Tag Archives: semiotics

Variations

Posted by on June 2, 2012 Comments Off




Since my last few posts I have added the “final cut” of my recent images to my website in a new section titled “Musicking”. Unlike on this blog no direct association to specific pieces of music is made, which was always my intention. To categorise these images I revisited, as I often do, the writings on Semiology of Roland Barthes (for a discussion see here) and thus, indirectly, came across the term “Musicking”, originally coined by the musicologist Christopher Small (see here). Small’s theories on music making struck a chord with me and the use of his term seemed entirely appropriate here to express some of the thoughts I have on music and the visual arts (or more properly the function of art in general and the process of “making” art).

The images above are intended for a new subsection which will be called “Handmade – Variations On a Theme”. The “Handmade” part of the title is a small nod to one of the inspirations for the images, “Dead Ends Died Out, Examined (1993)” by Damien Hirst. In Hirst’s piece all the butts used are from “pre-made” or manufactured (which, ironically, literally means “hand made”!) cigarettes whereas all of mine are hand rolled! There is a broader aspect too, however, which I also wished to explore: in the making of these images I used fully automatic camera settings (hence the variations in tone, white balance etc.) I was also shall we say a little cavalier in not being overly concerned about vibrating the tripod as I manually tripped the shutter; some of the images are, indeed, slightly blurred. Far from being concerned over these “mistakes” I actively embraced them and it is, I think, true to say that such “imperfections” add an air of the “hand made” to the finished grid of images, consistent perfection being something more readily associated with the machine made. The irony here being, that had I in fact taken care of the technical aspect “by hand”, manually as it were, the images would have all looked more or less the same (technically that is)! I shall be discussing further aspects of the “hand made” in some future posts with more “image variations” from this series.

The other part of the title is a hint as to the musical associations here: Variations on a theme being a much used musical notion or device. Largely through the influence of my friend, composer and painter Marc Yeats, I have given much thought as to how such concepts of “variations’, or the re-use, recycling, of individual themes and elements may be explored in visual art too both through choice of subject matter and treatment.

Accordingly I have chosen, as musical accompaniment, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, “Keyboard exercise, consisting of an ARIA with diverse variations for harpsichord with two manuals. Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits, by Johann Sebastian Bach, composer for the royal court of Poland and the Electoral court of Saxony, Kapellmeister and Director of Choral Music in Leipzig. Nuremberg, Balthasar Schmid, publisher.” (sic!). The choice of performer is deliberate too as it relates very much in my mind to Barthesian concepts of musical “grain” (his “grain of the voice”) and also to Small’s notion of “musicking” (see links in text above). The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was undoubtedly one of the 20th Century’s finest exponents of Bach’s keyboard works (and certainly my personal favourite) but both as a man and, in the opinion of many, musically he was not without his “flaws”. Eccentricity in personal habits and performance were indeed something of a “trademark” for him (read more here). The single aspect of his performing that drove some to distraction was his habit of “vocalising” as he played. If you listen carefully here you will actually hear him “singing along” as he plays. For some this, and it must be admitted myriad other tics and eccentricities, especially as regards the tempi he would take many pieces at, almost disqualified him from being taken seriously. To me it simply makes him all the more human and for me that is a priceless trait in any great performer…

Johann Sebastian Bach, Goldberg Variations, Glenn Gould

A Matter Of (Con)texture Or Conjecture

Posted by on January 6, 2012 Comments Off


“A photograph lacks almost all inherent reality; it is almost all picture. And painting always has its own reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture – no matter whether good or bad.”

Gerhard Richter

“Paintings are meant to be looked at and not touched, so it is not a tactile experience…

I am deliberately trying to call our attention to the fact that there is generally very little freedom of interaction when we experience an artwork. We can choose where we view the painting, how long we look at the painting and how concentrated our attention is during that time. That’s about it. Three variables. Three degrees of freedom.”

Freedom and Infinite Possibility, Arcy Douglass

Nature Represented

Posted by on December 29, 2011 Comments Off




“…this quality of [photographic] presence would seem to be just the opposite of . . . [Walter Benjamin's] notion of the aura: in the presence of a photograph, one is only presented with a copy. Is this a copy of some original? No. For even this copy is only the copy of a copy: “representation takes place because it is always already there in the world as representation”: the photographic presence is the assertion of the absence of an original, and not only is the represented thing itself not necessary, but, more fundamentally, the original’s autonomous, a priori existence is to be denied.

Roland Barthes’s description of the tense of photography as the “having been there” [must] be interpreted in a new way. The presence that such photographs have for us is the presence of déjà vu, nature as already having been seen, nature as representation.”

The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, Douglas Crimp

Doomed To Analogy

Posted by on December 17, 2011 Comments Off

“No sooner is a form seen than it must resemble something: humanity seems doomed to analogy.”

Roland Barthes

Names For Things

Posted by on December 7, 2011 Comments Off

“As long as images represent things (objects, places, people, events) , it made sense to identify what was represented by its verbal coordinates, as it were. This naming enables viewers to recognize the thing, or correlate it to other representations of the thing, and to admire the likeness or the rendering of some part of the world. This standard practice does not so much enact the primacy of language over image as it does confirm the function of the image as representing.”

George Dillon, Writing with Images

“Words are only Names for Things…”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Imperfect Approximations

Posted by on December 3, 2011 Comments Off

“…every theory of signification and communication has only one primary objective, i.e. verbal language, all other languages being imperfect approximations to its capacities and therefore constituting peripheral and impure instances of semiotic devices.”

Umberto Eco, A Theory Of Semiotics

A Semblance Of Transparent Meaning

Posted by on December 1, 2011 Comments Off

“For a sign to be truly iconic, it would have to be transparent to someone who had never seen it before – and it seems unlikely that this is as much the case as is sometimes supposed. We see the resemblance when we already know the meaning.”

Guy Cook, Semiotics: The Basics

Spatial Narratives

Posted by on November 30, 2011 Comments Off

“Turning from spatial to sequential syntagms brings us to narrative (which, as noted, may even underlie left/right spatial structures). Some critics claim that differences between narratives and non-narratives relate to differences among media, instancing individual drawings, paintings and photographs as non-narrative forms; others claim that narrative is a ‘deep structure’ independent of the medium.”

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners

It’s a Sign

Posted by on November 28, 2011 Comments Off

“We think only in signs.”

“Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign.”

Charles Peirce

Empty Signifiers

Posted by on November 27, 2011 Comments Off

“Many postmodernist theorists postulate a complete disconnection of the signifier and the signified. An ‘empty’ or ‘floating signifier’ is variously defined as a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified. Such signifiers mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean. In such a state of radical disconnection between signifier and signified, ‘a sign only means that it means’.”

Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners