Visual Diary

Soap Bubbles, ca. 1734
Jean Siméon Chardin (French, 1699–1779)
Oil on canvas

24 x 24 7/8 in. (61 x 63.2 cm)
Wentworth Fund, 1949 (49.24)

Chardin's image here is used by me in a metaphorical way. This blog is about the visual and uses supposedly important paintings from the past, amongst other images, to prove my points. So, the young man with the soap bubbles is involved in some trivial play. Chardin uses this mode often to display moral and philosophical themes. Here aimless fun, but with a reflective twist. I think I've made my point - this blog is for me a form of trivial bubble blowing - except for the fact that I am hopefully also dealing with important issues to to vith visual representation along the way.

As for metaphors of language and grammar in our work on the image - where does this leave us? Still questioning whether pictures will ever get beyond language. My intuition is that, for some quite simple reasons, that images have to be separate from language and the philosophical literature on paintings seems to bare this out. There is an immediacy of processing of visual material that does not go on when we process language, either written or spoken and it is this that I would go into next. In addition, there is an affective dimension to the processing of images - that there is a physical and visceral association with visual representations that does not necessarily occur when processing language. Both are important ways in which pictures differ from words.

But did Barthes and others who still advocate the primacy of language take this into account? Does the concept of "visual predominance" appear somewhat contradictory when we are still trying to decide whether the image behaves in a way that is different and independent of language? A philosophical and rigorous analysis of these issues will have to be undergone first and before we can actually start the process or act of interpretation.