Re: From abstract to concrete visual representations

Gunnar,

> The point of the triangle,
> or at least Scott's point
> for the triangle, is about
> how we regard images of
> human beings. His claim
> can be oversimplified as
> left corner is seen as
> particular, thus another
> person, the right corner
> is all people, thus
> plausibly me, like me, or
> whatever I'd like to
> project, and the apex is
> more about drawing and
> less about people.

OK. <vbg>

I totally missed this (I think perhaps what threw me off was "The
Picture Plane" label at the apex).

The 1st thing that occurs to me is the diagram's relevance for all
those who work on what I suppose we might call, for lack of a better
phrase, "the politics of representation." For this, I think, it
probably is a good heuristic.

E.g., it raises important issues I hadn't before thought about for my
own work on the changing portraiture of Margaret Cavendish during the
17th and 18th centuries ... and I can see its uses for contemporary
designers tasked with representing people with chronic illness (as you
know, I'm involved in some of this, too) ... and I'm sure I could come
up with other uses if I think about it for a bit....

I still don't get, though, what any of this has to do with perceptual
vs. conceptual (eye vs. brain). In other words, I think The Big
Triangle would be even more useful if some of the labels were changed.

If, say, we think of portrait painting, can we really say that
particularity is more heavily weighted to perception than conception?

What about Renaissance "history" painting? And even Baroque
portraiture, for that matter, where a range of cultural narratives are
deliberately inscribed on bodies by the painter?

At least through C18, painterly skill was judged by the level of
scholarship undergirding the visual presentation ... which theme,
incidentally, was raised over and over when arguing for the inclusion
of painting among the official (i.e., institutionalized) Liberal Arts,
with those on both sides of the issue reacting to age-old prejudices
in the Latin west against uninformed manual labor. Then as now, it was
"design" (concept & planning & vision) that separated the visual
artist from the lowly artisan, no matter how polished his or her
technique and execution.

So if this isn't conceptual representation, I don't know what would be.

Here I'm thinking of artworks such as Raphael's _School of Athens_ and
companion Stanze in the Vatican apartments, where scholars
collaborated with the painter to incorporate the academic themes and
minutiae needed to properly educate a pope.

But where would something like this fit on "The Big Triangle"?

Raphael's frescoes feature very detailed human figures (ergo, bottom
left corner of The Big Triangle for this, which I notice is where
McCloud places Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" at

http://www.scottmccloud.com/inventions/triangle/triangle.html

), but these bodies also encode complete cultural narratives (entire
stories from the bible, creation myths, moral teachings, "leadership"
qualities, etc.) for those who know how to read them (ergo, bottom
right corner of The Big Triangle also).

Not only would I put Raphael's _School of Athens_ in both corners at
the bottom of The Big Triangle, but if we consider its mystical
elements, I suppose we could even put it at the apex of The Big
Triangle as well!

I'm far from expert about such things, but I think it was assumed back
then that viewers could project themselves, as well as others, onto
(into?) a well-delineated human form. The idea of having to use
smiley-faces for this would have been incomprehensible to C17
audiences....

Of course, the bourgeois "individual," as we understand this in modern
industrial societies, had not yet evolved. Nor did early-modern
patrons of the arts concern themselves a great deal with matters of
diversity and inclusion. How -- or even if -- African Europeans and
Native Americans and even white servants and laborers projected
themselves onto/into European art is not really known.

Moreover, I think, "The Picture Plane" muddies even more when we
restrict the representational images plotted thereon to early-modern
portrait prints & engravings (vs. painted portraits).

I'll have to think about it more, but even here, I think, McCloud's
cleavage of perceptual and conceptual is in question.


> One could plot a graph of
> typeface features but these
> aspects are irrelevant to
> type classification.

Agreed.

However, McCloud does plot different kinds of "type" -- perhaps better
described as script? -- in the lower right-most triangle ("face,"
"splash," "comics," "tundra"), which I took to mean that he was
raising the matter for consideration.

Damned if I know what any of it means, though. ;-)

Deborah
_____

Deborah Taylor-Pearce
[email protected]



















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