Krešimir Purgar / 2007
Zlatko Kopljar’s K9 Compassion from a perspective of the visual turn
The question posed by W.J.T. Mitchell certainly seems key for understanding contemporary cultural, artistic and media production, and in its simplest form it would read: has the moment of change to the basic paradigm which we use to explain the phenomena of the world that surrounds us really arrived, and can we finally say that a shift has occurred in our model of experiencing the world towards the doimination of the image with the abandonment of the predominance or logos? Mitehell developed his ideas about the pictorial turn1, about turning towards visuality in contrast to earlier postulates made by Richard Rorty who claimed that the human sciences, as well as the critical reflection of modern societies about themselves, were structured through various forms of textuality and that the final act in this epistemological shift was in fact taking place through a linguistic turn”.
Mitchell does not challenge Rorty’s postulates, most likely assuming that the almost three decades that have passed between their completely opposite insights can be left to a newer visual spectacle of the everyday to be theoretically legitimized as a pictorial/visual turn. It is interesting to note that his starting arguments stern from that place where Rorty admits a threat to the linguistic paradigm on the part of visual metaphors which neea to be “thrown from the language”, but even earlier, byWittgenstein’s iconoclastic admittance that we have become “captives of a picture” which has “mastered our language too”3. What significantly establishes the dialectical nature of the visual turn, and by this the post-modern state in general, as Mitchell sees it, is the paradox of fear and hope; on the one hand we believe in the ability of pictures to help us overcome differences through their technological, communicational and simulative potential and make the diversity of the world visible to all, while on the other hand we are horrified by this very “picture power” and its power to get out of control and endanger those who create it. This paradox is immanent for the postmodern era and the only way to learn to live with it is a new metaphysics of pictorial presence as a postlinguistic and postsemiotic interplay between the picture and institution, the body, social apparatus, etc., and especially in the knowledge that the techniques of viewing, observing, gazing and glimpsing are not boiled down to remnants of techniques of decoding textual contents. Here we can already see Mitchell’s tendency to define the status of a picture in relation to ideology and towards metapictorial experiences through which we adopt our knowledge of the world. In this way he carries out the ideas by art historian Erwin Panofsky and interprets his theory on the “renaissance perspective as a symbolic form” in light of the postmodern derailment of iconology in ideology and vice-versa. The American author sees the preconditions for such an interpretation in Panowsky’s theory that the renaissance perspective in fact does not correspond “to actual visual experience”, being, as it is primarily socially motivated as a group of representational conventions”. The question on the active role of the spectator in the forming of a visual field remains open here and insomuch as Mitchell’s pointing to the more contemporary contributions to the theory of the gaze seems completely reliable.
One such contribution consists of insights by Jonathan Crary from the book Techniques of the Observer about the technical-technological conditions of that what we see by machines and optical devices which we use in the process of observing. Mitchell finds Panofsky’s and Crary’s relation to be interesting because Crary clearly shares the latter belief with the older author that “visual perception is a bodily and mental activity”. This is made even more apparent as Crary positions visual perception in critical relation to art history, insisting on the importance of a broader critique of a visual culture that places models of a spectator at a central location”5. Therefore, those places of iconology that Panofsky describes as universal symbolic forms, placed before individual experince, need to adapt to the new mobile observer and their mobile subject. The symbolic order of the premodern culture as visualized in the artworks of the central (Renaissance) perspective experienced, according to Crary, a double turn in the second half of the 19th century”. the introduction of a new symbolic order of pictorial abstraction (Cezanne and the Impressionists) and the completely new order of active viewing through the viewfinder of a camera which, at least in the beginning of the development of photography, represented a revolutionary, radical desymbolizing gesture. Mitchell acknowledges Crary’s scientific approach to the problem of observation and visuality in general, and to the insights he happened upon by subjecting himself to the 19th century regime of observing the dramatic changes in technology of the system of viewing and filming; however, it seems that Mitche^ mostly agrees with that part where Crary himself expresses doubt in the range of his own knowledge:
He (Crary, a/n K.P.) seems aware, above all, that the whole concept of the “observer” and of a “history of vision” is fraught with deep theoretical problems: there may not actually be any “nineteenth century observer”, only “an effect of an irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive, social, technological and institutional relations”6. There may not be any “true history” of this subject, only a rhetoric that mobilizes certain materials from the past in order to have an effect in the present.7
Furthermore, according to Mitchell, Crary neglects the concrete empirical experience of the observer finding reasons in the-then actual technology of the camera obscura for the abolition and “disintegration of the subject”, and opening up a discussion which has remained incomplete even to this day on the consequences of separating the very act of observing from the subject-observer Mitchell says that we are on the best path here for the spent method of idealistic history to absorb all existing theories and history of the observer in order to transform them into the one-dimensional figure of the completely hypothetical observer: “Foucault, Adorno. Baudrillard, Benjamin, Debord, Deleuze and other critics all co-exist happily in the construction of this specular history; their disagreements and discrepancies disappear in the blinding light of a ‘dominant model’ illuminating a ‘homogeneous terrain'”.8
