This is another 'for my own reference' entry, additional reading material for my ADM431 - Western Art History.
Five Levels of Visual-Textual Analysis
1) Descriptive Or Pre-iconographic Level
Descriptive mapping--basic recognition of things—a tree, a landscape, a naked man.
Which are the key icons in this image?
How do they relate to each other in terms of form, space colour?
What is in the foreground, what is in the background?
If a person is featured, from what perspective are they being shown?
What gender, culture, class, age, religion, sexuality does the person appear to have?
What are the main colours in the image, how do they clash or contrast, dominate or complement each other?
Others:
- Form, composition volume, mass.
- Material and Technique
- Line
- Colour & Light Additive Subtractive
- Texture
- Actual space
- Illusional space
- Perspective Foreshortening,
- Proportion & Scale: (relative)
- Carving & Casting Subtractive Additive
2) Iconographic Level: Preferred Readings
Identification of Meanings and Symbols otherwise known as Preferred Readings--No critique or larger contextualized analysis —internal to codes premises of image attributes: Internal to the Image/Text;
eg. Christ beard.
eg. Christ beard.
What are the main symbolic contrasts and/or binaries--in operation in this image/text combination?
What do you understand as the preferred reading of this image/text?
What do you think that the image/text is intended to convey?
How does the image/text do this?
Are there aspects of the image/text that contradict the intended/ preferred reading?
Who do think are the intended receivers/readers of this image/text?
3) Iconological Level: Larger, Critical Analytical/Interpretive Context (Oppositional/Negotiated Readings)
Eg. Te Pehi Kupe tattoo egs from Gardner Chapter 1
Content & Context
Larger meanings and analysis: including artist’s context, discourse and ideology.
What sort of assumptions are being communicated about gender/race/class/sexuality/religion/age in this
image/text combination?
What sorts of ideological tropes are at work here?
(An ideological trope is similar to a stereotype, but it is a little more “detailed” and is directly connected to a particular ideological--political perspective of the world)
Eg:
- The “unkempt but golden hearted working-class” is a trope pertaining to class ideology,
- The Oprah Winfrey spiritual “Mammy” with advice for all, is a trope pertaining to race/class/gender ideology,
- The blonde bombshell is a trope pertaining to gender/sexuality ideology,
- The sensual native or “noble savage” is a trope pertaining to colonial, sexual ideology,
etc. - What sorts of binaries are at stake in these representations and how do they serve to stratify/hierarchise the visual/textual universe of the examples chosen?
- EG Young/old
- Male/female
- Occidental/Oriental
- Cerebral/Corporeal
- Man/animal
Any other codes you find of critical importance?
In an iconological analysis, Oppositional Readings or critical readings often come into play—reading an image against the presumed intentions of the maker/patron/painter.
4) Iconological & Inter-textual Level
Iconological readings can also mean intertextual Contextualising/ Critiquing the Image/Text Oppositional Readings
How do your responses to level 3) connect with a wider “matrix” of power politics and ideological assumptions about for example
gender/race/class/sexuality/religion/age
- At the time at which the image was produced
- In contemporary visual culture
Can you think of other examples from visual textual media, or indeed, from every day life where the ideological tropes, binaries and visual inequalities at stake in these images are reproduced?
5) Reception Analysis—The Meanings being Made of an Image by a Particular Audience.
A fifth way to analyse visual/textual data is of course to conduct reception analysis amongst a controlled focus group, in order to attempt to understand the sorts of meanings different groups of people are actually making of visual/textual media and comparing these to your own critical analysis.
This is a little difficult to do with Greek classical sculpture!
However, its also pretty difficult to do today.
Reception analysis has a number of pitfalls. Images (and text) operate upon us on a whole series of conscious and unconscious levels.
And we are none of us able to completely formulate how these work upon us. The ways in which we decode visual/textual information is mediated by time (sometimes we make meanings out of things we have seen only years after we have seen them), by space and inter-textual context, (sometimes if we are distracted--we might be thinking of something totally other while supposedly looking at a painting or watching a tv ad).
This makes reception analysis a very inexact practice.
Moreover, it is dangerous to over-emphasize the viewers “freedom” to make meanings of media in whichever way he/or she chooses:
Its kind of like the way how consumers in a supposed “free-market system” are never truly free to consume whatever they want, there will always only be mundane, generic monopolies starbucks, Giordanos, CNN and Hollywoods to chose from.
Similarly, there is no such thing as “free will”, “free association” and “free interpretation” of visual culture—including fine art.
The very way we interpret images is in turn part and process of the images and ideologies through which we have moved every day since childhood. And these representations are monopolized by the structuring “dream makers” of our societies—those with the power to define/inscribe the ways in which we dream, think, understand speak, visualize, and perform our daily life
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