Pictorial Turn Research Articles

Representación en prácticas educativas: afirmaciones reales y replanteamiento de la tradición pedagógica.

El artículo contiene un análisis de representaciones de imágenes en prácticas educativas como una aparición del giro pictórico en los humanitarios, especialmente en pedagogía y prácticas educativas dirigidas a la formación de la cultura de la cosmovisión por parte de los estudiantes. El giro pictórico del pensamiento filosófico y pedagógico y sus consecuencias en las prácticas educativas se reflejan en sus valores comunicativos. La cultura pictórica desarrollada tanto en la corriente de la tradición como en la tendencia de la digitalización puede ser capaz de crear síntesis y formas híbridas para estimular las prácticas educativas adecuadas a las necesidades reales. Para comprender esas posibilidades, es necesario revelar la implicación filosófica de la cultura pictórica en el campo problemático de la pedagogía.

Fording the stream of changes: The concept of border-zone in the novel by Dubravka Ugresic

The article aims to identify correspondences / parallels between the lit-erary text and the “text” of the historical time. The novel of the modern Croatian writer D. Ugresic “Fording the Stream of Consciousness” is taken as a basis: it is considered against the background of the events of the 1980s in Croatia. As the core of the poetic structure of the work, the concept of border-zone stands out. The latter can be traced at different levels of the text organization: in the composition, the plot, the characters, the narrative structure as a whole. The novel describes vari-ous boundaries (mental, existential, state, linguistic). Their function in the poetics of the novel is based on the principles of postmodernism: this is literature on literature. The social and cultural context in which the novel arose also demonstrates the concept of boundary by which the characteristics of the transitional era can be described. The 1980s in Croatia marked the state of transition in politics, economy as well as culture. The article discusses various types of art, cinema, literature and print media that set the main tone. It is shown that in literature, art, and cinema this was a boom period. Access to new frontiers is described by the concept of border-zone, which manifests itself in various ways of breaking the usual hierarchy in art: intertextuality, combining high and low genres (in fi lms and literature), enhancing the role of marginal (youth press), hybridization of media (pictorial turn). The sense of border-zone existence gave rise to “garbage poetics” as a contra-cultural phenomenon of the time. The novel of D. Ugresic contains all these signs of a transitional period. It also relies on the deeper layers of the liter-ary tradition, revealing correspondences with the Balkan model of the world. In this regard, the article touches upon the issue of the bridge in I. Andric’s prose, as well as the stairs in the story of A. Solan. Destruc-tion as the leading principle of postmodernism, the theme of the death of the novel, that manifested themselves in the piece of D. Ugresic, became a refl ection of the transitional time of Croatia, its culture, marked by the symbolic border of existence.

How do students engage with visual sources in the teaching and learning of History?

The idea that the emerging global society is also the age of the ‘pictorial turn’ is one in which the use of visual historical sources (VHS) in the teaching and learning of History in English secondary schools is situated. Yet there has been little research conducted into how such sources are experienced by teachers and students in the classroom, and the ways these are mediated by political, cultural and social forces. This article considers how students engage with VHS and some of the implications this has for teacher pedagogy. It is based on a qualitative study conducted with secondary (aged 11–18) school students, teachers and gallery educators that draws on a form of constructivist grounded theory. It uses thematic analysis, as well as a variety of theoretical positions, to help conceptualise the perceptions described and observed in the research. The findings illustrate how descriptions that emerge around how students engage with VHS can be seen to coalesce around a number of axes, based on binary positions such as immediate–distant and like text–not like text, which are used to describe experiences that may at times seem paradoxical, and which in turn have pedagogical implications for teachers.

Visual practices and art in the internet-space

It is determined that modern culture is mainly focused on the visual. Since the last decades of the 20th century, a peculiar socio-cultural trend has been forming, which researchers define as the “pictorial turn” or visual turn. Its essential feature is that verbal means of communication give way to the visual. The significant influence of technical means on the perception and creation of art is emphasized. The processes that accompanied the emergence of photography and cinema have been developed in the further culture of the 20th century. Although the basic laws of creation of an artwork, the shaping tendencies and expressive means remained virtually unchanged, however, a lot of technical possibilities arose, which are being widely used. The growth of the value of the virtual network space on the physical reality is noted. The emergence of visual practices that perform a communicative function is highlighted. The network becomes a place of concentration of achievements of human creativity, reproducing actual requests, interests of recipients, providing not only an opportunity for self-expression, but also for receiving a quick reaction from another audience.

