• Questioning assumptions made about the tradition of European painting • The way we now see paintings, in the 2nd half of the 20th c. • Through discovering why we see paintings this way, we will discover ourselves and the way in which we live • A large part of seeing is dependent upon habit and perspective • All the paintings of tradition used the convention of perspective, unique to European art • Perspective centers everything on the eye of the beholder; it is the idea of light (appearances) traveling in (aka reality) • Human eye can only be in one place at a time; takes the visible world with it as it walks • The invention of the camera changed this; appearances no longer traveled to just a singular center • Dziga Vertov manifesto (1923) • Camera changed not only what we see, but how we see it • A painting can now be seen in many different details in millions of places at once • Paintings no longer belong to their own place • Originally paintings were an integral part of the bldg for which they were designed • Paintings in a chapel, for ex., constitute the idea that painting once made up the memory of place; the individuality and life of the bldg • icon is the extreme example of this ^ • you no longer come to images, images come to you • the image of the painting is what travels now; its meaning no longer lies in its surface, its meaning has become transmittable • Faces of paintings become messages to persuade us, to convince us that we need to purchase more originals which these very reproductions have replaced • Reproductions distort • stripping art of the false mystery and religiosity that surrounds it • religiosity linked to cash value, but invoked in the name of culture and civilization, but is in fact, a substitute for what paintings lost due to the reproduceability engendered by the camera • due to cameras rendering of painting as transmutable, has multiplied its possible meanings and destroyed its original What works of art have lost and gained bc of this: • most important thing about paintings is that their images are still, silent • however, lines on a screen are never still, nor are the pages of a book, but silence can still be demonstrated • uninterrupted silence and stillness can be very striking • this exp has nothing to do with what is taught about art, rather, it's as if the painting becomes a corridor, connecting the moment it represents with the moment you are looking at it • "something travels down that corridor faster than the speed of light, throwing into question our way of measuring time itself" • bc paintings are still and silent, and no meaning is inherently attached to them due to their transmutability, they lend themselves to easy manipulation • most obv way of manipulating them is by using movement and sound • camera moves in to remove detail of a painting from the whole; its meaning changes • if you look at the whole of a painting from a screen, you dont see much. you are waiting impatiently for the camera to go in and examine details, but once this happens, the comprehensive effect of the painting changes • you can recreate the narrative of a painting by framing and excluding its details • in film, the details have to be selected and rearranged into narrative based on unfolding time • but in a painting, all these elements are simultaneously there; there is no unfolding in time • the introduction of sound, movement, and type, by way of the invention of camera, and therefore film, subconsciously influences our interpretation of a painting • paintings are also now in constant tension with all other images they are surrounded by, what comes after an image, what comes before it etc; each time the impact of a painting is modified • reproduction of painting = makes its meaning ambiguous (not necessarily negative) • reproductions can be used by anyone for their own purposes, used as words; makes it easier to connect our exp of art directly with other experience • Everything now belongs to the same visual language, used to describe or recreate an experience • the inhibition of this process is the forced mystification surrounding art • children, when viewing art, directly relate it to their own experience (e.g. caravaggio painting, children immediately noticing the ambiguous gender of the figure; caravaggio was gay) • children view pictures as words, rather than holy relics, as we have been conditioned to see art in by way of European/Christian indoctrination • John Berger remarks he is using the reproduction of images for his own purposes, and that, within the year 1972, it is not possible for there to be a dialogue, you cannot respond to him with images; TV is limiting in its scope of possible dialogue, and therefore transmutability, however, the internet, allows for this dialogue to unfold
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