Assignments: Batch Two: Assignment 10

The art historian Ernst Gombrich insists that 'pictures cannot assert' - still or moving visual images cannot make statements without the aid of words. Critically assess the evidence for and against such standpoints.

Guidance

For general guidance about what is expected in your essays for this module, see the general criteria.

What Key Features Do I Look For?

  • Familiarity with relevant texts
  • Evidence - the stronger the better
  • Argument - coherent and balanced
  • Theoretical discussion - relation to relevant theories
  • Understanding of relevant concepts
  • Reflexivity - reflections on methodology
  • Examples - insightfully analysed
  • Style - readability and effective presentation

Please remember to avoid footnotes and to include an alphabetical list of 'References' which have been cited in the text (not a Bibliography of anything you have read for the essay). This list should include author's names, date, book titles (in italics), place of publication and publisher. Within the text always cite author's surname, date and page number. Double-space your text and number your pages. For more detailed notes on writing essays in this department, click here.

Advice for this particular assignment: The most relevant lecture for this topic is Lecture 7: Nonverbal Language?.

You are expected to demonstrate your understanding of relevant semiotic concepts. This is not a Visual Art essay, though you may use some examples from art. Consider photographs as well as drawings and paintings; include examples from advertising and journalism as well as art. Read Gombrich's own discussion of this issue in The Image and the Eye but don't just accept his persuasion! What is the basis of his case? Peirce makes a similar claim to that of Gombrich, by the way. Read also Sol Worth on 'Pictures Can't Say Ain't'. Are there no basic units in images in the way that there are in language (this is an issue of analogical versus digital media)? Find some examples which seem to you to illustrate that pictures can 'make statements'. What does it mean 'to assert', 'to make a statement' - what is a 'proposition' in this sense? Pictures (and even simply colours) undoubtedly generate 'connotations' and may even be 'symbolic', but connotations and symbols are not assertions, statements or propositions. Non-verbal advertisements may appear to imply meanings, but how much agreement would consumers reach about what meanings are being implied? There might be remarkable agreement about what is depicted, but there are likely to be significant differences in the inferences viewers make about exactly what it means. In the context of (largely) nonverbal ads is there a broader agreement about what is implied (or in the case of ads, 'claimed') than in the case of other kinds of visual signs? Remember that visual signs may seem easy to 'read' but that in order to make sense of images (just as with words) we have to draw (typically unconsciously) on both social and textual knowledge. Relate the issue to Barthes' discussion of anchorage.

The best essays demonstrate appropriate critical reading of academic sources. Show that you are aware of different viewpoints and try to map out the areas of agreement and disagreement. Do not simply present the claims of academic authors as if they were indisputable. Where different authors disagree, compare their arguments and evaluate the evidence they offer. What evidence or examples can you find to support or challenge particular claims?

Note also that this is an assignment for which the inclusion of relevant pictorial illustrations is likely to be an advantage. Remember to include a list labelled either Figures or Image sources after your list of References.


The visual image is supreme in its capacity for arousal... Its use for expressive purposes is problematic, and... used unaided it altogether lacks the possibility of matching the statement function of language.

The assertion that statements cannot be translated into images often meets with incredulity, but the simplest demonstration of its truth is to challenge the doubters to illustrate the proposition they doubt. You cannot make a picture of the concept of statement any more than you can illustrate the impossibility of translation. It is not only the degree of abstraction that eludes the visual medium; the sentence from the primer 'The cat sits on the mat' is certainly not abstract, but although the primer may show a picture of a cat sitting on a mat, a moment's reflection will show that the picture is not the equivalent of the statement. We cannot express pictorially whether we mean 'the' cat (an individual) or 'a cat' (a member of a class); moreover, although the sentence may be one possible description of the picture, there are an infinite number of other true descriptive statements you could make such as 'There is a cat seen from behind', or for that matter 'There is no elephant on the mat'. When the primer continues with 'The cat sat on the mat', 'The cat will sit on the mat', 'The cat sits rarely on the mat', 'If the cat sits on the mat...' and so on ad infinitum, we see the word soaring away and leaving the picture behind...


Mosaic of a dog. From Pompeii, Naples, Museo Nazionale
A mosaic found at the entrance of a house in Pompeii shows a dog on a chain with the inscription Cave Canem (Beware of the Dog) . It is not hard to see the link between such a picture and its arousal function. We are to react to the picture as we might to a real dog that barks at us. Thus the picture effectively reinforces the caption that warns the potential intruder of the risk he is running. Would the image alone perform this function of communication? It would, if we came to it with a knowledge of social customs and conventions. Why, if not as a communication to those who may be unable to read, should there be this picture at the entrance hall? But if we could forget what we know and imagine a member of an alien culture coming on such an image, we could think of many other possible interpretations of the mosaic, Could not the man have wanted to advertise a dog he wished to sell? Was he perhaps a veterinarian? Or could the mosaic have functioned as a sign for a public house called 'The Black Dog'? The purpose of this exercise is to remind ourselves how much we take for granted when we look at a picture for its message. It always depends on our prior knowledge of possibilities. After all, when we see the Pompeiian mosaic in the museum in Naples we do not conclude that there is a dog chained somewhere, It is different with the arousal function of the image. Even in the museum the image might give us a shadow of a fright, and I recently heard a child of five say when turning the pages of a book on natural history that she did not want to touch the pictures of nasty creatures.

Source: Gombrich 1982, p. 138-140

Some suggested reading

Note: Treat with extreme caution sources labelled with this symbol!


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