that they saw only the shadow of reality, not reality itself. The image had a tremendously negative charge for Plato and he linked the image with the shadow—both were copies of reality.”
Hans Christian Andersen, "The Shadow"
A mans shadow taking his place
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Week 3 Lectures
Daege's the invention of painting
Film: Ingmar Bergman, Persona (1966)
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