Re: From abstract to concrete visual representations

Gunnar speaking to Scott McCloud back in January 2004:

> We could easily say all
> language, even if you factor
> in onomatopoeia and bow-wow
> theory of language
> development, still it’s all
> completely cultural where
> there’s an aspect of pictures
> that isn’t.

Well, I tried ... I really did, but I have to say I was totally
flummoxed by "The Big Triangle." <bg>

For starters, I don't get why there's such a pronounced -- and to
others, obviously meaningful, even if not to me ;-) -- gap between
perceptual and conceptual ...

To me, these intertwine endlessly, and this holds as much for
visual thinking as it does for verbal thinking.

I suppose if I had to picture the relationships involved, I would draw
some sort of mobius strip ... definitely not a pyramid (and since a
recognizable 3D pyramid is well beyond my drawing capabilities, I
would never have thought of that shape for this purpose, either ;-).

I guess a large part of my problem with "The Big Triangle" is that I
can't even get a fix on the lower-left category, "Reality." Even if we
limit this to photographic realism, there's no starting point of
"pure" representation for me.

I'm thinking here of Daniel Harris' jeremiad on nature photography in
_Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism_:

	"Nature photography, like food photography, is in many ways
	pure pornography. Much as the perfect bodies in stag films
	interfere with our ability to appreciate our real lovers,
	photography inflates aesthetic standards applicable to nature
	and hinders our ability to enjoy our immediate surroundings,
	which pale in comparison with distant worlds populated by
	outlandish species of armadillos, aardvarks, and orangutans.
	The danger of nature pornography is two-fold. Its alluring
	colors and unearthly forms lead us to neglect the world
	around us and despise nature in its more commonplace
	incarnations in the backyard, spoiled as we are by images of
	humpback whales gamboling amidst icebergs or crustaceans
	hiding in the Great Barrier Reef. But, perhaps more important,
	the subliminal message that nature is always far away
	stimulates curiosity and leads to the invasion of the outback
	by armies of well-intentioned tourists, who stampede through
	the wilderness, leaving behind the litter of their picnics and
	a gory trail of fresh roadkill, riding roughshod over
	ecosystems threatened by crowds and pollution.

	"In even the best nature magazines, the subjects selected are
	those with the most vibrant hues: technicolor flora and fauna
	in arsenic greens, Titian reds, acid yellows, and shocking
	pinks, as in an article about 'little birds so incredibly blue
	they seem fragments of some distant magic sky' or in an
	advertisement for a Pentax Camera that enables you to capture
	Kenya in 'three distinct modes: deep saffron, fiery orange,
	and crimson.' Photographers treat nature as one big paint pot,
	a chromatic riot that blinds us to the subtlety of the browns
	and grays of our everyday landscapes, which look positively
	sallow next to the fly-traps and orchids that have become the
	botanical centerfolds of _Sierra_ and _Natural History_. Such
	voluptuous pictorial clichés may seem to come straight out of
	the darkest reaches of the rain forest, but in fact they
	reflect the unnaturally vivid colors of modern advertisements,
	which have trained our eyes to expect hues that capture our
	attention and imprint on our memories the image of the product
	being sold.

	"The vision of nature presented in magazines is tailored to
	rival the artists of Madison Avenue, to supply eyes spoiled by
	the fluorescent tones of consumerism with their chromatic fix,
	the addictive drug of loud, saturated tints that can be found
	only in the most exotic reefs and rain forests. Our very
	conception of what constitutes nature is refracted through the
	aesthetics of consumerism, which have become the window
	through which we look at our world. This lush color scheme
	disciplines the eye, compromises perception, and ultimately
	leads us to ignore or denigrate more natural colors, which
	cannot compete with the brilliance of the pixel and the
	Ben-day dot...."

But before so-called photographic realism took hold, naturalist
representations of "Reality" combined iconic, symbolic, and "true"
pictures in ways that don't plot neatly (at least, I wouldn't know how
to do it) within the areas of "The Big Triangle."

I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately, with my studies
of what Victoria Dickenson (_Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the
Portrayal of the New World_) -- here inspired by Michael Aaron Dennis
("Graphic Understanding: Instruments and Interpretation in Robert
Hooke's _Micrographia_") -- calls "the idea of representation as
heuristic."

I personally am working on evolving C17 representations of *ananas
fructus* (pineapples), maize, flying fish, and the Brazilian sagoin
(monkey), but the convergence of representational categories holds
pretty much across the board, I think, except maybe for some areas of
astronomy (e.g., Galileo's diagrams, as Dickenson points out).

Dickenson's book (which, for those of you who think I'm veering
off-topic yet again, includes almost an entire page on Edward Tufte!
;-) pretty much focuses on the function of the image in scientific
thought -- a far cry from the world of comics and the design of iconic
animals for road signs, but I'm going to recommend it anyway. <bg>

A teaser from Dickenson's Introduction:

	"I am not interested in showing how artists learned to draw
	better bears or bison or birds, but how they used images to
	communicate certain understandings about the natural world,
	how their very depiction of the real world (and what can be
	more real than a particular bird or a flower?) reflected
	their interests and their knowledge. From the sixteenth
	century onwards, artists insisted that their images were
	'drawn from nature,' 'true and accurate descriptions,' or
	'drawn from life.' It is obvious even from a cursory
	comparison of images from Thevet's _Cosmographie universelle_
	(1575) or Topsell's _History of Four-Footed Beasts and
	Serpents and Insects_ (1658) with those from Rondelet's _Libri
	de Piscibus Marinis_ (1554) or Linnaeus's _Hortus
	Cliffortianus_ (1737 [1738]) that 'drawn from life' had very
	different meanings for different authors and artists. By
	looking attentively at what Rudwick referred to as 'the
	strong visual component of the original source-materials,' I
	hope to be able to make some contribution to an understanding
	of the transformation of the world of Columbus and Cartier
	into that of Darwin and Humboldt, and essentially into our
	own."

(Apologies to José for so much un-illuminated text-based discussion! ;-)

Deborah
_____

Deborah Taylor-Pearce
[email protected]






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