Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. - book reviews

Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 1994 462 pp; 79 b/w ills. $3495

Visitors to a novel exhibition of the art of Mark Tansey were (to single observer) variously bemused, upset, entranced, and bewildered by the agency of the sole three-dimensional object displayed among the vast oil paintings for which the artist is best known. Wheel (1990) is a large, finely finished copse object that suspends three disks of different diameters within each other, each of which can be rotated independently around a belonging to all center. Around the edge of each disk are engraved words, parodic "art-worldly" nouns and verb Thus, by dint of turning the wheels a vast number of phrases can be generated to exhibit an "art-speak."(1)

Works like Tansey's exemplify a central aspect of contemporary art, single that underlies the concerns of W J T Mitchell in Picture Theory. admitting (puzzlingly) he does not specifically consider of the like kind works, Mitchell approvingly quotes Craig Owens's characterization of postmodern art as "an eruption of language into the field of the visual arts" (p 217 diocese also 239).(9) Picture Theory is fundamentally an examination of the disparate combinations and fragmentations of meaning that obtain when words and images - methods of verbal and visual coding - play into, and not on of, each other. Mitchell is a figure of major importance to this topic. As editor of Critical Inquiry, he has lengthy been involved in the mixed interdisciplinary conversation on theory in the humanities. Far more than otherwise comparable journals, Critical Inquiry has consistently sought to include the pertain tos of art history and visual representation within this broader range of discussion. We are better not on for it. Even more, a central belong to of Mitchell's own work has drawn out been precisely this relation between word and image. His Blake's Composite Art (1978) examined, with remarkable inventiveness and imagination, the fusions and divergences of word and image in William Blake's illuminated numbers A later work, Iconology: Image, true copy Ideology (1986) is a groundbreaking research in the nature of images, by what mode they carry meaning, and their social/cultural implications.

Picture Theory should be oriented within this larger continuing meditation upon the relation of word and image. Mitchell describes it as "a continuation and companion" (p. 4) to Iconology, going from the former's more abstracted (and unillustrated) conceptualization of the image to a framework considering individual visual and verbal artifacts. however for the same reason, it also marks a get back to the sort of "minute particulars" considered in Mitchell's first volume (even including a chapter upon Blake), though now more infused with the touchs of Iconology.

Picture Theory, then, works to stake on the outside a position between abstract and coagulate general and particular. It is a deliberately paradoxical volume which itself deals with the complexities and paradoxes of visual and verbal representation. In this fundamental faculty of perception Picture Theory is a unique, and also a remarkably generous, volume Its generosity is evident over as Mitchell acknowledges the contributions of numerous colleagues, friends, and family in ways that advance far beyond the conventions of academic writing. Further, it is written over with extraordinary subtlety, clarity, and wit.

As the author describes it, "This may well be an introduction to a discipline (the general inquiry of representation) that does not exist and at no time will" (p. 7). This is a tantalizing statement, and not single for introducing its contents below an explicitly nonexistent heading. While Mitchell doesn't exactly argue for the impossibility of a general inquiry of representation, his theoretical erects are developed in coexistence with the book's particular thing perceiveds of analysis, both visual and verbal - Robert Morris's plastic art a cover of Mad magazine, Homer's description of the Shield of Achilles, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, television coverage of Operation uninhabited Storm, Blake, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, many cartoons, a certain number of theoretical tenets of Panofsky, Gombrich, Wittgenstein, Nelson Goodman, and plenteous more. Mitchell's method, that is, appears designed to concretize theoretical bear upons in conjunction with treatment of particular percepts as he consistently puts it (revealing the quibble in the book's title), to "picture theory." The wide range of external realitys of study, taken from art history, aesthetics, literary criticism, film theory, and cultural studies contributes to the book's character "as a de-disciplinary exercise to make the segregation of the disciplines more difficult" (p 7)

Mitchell is thus well aware "that this is a work whose reach far outstrips its grasp," single "likely to offend a destiny of specialists," and must be "content with raising questions whose answers are beyond my competence" (p 7) In this faculty of perception it is quite different from his earlier works, which treat more delimited topics. at the same time there is a further reason the work works to demonstrate the heterogeneity and discontinuity of representational discourse. Picture Theory has as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of the character of a convolution of collected essays as that of a monographic contortion Even as the book's subtitle glance ats simply "essays," Mitchell asserts, "This volume is not a history of visual and verbal agriculture but a theory" (p. 100) greatest in quantity of the book's thirteen chapters originated as essays written for a variety of edited works journals, and exhibition catalogues. There are notable overlaps and repetitions among the essays. individual finds also a (perhaps inevitable) unevennes of detail and treatment between the different chapters and sections, despite brief introductions meant to place each of the five sections within the volume as a whole.