Entry 8: Hooray Art History

            First off, let me start by saying that I’m getting a little tired of the puns.

            Now that that’s out of my system, I think that O’Gorman used Chapter 3 to bring in issues of the binary (which of course he punned with computer coding) within imagetexts. He begins with the Ramist tradition and its particular situation in pedagogy. To recap, Ramus’s philosophy helped lay the groundwork for the printing press, based on his efforts to move information outside of memory and into a storage container. This shift in internal to external can be documented in the learning flashcards that O’Gorman includes, which rely on subjective mnemonic devices. Under the Ramist tradition, these cards have to be remediated to bring that knowledge outside of the personal and the memory, and into what eventually becomes the textbook, the tool of the Republic of Scholars. As a non-academic side note, his characterization here of the textbook and the ROS made me imagine that cliché scene of the bad guy (the ROS) spinning around, stroking a white cat in his lap (the textbook) while plotting world destruction. I’m not sure if I can explain that by a lack of sleep, a weird imagetext, or being a cat lady…I’ll hope it’s the imagetext one though.

            O’Gorman uses the imagetexts of William Blake to illustrate the problems with the Ramist tradition, and show that it can be rebelled against and possibly overcome if we adopt Blake’s methods in our contemporary pedagogy. I did enjoy the exercise he shared from his own class, where he had students remediate “Nurse’s Song”. His students comment, “It was strange that when told what something is supposed to be, everyone almost automatically adapts their perception to see it that way”(66), I found to be very telling of how we’re trained to look at images. There is the notion that there is one right way to interpret images (and, to a certain degree, I’d argue that while there aren’t advocates for reading a text one way, there is potentially a hierarchy of interpretations for specific texts, ruled by a more favored or famous reading). O’Gorman presents Blake’s work as both resisting the Ramist tradition of his day, as well as offering us methods of resistance for its legacy in the academy and culture at large. Primarily, the resistance of seeing things in polar terms (as Blake does maintain certain binaries, such as good and evil) serves Blake’s imagetexts, while complicating the binary by making them inescapably bound to one another. O’Gorman writes, “Contraries may oppose one another, but they are not to be separated or divided into immutable categories or heading as in, for example, the Ramist dichotomization of knowledge” (62). Ultimately, this serves Blake’s purposes, “involv[ing] a unification of form and content, material production and ideology” (62).

            In this chapter we also, finally, get a (somewhat) clear definition of a hypericonomy. To be honest, I’ve been a little frustrated with O’Gorman’s refusal to give us a definition until this point (and a somewhat shabby one here, at least for me), as it’s made it very difficult to conceptualize any framework of a hypericonomy for me. It’s kind of sounded like “It can be anything!” to me at this point. However, when I read this: “…the process of subject formation in a culture saturated with endlessly repeated broadcast images. Those who engage in hypericonomy are asked to take a more critical look at that mode of subject formation, and have the opportunity to short-circuit it by producing and broadcasting their own schematic set of icons—not for the sake of marketing and sales, however, but for the sake of education” (68-69), I thought this:

            Memes play with images, jokes, and cultural artifacts and make commentary on them, not to replicate images for mass marketing or sales, but to spread (hopefully witty) ideas, thoughts, and observations through these images. One you log enough hours on Memebase, you’ll understand the implied tone/joke/point of the image, and the text will then make sense. And then you’ll cringe later when you see something in real life and think of how you’d meme-ify it. Maybe I totally missed the point of O’Gorman’s attempt at defining hypericonomy here and instead betrayed my own time log on Memebase by bringing this up (I made the front page once!!!!!!!!), but I think this might work. After all, he does say he wants us to take off with the idea of the hypericonomy, so I’m going to run with this for now.

