I found Mieke Bal’s article to be highly useful in understanding how semiotics might be used to deconstruct the visual language of a painting. Bal’s explanation of how Peircian semiotics works helped to clarify the readings from last week. I did have to sit and write all of the new definitions and varying divisions of semiotics down so that I could visualize the groupings in my own way. The concept of “ground” is a little unclear to me, but I took it to be similar to the Saussurian plane or the context of interpretation.
The explanation of semiotics from the point of view of linguistics in comparison to semiotics of art criticism (and how that has in turn been misinterpreted) was also very helpful. It seems as though linguistic semiotics is very nearly the same thing as image semiotics. Is a word (or letter) really all that different from an image?
Regarding Bal’s discussion about narrative, it seems that he/she was saying that people are likely to use one or more of the narrative codes at a time because looking and interpreting tend to be a dynamic process. I love this idea – and semiotics in general – because it really does seem to be a sort of democratic process (although, with no real definite outcome due to its subjectivity) in analyzing art and images.
I particularly enjoyed Bal’s interpretation of why the crowd went wild (or not) over Manet’s Olympia. That Olympia addresses the viewer as “you” rather than “I” falls perfectly into the history of that painting and helps to explain its appeal to me.
Bal’s semiotic interpretation of Gentileschi’s paintings, particularly her self-portrait, was very helpful in further understanding how semitoics can be applied to a painting. I look forward to talking about it more tomorrow!
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I concur that Bal’s article is very dense and it definitely took a few reads to being to understand. Although I will need to read a couple of more times I am sure.
Mieke Bal’s article, Seeing Signs, is a great introduction into the usage of semiotics within the art history framework. Rather than forming an analysis of images based on pre-existing, verbal histories of human knowledge, Bal argues that the studying and interpreting of visual signs within each artwork carries significance into what the image actually says. In advocating the usage of semiosis to create new signs in order to convey meaning, Bal shows that different paintings take on different meanings.
In the example of Roland Barthes’ five codes, prorairetic, hermeneutic, semic, symbolize, and referential, this usage of semiotics forces the reader or viewer to realize the image is not unified and, in opposition, Bakhtin makes us aware that the artist who creates an image realizes there is no unification with the viewer because of differences such as culture. What I find very interesting about Bal’s analysis of Barthes and Bakhtin is that of the relationship between the reader (or viewer) of the image and the artist who makes the image. The cyclical back and forth relationship between the viewer, image, and artist can results in many different meanings, and, therefore, many different signs. As can be seen in the example of the artist Anselm Kiefer, his artwork takes on many different meanings between viewer, image, and artist between the constant debate of art and politics. Viewers’ narrative responses to the images fail to suppress the ideas of Nazism and Fascism as well as make Kiefer an artist of constant speculation and controversy.
I found it very interesting that Dottie Attie’s A Violent Child (1988) forces Judith to become a sign by breaking apart pieces of Caravaggio’s painting Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598-9). By changing Judith’s gestured pose into a reclining position, signified as being a victim of violence and, hence, becoming an index. Just by changing the position of Judith ever so slightly, the meaning changes and so do the signs related to icon, index, and symbol defined by Peirce.
Lastly, Gentileschi’s paintings, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1620) and Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (1625), makes me aware that epistemology works within a narrative one uses to make signs. In doing so, semiotics is used to help re-visualize what the painting actually has to say almost 400 years later as in the case of Caravaggio and Gentileschi’s paintings. Last week, I was having trouble understanding semiotics and I am sure there is much more I need to learn. However, the theory appears to call forth the usage of signs as language to let the image speak.
I look forward to class tomorrow!
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