Digitális kreativitás – a vizuális és informatikai kultúra szinergiája

A vizuális művészetek új műfajai a digitális kreativitás körébe tartoznak. Az immár általánosan elfogadott, az információs és kommunikációs technológiákat felhasználó képalkotó módszereket és innovatív megoldásokat tartalmazó új vizuális kultúra iskolai megismertetése fontos feladatunk, hiszen a fiatalok képalkotó közösségei ezt ma főként az iskolán kívül egymástól tanulják. Ebben az írásban röviden ismertetjük az Új Képkorszak képzőművészetének digitális műfajait, összefoglaljuk egy nemzetközi kutatás eredményeit a Vizuális Kultúra Tanuló Közösségekről és bemutatjuk a MoholyNagy Vizuális Modulok – a 21. század új képi nyelvének tanítása című pedagógiai program részeként megvalósuló, integrált vizuális és médiapedagógiát.

Paradox of ‘pictorial turn’: Reconsidering the interaction between drawing and linguistic activity

Abstract A paradox of ‘pictorial turn’ seems to be occurring, as we are struggling to cope with the gap between the wealth of visual images and our ability to handle the experience relevantly. This study aims to investigate the relationship between drawing and linguistic activities in a process of appreciating artworks, and to discuss the significance of developing one’s abilities. A longitudinal study was conducted to integrate drawing, narrative writing and short essays for four years starting in the fourth grade. There is a significant correlation among those activities, and the correlation increases as the grade advances. The interaction has facilitated the students’ development, and provided the means to be familiar with imagery recollection and observation. Most importantly, a well-functioned interaction gives them opportunities to generate flexible thinking and metaphoric cognition. In preadolescence, when drawing activity slows and linguistic activity intensifies, facilitating the interaction is significant to tackle the issue of updated competencies.

Apocalypse and Body Transgression: On Picasso’s Crucifixion (1930)

The article deals with the question of the possibility of a new interpretation of Picasso’s picture entitled Crucifixion, which was created in the context of the art paradigm shift in the 1930s when the master focused his attention to the return to painting as a reference framework of myth and religion. But this return was only a turning point towards a modern understanding of the world and art from other sources. It should be noted that the problem of pictorial turn nowadays has a strong impact on the postmodern theology, which encompasses various cultural traditions, and also quite opposite philosophical attitudes. The article shows, thus, the inner relationship and connection between painting art and the search for transgression in the language that was the idea of Bataille. In the first part of this article, author tries to show the consequences of Bataille’s thinking of transgression ; the second part has attempted to articulate the problems of interpretation of Picasso’s canvas Crucifixion ; and concluding remarks is an attempt to review the emphasis on relationship with pictorial turn and transformations in the notion of contemporary art concerning the body as a sovereign event of the freedom and sacrifice.

Paradoxes of Visibility

Abstract The paper investigates two possible critical arguments following the pictorial turn. The first is formulated within ocularcentrism, the dominance of sight, and starts with the right to visibility as a general principle that governs today’s digital culture but gets twisted in special cases like the Auschwitz photos of the Shoa, the Abu Ghraib prison videos, or recently the website called Yolocaust. The second is conceived outside the visual culture and is meant to vindicate the other senses vis-à-vis the eyes. However, the argument is truncated here only to highlight the boomerang effect of the other senses: haptic vision. It is the case of visual perception when (a) there is a lack of things to see and (b) indeterminate synaesthesia: when vision intensifies the other senses in the embodied viewer. The two arguments converge upon a dialectic of the visible and the imaginable, which is formulated here as two paradoxes that the discussed examples transcend. By enforcing visibility at all costs where there is hardly anything recognizable to see, they lead to two diverging results. On the one hand, the meaning of “image” is extended toward the unimaginable, the traumatic experience, on the other hand, it is extended toward the invisible, the encounter with the radical Other.

‘The message is the medium’: Evaluating the use of visual images to provoke engagement and active learning in politics and international relations lectures

Globalization and digitization have combined to create a ‘pictorial turn’ that has transformed communication landscapes. Routine exposure to visual stimuli like images has acculturated our students’ learning processes long before their arrival at university. But when they reach us, we expose them to text-centric teaching out of kilter with the worlds from which they come. More importantly, emerging scholarship argues that such textual hegemony is out of kilter with how they learn. This article describes a 3-year experiment to assess the veracity of such claims. It found that student academic engagement was greater when apposite images were applied. In addition, the experiment revealed that introducing imagery triggered active learning behaviours. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for politics and international relations teaching.

