Visual Culture. The Essay! The final Submission.

Fine Art Visual Culture Essay, Images and Bibliography:

Fine Art Student: James Norman (12018904).

Introduction to Visual Culture: Contextualising Practice [UA1A8P-20-1].

Year 2012-2013.

   

The Essay question: Present a detailed, critical analysis of a cultural text. 

           My chosen cultural text is called Aunt Marianne (Fig 1).  It is a painting by Gerhard Richter.

            It is of interest to me for a number of reasons.  I am interested in what the text has to say about itself as an entity.  Secondly, I am interested in the historic events and biographies which have enveloped the figures portrayed.  Thirdly, I am interested in the dialogue between the author and the work and the questions which the dialogue poses.  I wish to use the notions of semiotics, structuralism, post structuralism and the thoughts of Roland Barthes to demonstrate why this image is of interest to the viewer.  The object is to be formally analyzed.  The content of the image is to be further investigated using the ideas of semiotics and structuralism.  I wish to extract the signified notions from the signifiers from within the text.  I then intend to add external text to give the analysis a poststructuralist viewpoint.  This will take the form of historic, biographical, autobiographical and sociological texts. Intertextuality will also play a part in expanding the analysis.  This will take the form of referring to similar historic biographical works which were done by Richter during the time that  Aunt Marianne was painted.

             The image in fig.1 is an image of an oil on canvas painting which measures 120cm. x 130cm. (Godfrey and Serota, 2011).  The colours are in black and white monochrome.   It was painted in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1965 (Godfrey and Serota, 2011).  It is based on a photograph from Richter’s family album (Harding, L. 2006. p.16).  The original photograph was taken in 1932 (Harding, 2006. p16).

             The image shows a very young looking women holding an infant swathed in blankets and sheets and supported by a number of pillows against a black background.  This is a portrait of Marianne Schonfeld (Heiser, 2012) and Gerhard Richter as a four month old baby (Heiser, 2012).  Marianne Schonfeld is Richter’s aunt (Heiser, 2012).  There is a surface blur quality to the painting.  The composition takes the form of a tri-angle in the same manner as a Madonna and child icon.  This genre of art was, and still is, for Christian meditative purposes where the Virgin Mary together with infant Christ child are venerated (Williams, 2003, p.11).  This genre of painting has a long pedigree going back to the earliest representations of Christian art (Williams, 2003, p.11).    Marianne holds a far away glazed expression while the infant artist with his enlarged cranium looks out directly out to the viewer as if he has something of gravitas to announce.

              It should be stated that all Richter’s artistic decisions are deliberate and intentional.  They have not come about as a result of an uncontrolled accident.  They include the nature of the paint, composition, choice of the original photo, and the date and place of production.   These decisions can be viewed as signifiers in semiotic analysis.  The choice of oil painting from a photograph reflects the tensions of the debate on the hierarchy of image which has taken place since the advent of Photography.  The choice of oil and canvas signifies gravitas.  Similarly the use of the blur which is one of Richter’s motifs in his works is also part of the dialogue between painting and photography.  The triangular icon like structure signifies notions of a religious nature such as virginity, fertility and the gospel message.  The positions and the relationships of the figures raise a number of questions.  Infant Richter is the figure who engages with the viewer in a direct adult to adult manner (Berne,1961).  Although held by his aunt he is at the same time detached and remote from her she appears to be connected to the mysterious dark background.  Why has the author of this text decided to depict himself as a four month old in this quasi-religioso manner? 

           The analysis of the author in the author’s work poses a problem in semiotic theory.  Roland Barthes (1977, p. 147) in his essay, Death of the Author says;  ‘to give an author a text is to impose a limit to the text to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing analysis.’  Thus a purely structuralist approach would exclude the author from the analysis.  Self presentation theory (Crozier and Greenhalgh, 1988, pp.28-29) would argue that one of the motivational factors in self portraiture is to make an artistic statement.  Therefore there is a tension in this work that probes the limits of semiotic analysis.  The addition of a post structuralist approach such as referencing other historic and biographic texts would provide a further dimension to the analysis. 

