Composition: independent from language?

In the light of the terms of the debate outlined in the previous two posts, I want to begin to establish whether composition in painting can have the potential to act independantly from language. I want to apply this to the three paintings posted in the previous weeks. Here I mentioned the possibility of a "compositional syntax". But here the gramatical expresion in this phrase was use metaphorically. And, this is my first criticism of Kress and van Leeuwen in that such terms as "visual literacy", "reading images", or "grammar of visual design" etc all use thst structures in language in a metaphrical way. It is hterefore necessary to investigate these concepts in some depth to see the extent to which their ideas reating to the visual can in fact be seen to function "indepandantly of language".

Questioning Visual Predominance:

According to Barthes' account, indicated in the quote in the previous post, the image is always reducible to language and as such is never seen in the absence of the word. But in tier book Reading Images, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) spend some time taking issue with Barthes' position. Their account tends to look in places where word and image are integrated, in their words, these are "multimodal texts", ones that at the very least combine pictures and words. The first step in their suggests that images can have a structure and a meaning that is separate from language and that visual messages are structure independently from language - in this case the printed word. There problem with Barthes is as follows:

"Barthes' account misses an important point: the visual component of the text is an independently organised and structured message - connected to the text, but in no way dependent on it" (1996, page 17).

But, if according to Barthes, the "linguistic message is present in every image", the, how is this so, and on what grounds can we say that the image relies on language for signification? On the other hand, if visuals can have their own logic of signification, then what evidence can we provide to say that images can work, can embody meaning without the support of the linguistic message.

These are the terms of the debate, the very first issue that raises itself when we think about the possibility of Visual Literacy.

On visual literacy and visual predominance

The point I want to get to is where I can stuate the concept of "visual literacy", in the way that it is articlated in Kress and van Leeuwen's book Reading Images, within more general studies of visuality and visual culture. The problem is that there is so much writing, some of it puporting to be serious academic research, that unquestiningly poresents the argument that contemporary culture is awash with images to the extent forms of visual communication have somehow taken over from the word, from language. This is what I call "visual predominance". I would like to suggest that this issue is not as clear cut as it first seems. To begin with, I would like to remin you of something that Roland Barthes wrote back in 1964 in his essay Rhetoric of the Image:

"Today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is present in every image [...] which shows that it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image - we still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing, writing and speech continuing to be the full terms of the information" (Barthes, 1965, p. 38).

This is the first step in the argument, that of questioning assumptions about visual predominance. I would argue that writing, and therefore text, whetherrendered in print or on screen still continues to be the privieged mode in contemporary Western society. That, even in the context of some rapid "coomunication shifts", the migration from print to scree or the rise of the internet as a public communications platform the word is dominant.

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, 1971.











Frame, composition, semantics

I would like to know what we can make of this in the light of this discussion about Visual Literacy and the semantics of composition when before we could see clearly the formal qualities of an image relate to the structures of grammar. Here we cannot rely upon geometry to help us out. 

Q: When the grid is taken away from composition, what's left?

A: The Frame.

Framing is, therefore, our next port of call in this argument.

The Grammar of Composition
The point I am attempting to make with both Malevich and Mondrian is that accidentally the were both, through working with abstraction, involved in developing a formal system through composition and that composition in this way, as part of the semantics of the image become a grammar. The Grammar of Composition, where elements combine to form a complete whole - just like the phrases and sentences of a paragraph. But where this is realised visually. But not just in terms of pictures seeming to be equivalent to language or similar to it in some way, but that pictures have their own potential in terms of grammar. This is what I take Kress and van Leeuwen to mean when they say that composition behaves as an independent system from language, similar to it, possibly, but different. In my critique of Visual Literacy - yes, this is becoming something of a critique - I would like to take issue with Kress' version of the relationship that pictures have with words and that composition can be seen as both an independent system as well as an adjunct to language as a kind of bimodal system that can never really be free from language.

Mondrian's Legacy

Another icon in the progress of Abstract Art in the twentieth century is that of Modrian's compositional pieces like the one illustrated here. Although painted some time after Malevich, this image bears a striking resemblance to the strategy used in the earlier painting. It is a 'pure' composition. It is fundamentally geometric. It's meaning is constructed through form. As such there is an implicit spiritual dimension, or at least by association, with more lofty ideas relating to the manufacture of pure form in painting - akin to similar notions in mathematics - and the divine.

