In the excepts from Myth Today, "From Work to Text," "The Photographic Image," and "The Third Meaning," by Roland Barthes I found that what I thought to be his main concern is what differentiates one type of artistic expression from another.
In "From Work to Text" it is literature that confounds (or delights) him and how one would begin to categorize a work of literature from that of a Text; "...an irreductible [...] plural," one that "can be only in it's difference (which does not mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive [...] and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages [...], antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony."
In "The Photographic Image" Barthes is most interested in the photographic "paradox" or how no image can be merely object, objective, or analogon; but is always faced with a connoted message that the viewer (or society) brings to a photograph that "communicates what it thinks of it." At first he seems to struggle with the idea that a photograph, its very nature, is a message without a code, an image with only denotation. He uses the press photograph as an example to illustrate this idea and touches upon the three aspects which make up a press photograph; the emission (staff of newspaper), a channel of transmission (the newspaper), and its point of reception (the public who reads the paper). But, further on in "The Photographic Message" Barthes begins to question his idea that a photograph consists solely of a denoted message; "In front of a photograph, the feeling of "denotation" [...] is so great that the description of a photograph is literally impossible; to describe consists precisely in joining to the denoted message a relay or second-order message derived from a code which is that of languae and constituting in relation to the photographic analog, however much care one takes to be exact, a connotation..." So therefore, although the photographic image seems to be created specifically to carry only a denoted message even it cannot get away from the connotation, or what the viewer brings to the image.
"The Third Meaning" goes on use the artistic practice of film (specifically in some of the still frames of S. M. Eisenstein) to illustrate another way of classifying and categorizing the image and its practice. The stills are divided into two levels: informational and symbolic which give way to a "third" meaning, the obtuse. Like the punctum from Barthes Camera Lucida, the third meaning is an aspect of the image that gives way to an inexplicable devastation, an infinity of language, an emotion or relevance that is specific and autonomous for each viewer; an experience that cannot be expressed in words, but is merely felt.
In everything that Barthes talks about, whether it is the excerpts from Myth Today to Camera Lucida Barthes struggles with the elusive trait which breaths life into imagery and is essentially completely dependent on the subjectivity of the individual viewer. It is something which separates reality from life, what describes artistic invention and yet it is inevitably undefinable because its poignancy is dependent on the individual; for one image may contain a punctum or an obtuse meaning to one person and yet be completely absent to another. Perhaps artistic practice exists only in the notion of its absolute wraith-like quality; like smoke curling it is something beautiful to watch but impossible to truly touch.
No comments:
Post a Comment