         Here are some of the Marianne’s biographic details.  She was aged fourteen when the original photograph was taken (Harding, 2006).  This was the year before Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party came to power in 1933 in Germany.  (Shirer, 1964). Marianne went on to develop a form of schizophrenia (Green, 2009).  In 1937 she was admitted to a Dresden psychiatric hospital, The National Institute Arnsdorf, where she was compulsorily sterilized (Green, 2009) under the 1933 law called “Law for the prevention of hereditary diseased offspring” (Schmidt, 2007).  This was one of the earliest pieces of legislation brought in by the Nazis on coming to power (Schmidt, 2007).  It is estimated that over 400,000 individuals were compulsorily sterilized during the time of Nazi rule (Schmidt, 2007).  This was a manifestation of the eugenics movement that was prevalent in Europe and American in the early decades of the twentieth century (Brignell, 2007).  It emanated from a socio-political extrapolation of Darwin’s theory of evolution (Brignell, 2010). This distorted view fitted neatly into the Third Reich’s racial policies (Schmidt, 2007).  Marianne was eventually deliberately murdered by starvation in the Institute Gross Scheidnitz in 1945 (Green, 2009).  She was one of five thousand patients killed at this Institute under the Nazi medical profession (Green, 2009).

       The biographic details Richter is of interest to the analysis.  He had spent his formative years under the Nazi regime followed by communist rule in divided East Germany (Godfrey and Serota, 2011).  He escaped to the capitalist West Germany from Dresden in 1962 (Godfrey and Serota, 2011).  This was three years before the picture was painted.  This change of culture gave Richter a sense of objectivity on socio-polical issues of the West (Godfrey and Serota, 2011).  One of these taboo subjects in the prosperous West Germany of the 1960s was its relationship with its recent Nazi past.  Many of those who were orchestrating the prosperity of West Germany had connections with its Nazi past (Graham-Dixon, 2008).  These historic themes feature in Richter’s other pictures done at the time.  Most notable is the painting of Richter’s own uncle Rudi in SS uniform (fig 2).  Thus the Marianne picture could  be seen as signifying the author and West Germany confronting their Nazi past. 

          When consulting other texts to illuminate the analysis there is ambiguity about this straightforward conclusion.  Richter himself is remarkably reticent, equivocal and elusive when he talks about his past and about these historically inspired images.  When questioned about the Aunt Marianne picture by Der Spiegel in 2005 ‘ ..... factual information, names ,dates  have never interested me much.’  (Elger and Obrist, 2009, p.500).  In the biography on his own web site he describes his aunt’s demise as ‘a regrettable end to her life’ (Richter, 2012).

           A key text to add to the analysis comes from Jurgen Schrieber who is a German investigative journalist (Harding, 2006).  His book, published in 2003, is called; ‘Richter, A painter from Germany; a drama of a family.’ (Schreiber, 2005).  He discovered that Richter’s father in law from his first marriage was a Prof. Heinrich Eufinger.  He was an SS. gynaecologist and was in charge of forcible medical sterilizations in the Dresden area in the 1930s (Harding, 2006).  He went on to be a respected gynaecologist after the war (Schreiber, 2005).  His image (fig. 3) appears as a cheerful, smiling family man in another of Richter’s monochrome photorealist pictures called; Family at the Sea, painted in 1964.  The over cheerful scene portrayed in this picture is in deliberately contrast to the man’s relationship with his extended family and to that of Germany’s recent history.

           In conclusion the structural analysis of this image presents as many questions as it answer.  The introduction of external texts from varied sources and the intertextuality from Richter’s other paintings added further insights to the analysis of the text.  How much Richter knew at the time about the full family involvement in Nazi eugenics remains an enigma.

                Fig.1. Aunt Marianne  1965 Oil on Canvas 120 x 130 cm 

   Fig.2. Uncle Rudi 1965 Oil on Canvas 87 x 50cm. 

   Fig.3. Family at the Seaside 1964 Oil on Canvas 150 x 200cm.

Bibliography:

Barthes, Roland. (1977). Image Music Text. Translated from the French by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. p.147.

Berne, Eric. (1961). Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy. [Online] Available from www.ericberne.com/ [Accessed: 10/12/12].