Even though he himself is the author of a very influential book on iconology, Mitchell somewhat amnesties Crary’s tendency towards historical generalizations by his confession that even iconology- like the science of a picture par excellence – is unavoidably subjected to “historical totalities” and that its contribution to the “hermeneutics of culture” is perhaps not as important as it seems to us. He asks himself, finally, “is iconology, in contrast to its ‘disintegrative’ cousin, philology, incapable of registering ‘faults’ in culture, the fractures in representation, and the resistance of spectators” and offers an introduction to his theory with the statement that the “image in iconology is like a suppressed memory which always comes back, like a symptom completely out of control” What then, does Mitchell do with iconology, and in which way does he instrumentalize it in his shift towards visuality? He attempts to affirm the idea that the path towards the visual turn opened at the very moment when the picture stopped being the exclusive right and subject of iconology and when the systematization of representational codes (with perspective certainly being one of these) began to resemble the organization of social formations into solid, unchangeable matrices that are easily recognized and even easier to adapt to; in other words, when iconology began to function as an ideology, as an indisputable set of values of a certain social group or historical period. The image then obtained an expressly unstable and dynamic status – from media in which society unconsciously (self) represents itself (stylistic formations, like Impressionism, Cubism, etc. fall here) to the complete instrumentalization of ideological propaganda means. American art historian Michael Podro notices this precisely in the already mentioned essay about Erwin Panofsky’s perspective when he claims that, on the one hand, perspective “has no unique authority as a way of organizing the depiction of spatial relations, as it is simply a part of one particular culture and has the same status as other modes of spatial depiction, while on the other hand, it provides an absolute viewpoint for interpreting other constructions.”10 Perspective, therefore is, as Mitchell concludes, an “iconic metaphor of ideology” – a historically, culturally conditioned formation wishing to show itself as a part of the natural, universal order.11
I would like to propose a way of interpreting Zlatko Kopijar’s K9 Compassion series here following Mitchell’s parallel which ascribes the possibility and conditions of the pictorial turn. Mitchell does not ascribe them to the media monsters of our time embodied in the advertising and television Moloch, nor in the multinational capital and planetary networking of knowledge and power, but in something much more basic: in the hermeneutics of the pictorial display and conventional iconological standards which are as modern today as they were in the time of Erwin Panofsky, for example. The image, namely, really does carry that immanent paradox, insofar as it presumes the existence of the conventions of reading which, as Mitehell says, are transformed into ideology by default, just because the potential differences in representation are reduced to symbols understood by everyone. To me this seems to be a key insight, both for the final abandonment of materialistic notions on wealth (or, more currently, of the imprisonment of the mind througn advertising and TV-networks) as the beginning of social evils, and for the accepting of the visual turn from the spirit of the ideological conventionalization of pictorial displays. Thus image predominance was not enabled by the media’s omnipresence but by the trivialization of interpretational models. Are we entirely sure that viewing means to see, and that knowing how to see is necessarily the power of cognition? What Kopljar initially envisioned as a performative-political gesture with a basic conviction of the artist’s social responsibility was transformed into a photographic tableau vivant, into an artistic image with narrative ambitions that outdid the artist’s elementary intention, and which especially surpassed the ephemeral temporal dimension of the performance in a narrower sense. The exact opposite happened more than one century ago when Manet painted his Breakfast on the Grass: at that time it was the enigmatic quality of the scene, social transgression or something other that could eclipse the painting’s superiority as it was a time when a painting or picture still carried meaning and to which people expressed themselves emotionally.
Kopljar’s performance shows that we can no longer emotionally define ourselves toward any content or deeper reason of his now metapolitical act, because we no longer experience this represented reality as an image of the real world, but as a picture-fetish mediated by the media. In other words, we have once more believed in the power of an image and have once more abandoned ourselves to its seductive powers. The hermeneutics of pictorial representation has prevailed over dramatic performative gestures, however much the motivational potential of the latter made it seem more destructive and stronger. We intuitively feel that Kopljar’s ethical position is completely justified: in the end. however, K9 Compassion is a metaphor for the unequal game of power between the individual and the institution of political-economic coercion when our sympathies are always on the side of the weaker one. At the same time, however, we cannot and we do not want to resist the seductive energy of the photographic tableau. And what now? An ethical-aesthetic interpretational misunderstanding does not result (at least not exclusively) from the logic of (non)comprehension of a work, but from the changed role of the two-dimensionai picture plane at a time of spectacularizatioh of all perceptions. The way we experience this painted reality changes much more quickly from the way in which we can transcend the spectacle of the image by artistic means. The image thus has direct domination over our cognitive abilities than any attempt at intellectualizing an artistic act. The visual turn in Kopljar’s work occurs in the unstoppable process of softening politically charged performative gestures and its transformation into an image as a traditional object of iconology. Kopljar’s series, in fact, cannot have the paradigmatic, symbolic characteristics which Panofsky in his time ascribed to perspective, but it can surely become what Mitchell calls postsemiotic, and even a postpolitical “iconic metaphor of ideology”. The picture has won; it is now our new icon/ideology.
1 W. J. T. Mitchell: Pictorial Turn, published in: Picture Theory, The University of Chicago Press Chicago 1994. This essay was originally published in the magazine ArtForum, March 1992. / 2 Rorry first makes mention of the term linguistic turn in the essay collection Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in the Philosophical Method (Chicago university Press, Chicago. 1967) and later in the work Philosophy and the morror of Nature (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1979). / 3 Here Mitchell refers to the English translation of the work by Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (Macmilan, New York, 1957.) / 4 This refers to the ideas of Erwin Panofsky from his book: Perspective as Symbolic Form; Zone Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991. / 5 Jonathan Crary: Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990. p. 19. / 6 J. Crary, op. cit., p. 6. / 7 Mitchell. op. cit., p. 20. (p. 6); (p. 7) / 8 Ibid..p. 22. ‘-Ibid., p. 23-24. / 10 Michael Podro: The Critical Historians of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. 1982, p. 186; cited according to W. J. T. Mitchell: Pictorial Turn. / 11 Ibid., p. 31.