TRANSVISUALITY: ON VISUAL MATTERING 1 Anders Michelsen
As we know from the idiom, a picture is worth a thousand words. But what does that mean? What does it mean that the picture, allegedly by its visual nature, can be worth more? And more than words? Nevertheless, it is fair to argue that this kind of conundrum has been a driving force in the approach to the visual since the beginning of depiction. Fascination with the visual, what it is, what it can do, whether it can be trusted – for instance, in the shape of pictures – has proceeded along with hesitation. The visual brings something into the foreground, it appears, but at the cost of scepticism. A main issue seems to be the problem of intelligibility, of understanding what the visual is, of what is evoked: the recurring and classic theme of aliquid stat pro aliquo (i.e. something stands for something else). For instance, in painterly depiction, this theme has been reinforced by a long association between imagery and a certain craft of picture making, opening a long history of interpretation of painting, print, and murals, from Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1480s) and Francis Bacon’s triptychs (1944-1986) to Cindy Sherman’s photography from the 1970s onwards. Or, in a different sense, it is present in a recurring scepticism with regard to the status of such depiction, reinforced over centuries 1 A warm thanks to Heidrun Krieger Olinto and Karl Erik Schøllhammer, in addition to the team of Visual Studies and Literature (Estudos Visuais e a Literatura) at the XIV International Seminar of Literary Studies (XIV Seminário Internacional de Estudos de Literatura), PUC-RIO 2017, as well as to Isabel Capeloa Gill and The Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture, at which an early version of this paper was presented during the event ‘Transvisuality’, 2016, as well as to Frauke Wiegand, University of Copenhagen (UCPH). The paper develops ideas put forward in the two collections on ‘transvisuality’ (see references in this article) from Liverpool University Press, including a forthcoming third volume, Purposive Action: Design and Branding of visuality, due in 2018, as well as the monograph Trans Visual, Leiden & Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2019.
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