reading 1 - March 12

re : Meg Cranston w/ Nico Israel and W.J.T Mitchell.

Meg Cranston with Nico Israel, "Running on Light Feet", From 'Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World' : work 1987-2007, Auckland: Artspace and Clouds 2008,pp.6-21
WW.J.T Mitchell , excerpt from chapter "What is an Image?" 'Iconology:Image, Text, Ideology' Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1986, pp.40-46

The two texts were so different its hard to draw parallels - maybe that’s the point. The interview with Cranston is obviously created with a much more accessible audience in mind - Mitchell’s text took several attempts to negotiate, but came up more interesting for me.

I found the ideas about motif/ symbol vs. expression/ meaning interesting, I guess I think about things like that sometimes - it seems like most people can never seem to express things in a pure form of expression that isn’t words? Pictorial representation seems to be much easier to "read" than an abstract symbol of expression. There isn’t really any way in which we can read any form of pictorial representation without prior knowledge affected the way in which we read it, so the ability to not draw any similarities / references between the image and verbal connections seems almost inhuman. How can we argue with something that is as old as the Egyptians?
Isn’t it a much more simplistic way of seeing to simply draw our own ideas from such images?? The Mark Twain example (“ Young girl with her head in a bag”) struck me as infinitely more amusing than the reality of the subject matter –the way we read the image is determined by the title (words) allocated to the image or the word associations we draw from an image. An expressionist image can only be explained in words; unless we are free to draw our own interpretation from it – otherwise we are just hearing the words that the artist believes embody the expression to them specifically. The idea, while interesting to consider, seems rather idealistic..