reading images in chapter 2 and 3

The "Venus of Willendorf" pictured here at the right is one of the oldest examples of human form in art history. She is very mysterious because no one really knows what her purpose was. Was she the depiction of ideal beauty? Was she for fertility? Was she a god? Art historians have theorized for years, but there is truly no way of knowing. One thing is for sure, however, she is very organic. Every part of her is round. Even her face has been generalized down to a series of organic circles.

At some point the tables turned from very organic form to very linear forms. I think a good example of this is to look at the Cubist work of Picasso and Braque. They broke down forms into geometric planes. According to art historians Cubists were trying to show a form from multiple view points, but after reading this week's text, what was really being said? As Kress and van Leeuwen state, in contemporary western culture, "squares and rectangles are the elements of the mechanical, technological order, of the world of human construction." (p. 54) In the Cubist's work many times people become made of planes, rectangles, and sharp mechanical shapes as in the image at the left Braque's "Man with a Guitar". Using visual cues from the images, can we infer a sense of people becoming machines entering into the subconscious? Nothing about this image looks remotely organic or human. You have to pry away the layers to piece the human elements together.

It seems only natural to take visual representation to the next level by boiling people and images down to a series of vectors and basic shapes. It is the ultimate dehumanizing jump. Diagram people like a sentence. But even boiling humanity down to geometry, it gets confusing. Nature cannot easily be put into such man-made order as a box. Look at the example of trying to diagram El Lissitzky's Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge on page 60,

The triangle in El Lissitzky's Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge literally wedges itself into the white circle. This opens up a perhaps large, but by no means infinite, range of possible readings: the triangle can be said to 'pierce' or 'infiltrate' or 'destabilize' the circle.

If an image of a triangle and a circle cannot be easily diagrammed, then can we really expect to be able to categorize people? They are infinitely more complex than a painting.