March 11, 2004
the pictorial turn#1
I've just returned from being on the road since last Sunday. Whilst flying into Adelaide this everning I thought about the different modes of seeing, as we flew across the Australian landscape from Canberra to Adelaide.
Flying into Adelaide across the Adelaide hills the landscape looked kinda like this:
Sydney Nolan, Durack Range, 1950.
There are different ways of seeing it.
Fred Williams, The Nattai River, 1958
And this mode of seeing:
William Robinson, rain Forest with Bower Figure
Can we talk about the pictorial turn I wondered as the plane descended into Adelaide?
Yes.
Earlier, at the begining of the twentieth century analytic and continental philosophers talked in terms of the linguistic turn with its idea of reading tests.
Images are not texts. You do not interpret pictures the same way as you interpret texts, even if both have rejected a naive mimesis.
I'm not sure what the difference is but my gut feeling is that there is a difference.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 11, 2004 10:42 PM | TrackBack