These are designed compositions and there relations with the design of fabrics, of furniture and architecture are very close. In terms of the progress of abstraction, as both an artistic and philosophical ideal, the story is almost complete when it comes to Mondrian. Where else could abstraction go? We have to wait until post-war - the 50sin particular - to see how abstract art was going to relieve itself, so to speak, from the strains of projection and of geometrical space. It’s almost as of the linear perspective of the Renaissance was still hard to shake off as the very last piece of the formal puzzle away from the tyranny – the need to represent things.

Malevich's Black Square: a comment on abstraction and visual literacy

This image, Malevich's Black Square (1915), is for me one of the most convincing justifications for the argument that Abstract Painting was in many respects due to the invention of photograph. More to the point the fact that one of the most significant genres in photography was that of imitating representational painting, meant that painters, like Malevich, were compelled to find other means, other systems to work in, other than representational, figurative or narrative forms of painting. This, in a sense, marks the beginning of pure abstraction, if there is any such thing.

From the point of view of images generally, I have used this image as a way of testing assumptions about visual literacy and exploring the uneasy relationship between pictyres and words, merely by asking what is this image saying, what was Malevich's intention here? The answer, I would argue, is always going to be from language. That we assume the same intentional or communicatyive purpose to at the very least equivalent to language. But more to the point, the question "what is it saying?", or "what does it mean?" always falls back to the same proposition - that language is the base-line mode for representing meaning. An image such as this, one that is so deviod of representational detail, I use to emphasise the point that in spite of the saturation and apparent domination of images in the modern world, we are, as in Brathe's words, "still a civilation of writing". Writing being the dominant mode. Language being the only means by which we can decypher this image.

An Incomplete Mosque
At the bottom of Sailsbury Avenue is this. I like the angle of this image and the composition seems quite painterly, like it could be from a very formal landscape painting. It is deceptive, this image disguises the actual size of this mosque. From other angles it's massive and definately the largest mosque I've seen in the UK. It is incomplete and it's been facinating watching it progress. In the middle distance you can just make out a large hat shaped green object. This is presumably the covering for the main dome, which is behind it - a sceleton dome. An intreguing image.

Corner Sign
I ride past this sign nearly every day as I cycle to work. It's facinating to see it change. The grafitti changes over time. I have other photographs with different letering on. It's just opposite the cemetary on Abb Scott Lane. It seems that not only do I have a bit of a thing about typr in the landscape. There is also a bit of a thing developing here about cemetaries.

EXCH
This was once part of the main entrance to Bradford Exchange station. It's an intriguing sign. It's got some interesting gaps in it. Even more intriguing is the fact that it has been left here since the demolition of the station.

Exch

An entrance to the old exchange station. A partial sign.

Joseph's grave

According to Colin Clark and Rueben Davison's boo "In Loving Memeory: the story of Undercliffe Cemetary" the gravestone above - being in the most prominent location in the cemetery - is for Joseph Smith who died in 1858, four yerars after the cemetary was built.

N MEMO

We entered the cometary with our cameras. A woman was following us with three dogs in tow, the smallest began running after me, playfully, and the owner kept calling the dog back. The owner then threw a packet into some bushes behind me as I was walking. "It's for the foxes", she said. Scraps of chicken apparently shoved into some paper bags.

After a few shots my camera pack in due to the fact that the battery has faded out. I then had to give myself a reason for being there having taken time out to work on the Grid. But I now had no camera. Not even a notebook or sketchpad. I continued to walk around Undercliffe cometary with Richard. Then I realised I was in a landscape full of type, carefully chiselled lettering of all styles, shapes and sizes. Many messages expressing deep emotion and loss.

At the end of the drive that I am standing on is an obelisk made out of grey-blue marble. The lettering on it appears very feint. Amongst the message and the date I see the phrase "in loving memory". The last two letter of the word "memory" are missing. I remember that I have my mobile with me - I never really use the camera on it. I capture this phrase. It intrigues me.