As I sat here this morning with my cup of green tea, I was attempting to figure out which of this week’s readings I wanted to reflect on for this blog entry. I had settled on writing a response to the chapter by Prior and Lunsford in the Handbook of research on writing entitled, History of reflection, theory, and research on writing. I was planning on tweezing out connections I saw between their ideas about comparative rhetorics with the work of linguist Robert Kaplan, who in the 1960s developed the idea of contrastive rhetorics that dealt with the writing differences of various cultures. I was also considering drawing some parallels between what I’ve been reading in structural semiotics with what the authors said about translation being “a site for intense reflection on writing” (p.86). But, the beckoning warm rays of the sun coaxed me outside for a walk where my mailbox foiled my original plan as soon as I opened it.
Inside was something I’ve been waiting weeks for with child-like excitement, a collection of books from Art 21, which is an ongoing PBS series that illuminates the work and issues of contemporary artists from around the globe. For weeks now, I’ve been engulfed in what I call “academic-mode” where I’m experiencing the theories, inquiries, and thick prose of scholars, and I’ve realized that I haven’t given time to my artist-self and this collection of book feed that inner space inside me. The visual world not only serves as my way into words, but it also serves as my way out of them. When I say the visual is my way out of words, I mean images give me chance to escape into a realm of feeling…of intuition…of experiencing. Whether I’m observing a visual landscape as in a painting or horses grazing in the fields or whether I’m creating a visual composition, the visual world allows me to muse within myself. In that space I can escape the demands and confines of word-laden modes of communication like reading, speaking, or writing. For me, much of visual art is about translating experiences, feelings, questions, and other contemplations into a visual form. The words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke speak right to the conversations with art that happen in me on a deeper level, which I believe is rooted in spirit.
You must give birth to your images They are the future waiting to be born Fear not the strangeness that you feel
The future must enter you
Long before it happens.
To bring this blog entry full circle, which might prove to be problematic, I want to go back to Prior and Lunsford’s chapter 5 in the handbook. Even though Prior and Lunsford ascribe to a theoretical understanding of writing that is a “multimodal phenomenon”, which I agree with, as an artist I’m at times frustrated with academic dialogues about multimodality and visual literacy (p.82). Discussions of multimodality and visual literacy sometimes feel like a double-edges sword to me. I think it feels this way because in my head I’ve acquired competing narratives from the writing worlds I have encountered including composition theory, tutoring writing, my own writing, and my experiences learning about and creating visual artworks. Even though there is a push to extend the definition of writing to include other semiotic modes of communication, I wonder, like other scholars such as Kress & van Leeuwen*, if the verbal mode of communication is still viewed and honored as the most complete means by which to communicate, and how this affects other modes of communication?
I'm often disheartened when I stop to think about how frequently I've hidden the artist side of my identity...or only let it out in very small, digestible doses particularly in the academy but elsewhere as well. I silence myself for others and try to adapt myself to fit into other modes of doing and meaning making. When I think about my struggle to fit within others ways of doing I'm reminded of Min-zhan Lu's* text From silence to words: Writing as struggle. Even though this work is about her struggle to become a writer in the English language, I can relate to the main idea of feeling unable to communicate in one way but being required to. Overtime I've become bolder with respects to showing my artist identity, but many times I feel that I'm only ever given full permission to bring out that part of me in contexts with other artists. I’m also often left wondering: 1). where do creativity and imagination go when we start thinking about visual literacy as a set of skills one must acquire to understand today’s ever-changing, globalized world; 2). how has applying the term literacy to the visual changed the study of it and in what ways?
* The work I’m referring to here is their 1996 work Reading images: The grammar of visual design.
* Citation for Lu's text: Lu, M. (1987). From silence into words: Writing as struggle. College English, 49(4). 437-448.
This is an interesting post, and some key notions seem to come up, such as the "the demands and confines of word-laden modes of communication like reading, speaking, or writing" and the notions of "academic" writing.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me as very odd indeed that in the field of literacy where we acknowledge that there are multiple literacies which people possess, and that these literacies have great value beyond the traditional, academic ways of reading and writing, that we do not accept the use of those literacies as modes for representing our ideas or research in academia.
I've often told colleagues about a student I heard about in the UK who represented her dissertation with the use of a quilt tracking her progress. Yet I'm not sure how many of us would "get away" with presenting our dissertations in this way.
Shouldn't the artist author of this blog be able to represent her ideas and research to the academy in an artistic form if she so wishes(I suppose with perhaps some form of commentary to please those who HAVE to have some form of academic writing?) Yet, I'm afraid this would not get her very far in an academic career.
When it comes to multi-modality do we practice what we preach? Perhaps we do and my limited experiences have not yet shown them to me, or perhaps we have far to go in this respect (?).
The points you make in your second to last paragraph hit close to my heart. I can think of a number of experiences where I've let the artistic-side of me out in academic work, but I've always had to couple the image with the written word. Only in visual arts related academic contexts have I been able to just do images for the sake of doing images. If we let go of the written word from time to time, what do we really have to loose, and what might we gain if we did let go of written words for awhile?
ReplyDeleteJen,
ReplyDeleteAnother thought provoking post. What are your thoughts about the difference between "reading" and interpreting visual media (I'm thinking here a film, wordless picture book, anything that is not textually based)? Do you still think "reading" happens to some extent? Or not? I don't think there is a "right" answer, just honestly curious to know your thoughts.
You asked such a great question, Petra! I'm not sure if I have enough of a background in the act of reading to draw super articulate parallels between reading and interpreting the visual.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking as I type here, but I think it depends on how one defines "reading". Surely both have a kind of surface level way to process the information presented say Sally ate dinner from which one would understand what Sally did, or in the visual case the painting has the colors pink and brown and there is a balloon, a fox, grass, and a sun. Both have a history that posses a New Criticism approach to interpretation. Ya know: the meaning is IN the piece and NOT in the person interacting with it. If one defines reading from a reader-response mode, then I think interpretation of visual media is also similar. Rosenblatt's transactional theory of the reader and the text comes to mind. I think both modes can be taught and modeling as one way of teaching how to go about them. Both seem to require one to be able to make inferences. Both are not linear processes; they are messy, and both take time and energy on the behalf of the doer. These are some of the things that come to mind right now...but I'll have to think more on this. What do you think, Petra or anyone else?