            As for areas where I take issue with O’Gorman, one is in the presentation of etching. While I think the metaphorical value of Blake’s process of the materiality of his etching process matching the ideology of his philosophy and pedagogical beliefs is important and powerful, I think O’Gorman missed what I see as an important bridge between the technology and materiality of etching and his stance on the Republic of Scholars. Etching was developed at the end of the 15^th century, and was used by a range of artists, including Rembrandt and Durer. This technology marks a significant turn in how art is distributed throughout Europe. Most art produced before this point is more akin to how we think of “high art” (canvas painting and sculpture), and because of the materiality required, was usually commissioned by the Church as objects of religious devotion. The Reformation challenged iconography at the same time etching was developed, but nevertheless, a lot of prints depicted religious scenes or teachings. The biggest difference emerges out of the ability to distribute these prints. Because artists could produce one art image and then reproduce it without devoting the original amount of time needed over and over again, art becomes largely accessible to the middle class, rather than either the institution of the Church or the upper-class with the money for patronage (read in O’Gorman terms: The Republic of Scholars). I think that this is an extremely important consideration that needs to be made when evaluating the tradition against replication that Blake (and I think O’Gorman as well) advocate. While the artist’s touch is important, and I understand the resistance to mechanization, I think that the relevance of etching as a shift in cultural proliferation and access to art needs to be considered as a way to challenge the monopoly of the Republic of Scholars. After all, if you bring artist’s images into the home, then you can then think about the meanings of the images on your own terms, in your own private spaces, and either not have to visit "The Institution" to access them, or hear about the art owned and housed by the ROS and reported by them to lower classes.

            I’d like to return to the remediation of Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” as something I really agreed with and enjoyed in this chapter. O’Gorman examines how titles and text project the content we search for in an image. I think this is even more powerfully seen in modern and abstract art. It made one particular work come to mind for me, “Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale” by Max Ernst:

The title of this piece comes from the writing at the bottom of the frame (written in French). This dates to 1924 and is a Dada piece, although I think it’s significant that Surrealism was also “founded” this year (Surrealism, perhaps even more so than Dada, in my opinion, has weird and fascinating interaction between image and text, as O’Gorman describes). In this picture, the text is literally on the image, and works to complicate this piece in frustrating and beautiful ways. The first thing one might notice is the background of this piece: It is simultaneously a pastoral scene and one evoking the antiquity of Rome, with the arch d’triumphe and the Greco-Roman dome silhoutte. However, the subjects in this piece shouldn’t belong in either of these “genres” of painting. The girl on the left is running with a knife, possibly defending herself from or attempting to scare off the nightingale overhead. The other figure has collapsed into a fetal-esque position, but seems distorted and too limp even for a collapsed human. There is a man hunched atop the barn, carrying what appears to be a third child (but Ernst only mentions two, so which figure is really the third?) and reaching for the doorknob that is attached to the picture frame. I think this work epitomizes this complication and opposition between text and image in an imagetext that O’Gorman describes not just in this chapter, but in 1 and 2 as well. How is a nightingale threatening? Who are the two children? What is the man on the barn doing? Why is the figure so distorted and possibly dead? What is the purpose of Classical and Pastoral imagery in the background? The suggestion that Ernst has provided may reference some of the images that a viewer can locate in the piece, but by no means does it explain the piece. However, our inclination is to try to view the piece in the terms he provides, so we impose a relationship between characters that may not have existed without that suggestion—for instance, without the mention of the threatening nightingale, the bird’s silhouette may have just faded into the background as part of the Pastoral scene, as the frame is oddly dominated by the sky.

            I think this piece is perhaps a better examination and example of O’Gorman’s point here. I found that his art references in the piece were a bit lacking (for someone who resents the Republic of Scholars, he uses a lot of terms and name drops that can’t really be understood unless you’ve had some art initiation from the Republic of Scholars, an opposition I find odd), so I hope that this either interests or helps explain this to anyone who isn’t an art nerd and didn’t get some of his references to art.

            Overall, I’m enjoying the integration of art into text (obviously), but feel a bit lost in other areas of O’Gorman’s text. I recall him resisting a linear, traditional layout for his ideas in the book, though, so hopefully as I move further into it, it will become clearer and clearer.