Iconic violence: belief, law and the visual

ABSTRACTIn early 2015, the attacks provoked by cartoons of the Prophet and the execution videos released by Islamic State staged a bloody encounter between two aesthetics of the image and two visions of its law. The confrontation between caricature and documentary realism and between blasphemy and freedom of expression form the context for this inquiry into the violence associated with beliefs about images. Violence can arise not only as a result of religious beliefs but equally from the contribution of visual evidence to secular convictions. The article shows how recent reassessments of the ethics of ‘law and the visual’ draw on the emancipatory discourses of the ‘pictorial turn’ and its recourse to the discourse of the early iconoclastic debates. The key legacy of the Byzantine debates, I argue, is less a theory of the image as the polemical identification of the iconoclast and the idolater and the management of the violent passions they evoke for each other. What is ultimately at issue in laws governing relations between seeing and believing are the attitudes people have to those who do not share their regime of the visual, and which, at times of crisis, can revive passions associated with veneration and execration.

Image science: iconology, visual culture, and media aesthetics

Almost thirty years ago, W. J. T. Mitchell's Iconology helped launch the interdisciplinary study of visual media, now a central feature of the modern humanities. Along with his subsequent Picture Theory and What Do Pictures Want?, Mitchell's now-classic work introduced such ideas as the pictorial turn, the image/picture distinction, the metapicture, and the biopicture. These key concepts imply an approach to images as true objects of investigation-an science. Continuing with this influential line of thought, Image Science gathers Mitchell's most recent essays on media aesthetics, visual culture, and artistic symbolism. The chapters delve into such topics as the physics and biology of images, digital photography and realism, architecture and new media, and the occupation of space in contemporary popular uprisings. The book looks both backward at the emergence of iconology as a field and forward toward what might be possible if image science can indeed approach pictures the same way that empirical sciences approach natural phenomena. Essential for those involved with any aspect of visual media, Image Science is a brilliant call for a method of studying images that overcomes the two-culture split between the natural and human sciences.

What happens when you turn twice?: Where the pictorial turn meets the material turn

What happens when you turn twice?: Where the pictorial turn meets the material turn

Picturing the Invisible

An understanding of religion as a practice of mediation has great potential to open up new methods and theories for a critical study of religion. Leading beyond the privileged medium of the text, this understanding approaches religion as a multi-media phenomenon that mobilizes the full sensorium. The central point of this article is that forms of visual culture are a prime medium of religion, and studying them offers deep insights into the genesis of worlds of lived experience. Pictorial media streamline and sustain religious notions of the visible and the invisible and involve embodied practices of seeing that shape what and how people see. Discussing the implications of the “pictorial turn” for the study of religion, I argue that a more synthesized approach is needed that draws these fields together. The methodological and theoretical implications of this approach are exemplified by turning to my research on video and representations of the “spiritual” in Southern Ghana.

‘Many Lamps Same Light’: The Stained Glass Paintings of Nigeria’s Prime Artists, Y.C.A. Grillo and D. H. Dale

Many lamps same Light’ investigates the place of agency in the transmutation of indigenous imageries in the art works of the pictorial turn. Through an investigation that entailed an empirical analysis of the works of two Nigerian prime stained glass artists, Yusuf Grillo and David Dale, this study established that in spite of their diversity in picture making tooling mechanisms, both artists met the purposes of the “new thinking” paradigm shift in the post Vatican II evangelisation regime. In a hermeneutic discourse, however, the study investigates Grillo’s exclusive use of indigenous thought systems’ imbued lexiconology as visual tooling mechanisms to affect imagery for the episteme of ecclesia in Africa. In effect that novel art form did not only affect the enlargement of the series in images of this, otherwise, European art form but also a change in imagery in the entire constellation of Church art. In fact, through art as agency utilsing the iconographical imageries from Nigeria as ciphers of the pictorial turn, distinguishing the paradigm shift in Christianity, it was possible to tell the Christos story with Christ as the magnate holding the ecclesiologies together.Keywords: stained glass, pictorial turn, evangelisation, iconographical imagery, tooling mechanism, agency, light, lamp

La visualidad como objeto: El giro pictórico y los estudios de la cultura visual

Durante las últimas décadas, una nueva corriente de investigación ha hecho camino entre disciplinas que han tenido a la mirada y a la visualización como protagonistas de la reflexión intelectual. Entre la historia del arte y la comunicación, los estudios de la cultura visual inauguran un espacio de debate formal en torno a la recepción y al uso de las imágenes visuales que ha sido explicado bajo la denominación de giro pictórico, una idea que sintetiza los fundamentos de este campo. El siguiente artículo presenta esta corriente y hace un análisis crítico de ella, de su contexto, de sus conceptos fundamentales, así como ofrece una selección de los principales canales de difusión de sus autores a través de los cuales se puede profundizar en la materia que han fundado.

