Picasso and sociology
On the wall above my desk is a black and white photograph of Pablo Picasso. In it he stands behind a window, hands pressed firmly against the glass. He is bald with calloused, wrinkled hands and lines deeply etched on his forehead. The trademark striped t-shirt is frayed at the edges, and stained with paint. A tiredness - of thinking and seeing but also of interpreting and representing what has been thought and seen - is shadowed over his weary face. He stands, pressing on the window, trapped.
The window is the device through which we see out into the world. Our gaze from outside to inside is through the medium of its glass. But we see doubly through a window, both what the window shows and the surface of the glass itself. On the window light and perspective tricks us, reflecting ourselves as we look through and at it. We see in Picasso’s window a stormy sky; an abstract metaphorical rage imposed onto his figure, echoing the expression of his face. A sharp, distinct black line – the edge of a shadow – and the frame of the window itself dissect the image, an accidental reference to the cubism of his youth. The photograph, by Robert Doisneau, is entitled The Line of Luck; a playful reference, perhaps, to what is on and of the window, imposed visually onto what is seen behind it.
Where is he trapped? As an artist, a painter, he seems trapped constantly into viewing the world as if it were behind a window, looking always for new reflections, refractions or representations to what is or is not there. As a celebrity, he is trapped inside the gaze of the world. Through the window, he seems frail and hardly there. Only the eyes, the hands and the t-shirt seem prominent. They are literally the tools of his trade (the hand and eye) but also of his self-identity: he is an artist, but the t-shirt is what marks him out as Picasso the artist.
The photograph is a powerful image. It moves me to look at. Yet it is a postcard, a reproduction that has been re-made a thousand times. Benjamin identifies the aura of an image as being related to distance, the further away from the original the less powerful it is for the observer (1968: 222). How, then, can a reproduced image such as a postcard retain an aura?
Pattison identifies three distinct factors that affect the response a person has to a visual object or image: antecedent, contextual and inherent. By antecedent he means the awareness a person has of an image before they see it, through, for instance, the narratives and fame built around an image, as well as the saturation with reproductions of the most famous images. Contextual factors relates to both the internal, psychological state of the person, as well as the time, place and company in which it was first viewed. The inherent is a more complicated phenomena, relating to what it is inside the image that makes an individual feel strongly toward that image, rather than any of the myriad other images seen with those same antecedent and contextual factors (2007).
Returning to my postcard photograph of Picasso, it seems Benjamin was wrong. My attraction to the photo is profound, despite it being significantly reproduced. The relationship with the image is derived from a combination of the factors Pattison introduced, unrelated to the distanced aura of the image. Picasso is perhaps the first significant artist I became acquainted with in detail, and his work still holds sentimental connotations. The postcard was bought from the gift shop of the Museo Picasso in Barcelona, on holiday there with a long-term girlfriend. The pose and aspect of Picasso in the picture seem on occasion to be analogous with my own, reflecting my life, somehow, like the window reflects the light and shade that illuminates it. These are specific internal and external factors that I have brought to the photo, regardless of whether it has been reproduced or not.
Aura, then, can perhaps be better defined as “the quality in an object that makes our relationship to it like a relationship with another human being” (Marks, 2000: 81, in Pattison, 2007: 61). If our relationship with images is human-like, then the range of our responses to it becomes as huge as the span of our responses to other humans. Elkins makes a study out of those who have responded to images by crying. He is convinced – and convincing – that we do not only ourselves but the artists themselves a great disservice by restricting relations with the visual to attempts at understanding and historically basing them (2001).
This essay, unwittingly, has convinced its author finally of the importance and validity of a sociology of visual culture and, indeed, a visual sociology. Sociology is the study of the micro and macro relationships humans have with each other, and the ways they mediate and structure those: if our relationships with the visual are human-like, what better discipline to examine, attempt to understand and point out the significance of them than sociology?
Bibliography
Benjamin, W., (1968) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books
Elkins, J., (2001) Pictures and Tears, London: Routledge
Pattison, S., (2007) Seeing Things, London: SCM Press
The window is the device through which we see out into the world. Our gaze from outside to inside is through the medium of its glass. But we see doubly through a window, both what the window shows and the surface of the glass itself. On the window light and perspective tricks us, reflecting ourselves as we look through and at it. We see in Picasso’s window a stormy sky; an abstract metaphorical rage imposed onto his figure, echoing the expression of his face. A sharp, distinct black line – the edge of a shadow – and the frame of the window itself dissect the image, an accidental reference to the cubism of his youth. The photograph, by Robert Doisneau, is entitled The Line of Luck; a playful reference, perhaps, to what is on and of the window, imposed visually onto what is seen behind it.
Where is he trapped? As an artist, a painter, he seems trapped constantly into viewing the world as if it were behind a window, looking always for new reflections, refractions or representations to what is or is not there. As a celebrity, he is trapped inside the gaze of the world. Through the window, he seems frail and hardly there. Only the eyes, the hands and the t-shirt seem prominent. They are literally the tools of his trade (the hand and eye) but also of his self-identity: he is an artist, but the t-shirt is what marks him out as Picasso the artist.
The photograph is a powerful image. It moves me to look at. Yet it is a postcard, a reproduction that has been re-made a thousand times. Benjamin identifies the aura of an image as being related to distance, the further away from the original the less powerful it is for the observer (1968: 222). How, then, can a reproduced image such as a postcard retain an aura?
Pattison identifies three distinct factors that affect the response a person has to a visual object or image: antecedent, contextual and inherent. By antecedent he means the awareness a person has of an image before they see it, through, for instance, the narratives and fame built around an image, as well as the saturation with reproductions of the most famous images. Contextual factors relates to both the internal, psychological state of the person, as well as the time, place and company in which it was first viewed. The inherent is a more complicated phenomena, relating to what it is inside the image that makes an individual feel strongly toward that image, rather than any of the myriad other images seen with those same antecedent and contextual factors (2007).
Returning to my postcard photograph of Picasso, it seems Benjamin was wrong. My attraction to the photo is profound, despite it being significantly reproduced. The relationship with the image is derived from a combination of the factors Pattison introduced, unrelated to the distanced aura of the image. Picasso is perhaps the first significant artist I became acquainted with in detail, and his work still holds sentimental connotations. The postcard was bought from the gift shop of the Museo Picasso in Barcelona, on holiday there with a long-term girlfriend. The pose and aspect of Picasso in the picture seem on occasion to be analogous with my own, reflecting my life, somehow, like the window reflects the light and shade that illuminates it. These are specific internal and external factors that I have brought to the photo, regardless of whether it has been reproduced or not.
Aura, then, can perhaps be better defined as “the quality in an object that makes our relationship to it like a relationship with another human being” (Marks, 2000: 81, in Pattison, 2007: 61). If our relationship with images is human-like, then the range of our responses to it becomes as huge as the span of our responses to other humans. Elkins makes a study out of those who have responded to images by crying. He is convinced – and convincing – that we do not only ourselves but the artists themselves a great disservice by restricting relations with the visual to attempts at understanding and historically basing them (2001).
This essay, unwittingly, has convinced its author finally of the importance and validity of a sociology of visual culture and, indeed, a visual sociology. Sociology is the study of the micro and macro relationships humans have with each other, and the ways they mediate and structure those: if our relationships with the visual are human-like, what better discipline to examine, attempt to understand and point out the significance of them than sociology?
Bibliography
Benjamin, W., (1968) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books
Elkins, J., (2001) Pictures and Tears, London: Routledge
Pattison, S., (2007) Seeing Things, London: SCM Press
posted by My Back Pages at 5:35 pm
