The visual rhetorics of liberty: Towards the viewer as producer

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that our understanding of visual liberty is framed within a functionalist circumscription. It thereby sets out to map an enfranchising dynamic for the act of viewing that is initiated within the domain of art but imbricates beyond it, illuminating and undermining the functionalism of the image within the culture industry: a functionalism that facilitates the sedimentation of ideologies and renders them matters of first rather than second nature, thereby militating against social change. Its approach, shaped through Antonio Gramsci’s work on the agency of the organic intellectual, establishes the historical background of art and the viewer through a detailed inventory that focuses on how tutoring the act of viewing has serviced elite hegemonies, beginning with early mediaeval church art and artefacts and progressing through to mediations of art history, art criticism and art theory. It proposes that the peculiar strengths of art can be put to the service of social change by illuminating how the visual rhetoric of the image industry constrains and controls our subjectivities. Through a Benjaminite partnership, the artist and viewer, working as organic intellectuals, can reconfigure their historic functioning into a creative coalition that activates the agency of the latter to inhabit a new space for thought and action. This understands art as a modus operandi, working shoulder to shoulder with other disciplines that are engaged in an emancipatory project: one way amongst many of doing, rather than a discrete discipline with outreach workers in selected theoretical fields.