For a Critical Iconology: the Meaning, Dynamics and Effectiveness of Images

In the 1990s, at more or less the same moment, William J. Thomas Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm announced and described the emergence of a new paradigm of the image, respectively championing the idea of a Pictorial Turn (1992) and an Iconic Turn (1994).Joined by others, these theoreticians call for a renewed science of the image and a more intent attention to the intrinsic effectiveness of the image. Just when this epistemological turn was stirring particularly lively critical discussions, it c...

The “Pictorial Turn” as Crisis and the Necessity of a Critique of Visual Culture

The “Pictorial Turn” as Crisis and the Necessity of a Critique of Visual Culture

Iconoclash: reflexões sobre cultura visual e pesquisas em Educação

Contemporary societies require the ability to understand and follow implicit rules of visual culture, which are developed through multiple, heterogeneous and often ephemeral images. This phenomenon has been named as the “pictorial turn”. This article aims to discuss the following: the effects of the “pictorial turn” seem to be more limited in the field of research in education, the substantial absence of phenomena of visual culture in educational research, as well as the underutilization of the tools of visual research methodologies, is not based on epistemological barriers. We propose to investigate educational phenomena from the perspective of iconoclash, analyzing images of Affirmative Action published in Veja a weekly magazine during the period 1995-2010. We conclude by recognizing the unavoidability of the constant tension between the pair image/meaning.

Mapas de interseções na educação em visualidades: evento artístico como pedagogia

This article explores the artistic event as pedagogical in Visual Education. It lies in the encounter between the Pictorial Turn in education and the pedagogical turn in art. Drawing from Cultural Pedagogy it seeks to cover how and under what conditions an event can be both an educational and artistic event at the same and how are instituted the spaces that promote educational events as aesthetic experiences. In this article it was pointed out conceptual and methodological bases for distinguishing the space of intersection between art and Visual Education and its political and cultural implications: Participant Art, Cultural Pedagogy and their relationships among politics and aesthetics. In this sense it analyzes the crossings of frontiers both in art and education and creates possibilities for an understanding of pedagogy of dissent.Keywords: Visual culture, cultural pedagogy, visual education, pictorial turn, pedagogical turn

Between iconophilia and iconophobia: Anita Brookner’s museum of words

Contemporary British writer Anita Brookner was for some thirty years a world-renowned art historian specializing in 18th-century French painting—she has published extensively on Watteau, Ingres, Greuze, and Fragonard, among other artists—before she became a prolific novelist. It is therefore hardly a surprise that painting should play such a prominent part in the novels that she wrote later in her life, only a few years before the end of her long professional career as an art historian. And yet, despite the wealth of pictorial images contained in her fiction, Brookner provides a somewhat unexpected and ambivalent discourse on the image, oscillating between iconophilia and iconophobia, which resonates with W.J.T. Mitchell’s analysis of the “pictorial” turn in postmodern culture. In the vast “textual art museum,” or “museum of words,” of Brookner’s fiction, the pictorial image serves a function which is primarily didactic, metaphorical, and allegorical. Brookner’s use of the image strictly in absentia, through nothing but words, as well as her allusions only to actual paintings by the Great Masters of Western art, convey to her novels an erudite and didactic dimension while strongly anchoring her fiction in the real world. The narrative voice, which keeps referring to pictorial images or providing ekphrases of them in absentia, uses them to teach the reader about the history of Western Art while emphasizing the essential role of images as both guides and obstacles in the characters’ quest for knowledge and self-improvement. The protagonists’ “epistemic gaze” scrutinizing the image for clues and answers of an existential, ontological nature is thus met by the “scopophilic gaze” of images which gradually reveal themselves as powerful, hostile predators ultimately threatening the integrity of the self. What emerges from such an interaction is that the aesthetic vision of the world, or “aesthetics of existence,” that seems to prevail in Brookner’s novels through the characters’ infatuation with the visual relies in fact on an ideological mystification whereby the apparent ennobling of art masks instead a veritable condemnation of art as self-absorbed, subversive, and ultimately destructive. Behind Brookner’s visible marks of a fervent love of pictorial images lies in reality a rather pronounced distrust and fear of the image, which, although originally used as a heuristic tool in the quest for identity, turns out to be fundamentally instable, opaque, and blank, its meaning forever deferred through anamorphic variations emphasizing deceit and elusiveness. The visual iconophilia of Brookner the art historian is thus gradually counterbalanced by the textual iconophobia of Brookner the novelist, thereby reflecting similar, ambivalent reactions aroused by, or inherent in, the “pictorial turn” in postmodern culture.