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Explore the intricate world of semiotics through linguistic signs, symbols, and their meanings in art. Delve into the theories of de Saussure, Peirce, and Barthes to unravel the layers of communication embedded in visual representations. Discover how signs, symbols, and images convey narratives and provoke responses, transcending cultural boundaries.
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Semiotics Readings: Theory Text Ch. 5, 3:5, 3:6
Language (F. de Saussure) • not just a naming-process linking words & things
Linguistic Signs • link concepts and “sound-images” • “sound-images” have two parts (Signified, signifier)
Sign (C.S. Peirce) • “is something which stands to somebody for something” (representamen) • Creates another sign (mental image) or “interpretant” that has like content • NOT like this picture
Icon • has meaning even if the “object” doesn’t exist • only is a “sign” if the “object” exists
Yamandejia or Yamantaka (Terminator of Death--Victory over evil) • From M. McArthur Reading Buddhist Art
Yamantaka Thangka • Textile • Tibet/Xizang • C. 1644-1911(?) • The John C. and Susan L. Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art, The Ohio State University
Index • Connects both with the “object” and with the person for whom it serves as a sign • Three characteristics • No significant resemblance to object • Refer to singularities • Direct attention by “compulsion” • Does not depend on association by resemblance or intellectual activities • Video clip (Cai Guo-Qiang discussing Gunpowder Paintings & Reading a Painting--from Art:21, Art in the Twenty-first Century, Season Three)
Symbol • Associated with “objects” (or ideas) by habit or convention without regard for original selection
Levels of Meaning (Roland Barthes) • Informational (communication of message) • Symbolic (semiologies of various kinds, common lexicon of meanings, closed sense, obvious meaning(s)) • Signifying/Obtuse (extends beyond culture, signifier without signified, outside language, disturbs, indifferent to the story, against nature, free of narrative, subversive, DIFFERENT, point where “another language begins”)
Signs, Meanings & “events” (Make Bal) • Rethinking encounters with signs and meanings • Narrativity vs. scenes from everyday life with no iconographic expectations (maybe)
How do we know what viewers will respond to? • Differences between verbal and visual texts • Differences between the verbal and the visual • Work-reader interaction
Theories and Images (Paul Gilroy) • Denotations • “reading” visual representations & text • Critical discourse analysis
Communication & Semiotics (Signs & Codes) • “Sign: something that stands for something else in a system of signification (language, images, etc.)” (M. Levine 2005) • “ Code: therelational system that allows a sign to have meaning, the social organization of meanings into binary oppositions, hierarchies, and differential systems.”
Critical Analysis: “Beautiful Women” • Ad and Illustration for article about ‘White Trash’ aesthetics by M. Talbot, “Getting Credit for being White” New York Times Magazine. Vol. 147 (Nov. 30 1997)
Last Day: Artists had long been challenging definitions of what is art and who can define it Marcel Duchamp. Fountain, original (left) and recreations of lost 1917 “Original”
