our last 6112 discussion

We started our discussion of Donis A. Dondis's Visual Literacy by looking at a range of two-dimensional art pieces, asking what Dondis's approach encouraged or allowed us to say about the objects. We quickly ran up against the absence of the social / cultural in her approach. For example, when looking at Raphael's painting of Galatea we could talk about the arrangement and relationship of abstract elements and how they directed our eyes and attentions around the picture, and we could name (because they are represented) -- but not talk about -- humans, water, and animals. We were also very aware that could not speak much of gender, ethnicity, mythology, frescoes, the Renaissance; we knew from our experiences outside the painting that those factors and more shaped our viewing, but we needed to turn to other sources to inform our talk.

We looked at a Chinese painting and could apply Dondis's analytic frame to it: we could say that the colors are equally subdued, with little contrast except for the red; this is a landscape with few objects in it, and the boats are painted to blend into what is around them, as is the body of the flutist who stands out only subtly in the lower middle because of a shift in line. Most of us were uncomfortable with going any further, with coming to any judgments about the painting (for example, "This is about the smallness of humans in the landscape" or "This is about the passing of time in fall, about grabbing hold of the gentle moments of enjoyment"): we could see that it has been painted in a tradition unknown to most of us. Yang was able to tell us that this painting was probably a response to or illustration of a poem, a traditional Chinese use of painting. (Am I getting that right, Yang?)

We acknowledged that Rose's critique of compositional visual methodologies -- that they "do not encourage discussion of the production of an image…. nor of how it might be used and interpreted by various viewers" -- seemed an accurate critique for Dondis's approach. We raised but did not discuss much, however, our concern that Rose lays the blame for this lack of social-cultural reflexivity on how compositional approaches can be tied to the notion of the great artist or "the good eye" -- when Dondis's reasons for her system are different. The implication of Rose's critique is that compositional methodologies are used by critics to establish what are the best and most beautiful or otherwise worthy art objects; they are used, that is, to establish the tastes and so hierarchical placements of some people (I am thinking of Bourdieu and Distinction here). But Dondis is interested in larger cultural participation; she is interested in the thoughtful consumption AND production of visual objects by a wider range of people. Rose approaches visual methodologies as occuring strictly after the fact: they are, for her, to help with analysis of existing objects; she does not discuss them as possible approaches for anyone wishing to participate in the production of visual objects. Dondis sees production as a necessary part of cultural participation. Are compositional methodologies necessary -- or necessary and sufficient -- for producing thoughtful visual productions? Are visual productions necessary for -- and useful for -- cultural participation?

In our discussion, however, that thread about different understandings of the purposes of compositional methodologies very quickly led into something more compelling for our particular backgrounds and interests, and that is Dondis's definition of "literacy." Dondis uses her notion of "literacy" as the grounding for her arguments about how we should approach the visual (although she does reiterate, initially, that for her there are shortcomings with her approach because the verbal is more conventionalized than the visual). Steve pointed out that Dondis's definition of verbal literacy -- "To be considered verbally literate, one must learn the basic components of written language: the letters, words, spelling, grammar, syntax." (x) -- seems equivalent to Street's notion of "autonomous literacy" (which was published approximately 10 years after Dondis's book). While Dondis acknowledges that there are varying degrees of verbal literacy (from the ability to write "simple messages" to "increasingly complex and artistic forms" [10]) and so, comparably, "visual literacy" "means increased visual intelligence" (185), this does not change how she sets out to build a model of visual literacy parallel to her understanding of verbal literacy.

And so Dondis offers the visual equivalent of letters: for visual production, there are the "basic elements" of dot, line, shape, direction, tone, color, texture, scale, dimension, and movement. Syntax is covered through what Dondis describes as "the potential of structure in visual literacy" through denotative "psychophysiological" perceptions of balance, stress, leveling and sharpening, a preference for the lower left of a picture plane, attraction and grouping, and positive and negative; the meaning of these latter "short circuits the intellect, making contact directly with the emotions and feelings" (22); these contribute to our ability to build meaning through the techniques of kinds of contrast that Dondis describes in one chapter.

Dondis also claims that there are three levels to visual meaning: the representational, the abstract, and the symbolic (and these would be worth comparing to Pierce's index, icon, and symbol). The first arises out of "reality," "the basic and dominating visual experience" (68): it is the attempt to faithful recreate direct visual observation of the world. The second is "the reduction of multiple visual factors to only the most essential and most typical features of what is being represented" (71), and it

conveys the essential meaning, cutting through the conscious to the unconscious, from the experience of the substance in the sensory field directly to the nervous system. (81)

The symbolic "is an information-packed means of visual communication, universal in meaning" (72). It is not clear whether these levels are meant to correspond to some some aspect of verbal literacy, as the basic elements and techniques correspond to letters and syntax, but for Dondis both producers and receivers of visual compositions -- if the producers and receivers are to be considered visually literate -- have to be able to work with all three levels separately and entwined.

It is when she moves on to discuss style, that Dondis begins to address social and cultural aspects of visual composition. As with the levels, Dondis does not describe a verbal equivalent to style; instead, style is for her an unconscious cultural background that exerts influence over the choices composers make in working with elements and techniques of visual composition. Although Dondis acknowledges that there are and have been many different styles historically and geographically, she argues that all styles can be fit into five categories: primitivism, expressionism, classicism, the embellished, and functionality.

The last categorization is a symptom of what everyone in class noted as being a feature of every level of Dondis's arguments: she claims universalism for all aspects of visual composition -- for production and analysis -- and none of us were comfortable accepting that universalism. Dondis offers few non-Western, non-canonical examples, and offers no analysis of the material conditions of production (the marketing of art, the historic gendering of artistic production, and so on) that we know shape how we understand what we see. There is no discussion of advertising, of other than the fine arts.

In spite of our complaints, I think that following Rose and Dondis we have questions like these remaining:

1. Are compositional methodologies always necessary for starting analysis (especially if we take seriously Rose's arguments that all visual methodologies must "take seriously" "the image itself")?


2. Is something like visual literacy necessary for full cultural participation?


3. How can we know the limits of our methods of visual analysis, in terms of being reflexive about our geographical and cultural positioning?

Anything I missed?