Dr.+A+Wk+11

Wk 11 Reflection on my VSP re: Malcolm and Ramage5 (write at least 500wrds)

"The Philistine who used to come to the museum of modern art and sneer, 'I could do that,' has been answered; the Philistine who comes to the Light Gallery, he observes, 'I have done that,' remains an unanswerable, threatening presence" (Malcolm 64)

When we read Ramage we can answer Malcolm with a calm and considered "That's what I do when I interpret. I take pictures of my world." The fact that they (my photos) will never be in a museum is not my concern. In fact, I prefer the fact that I can impose a certain amount of disorder on my reality by taking pictures. I even do this when I select pictures to tell my stories. I do what Ramage describes as "discounting"--"a process like translation, whereby a statement is understood 'in terms of' its circumstances." And he adds this: "W]e are always trying to recover the original sense of a text in the act of interpreting it" (140).

So creating a story from photographs is a way to interpret the photographs. If they are snapshots, in the VSP we enter the world of the image and build on it in order to translate it for ourselves into something else.

An interpretation creates another artifact which becomes the text of the interpretation. That's what someone means when they say they want to "interpret" Debussy, for instance. They want to take his music and put it through their own sensibility. Writers operate in the same way where they interpret someone by writing in their style. It's not as practical for a writer to do this because they are striving to speak in their own voice. But there is a sense that an interpretation produces a new text, a translation as Ramage says.

These interpretative translations cannot recover the whole meaning of the parent text. That is futile. What instead must happen is that we need to learn the whole context of the text we want to interpret so that we can be faithful to it. That means not merely saying what appears to us on the surface but how it communicates within the strict context and to the particular audience that it was written for. This takes reading the image in the sense that it was received (in it's temporal and physical context) as well as how it is received in the our own present context. There is a sense that we take the artifact and put it to use. It becomes "equipment for living" (Burke).

In order to provide a unique record of the artifact it is necessary to defamiliarize the orginal object so that we can see it differently. Otherwise, we will be stuck in the old routs of received truth. We will see it as we see all such things and in all such ways. We will not be able to say anything different about the thing. There is a sense even that you cannot do an interpretation if you do not defamiliarize the object under interpretation because you will be saying the same old things.

What will I use to defamiliarize (R151) when it comes to my images? And at the same time how will I answer the question concerning the methods (of visual composition) I use and how they are influencing how I think about the object? For instance, the simple process of juxtaposition provides a way of seeing that is taken for granted when you merely read words on a page. We put words right next to one another and form sentences right after one another, all to create ideas. How does putting images right after one another or in mere proximity produce ideas? I will have to answer that question for my project.

Note: I will start by putting myself into the photograph.