Brignell, Victoria. (2010). The Eugenics movement Britain wants to forget. NewStatesman. [Online] 9 December 2010. Available from http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2010/12/british-eugenics-disabled [Accessed: 30 October 2012].

Crozier, Ray. Greenhalgh, Paul. (1988). Self Portraits as Presentation Of Self. Leonado, [Online]. Vol 21, No1 (1988), pp 29-33. Available from  www.jstor.org/stable/1578412 [Accessed: 3 December 2012].

Elger, Dietmar. Obrist, Hans. (2009). Gerhard Richter- Text Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007. London: Thames and Hudson. p500.

Godfrey, Mark., Serota, Nicholas. (2011). Gerhard Richter/Panorama. London: Tate Publishing.

Graham-Dixon, Andrew. (2008). The Teutonic Hollow Man. The Times. 23 November 2008. pp 30-31.

Green,Tyler. (2009). Uncle Rudi and Postwar Germany. [Online] 5 August 2009. Available from http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2009/08/uncle-rudi-and-post-war-german/ [Accessed: 4 November 2012].

Harding, L. (2006). Dismay As German Painting is Sold. The Guardian. 23 June 2006. p.16.

Heiser, Jorg. (2012). Gerhard Richter. Frieze Magazine. [Online] 1 January 2012. Available from http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_back/gerhard-richter/  [Accessed: 29/10/12].

Richter, G. (1964). Fun at the Seaside [Oil on Canvas]. At:Duisberg: Museum Kuppersmuhle fur Moderne Kunst [Online]. Available from:http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?start=20&num=10&hl=en&tbo=d&biw=996&bih=723&tbm=isch&tbnid=hPrkQKnzVgSeTM:&imgrefurl=http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/nov/30/gerhard-richter-national-gallery&docid=MoqHQREGGm-_oM&imgurl=http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/11/29/family_at_the_sea460.jpg&w=460&h=276&ei=bCrHULnbPLGV0QWw64DYDA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=389&vpy=230&dur=7744&hovh=174&hovw=290&tx=137&ty=100&sig=104215748773511625314&sqi=2&page=2&tbnh=134&tbnw=215&ndsp=25&ved=1t:429,r:37,s:0,i:55 [Accessed: 11 December 2012].

Richter, G. (1965). Aunt Marianne [Oil on Canvas]. At: Dresden: Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kuntsammlungen [online]. Available from:http://www.gerhard-richter.com/exhibitions/detail.php?exID=581&show_per_page=32&page_selected=1&paintID=5597 [Accessed :11 December 2012].

Richter, G. (1965). Uncle Rudi [Oil on Canvas]. At: Lidice Czech Republic: Lidice Gallery [online]. Available from: http://blogs.artinfo.com/resources/modernartnotes/images/UncleRudi.jpg [Accessed: 11 December 2012].

Richter, Gerhard.(2012). Gerhard Richter.[Online] 2012. Available from http://gerhardrichter.com/ [Accessed:10 December 2012].

Schmidt, Ulf. (2007). Karl Brandt, Medicine and Power in the Third Reich, The Nazi Doctor. London: Continuum Books.

Schrieber, Jurgen. (2005). An Artist from Germany: Gerhard Richter- A Family Drama).[Online] 2007. Available from http://www.new-books-in-german.com/spr2006/book05a.htm [Accessed: 9 December 2012].

Shirer, William. (1964). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. 2nd Edition. London: Pan Books.

Williams, Rowan. (2003). The Dwelling of the Light, Praying with the Icons of Christ.
Norwich, England: Canterbury Press .

        

Visual Culture Essay, Provisional draught Aunt Marianne

This is a rough unformatted draught of the Essay:

Provide a detailed, critical analysis of a cultural text.                James Norman

    My chosen cultural text is a text called Aunt Marianne. It is a painting by the artist   Gerhard Richter.

   It is of interest to me for a number of reasons.  Firstly, I am interested in what the text has to say about itself as an entity.  Secondly, I am interested in the historic events and biographies which have enveloped the figures portrayed.  Thirdly, I am interested in the dialogue between the author and the work and the questions which the dialogue poses.  I wish to use the notions of semiotics, structuralism, post structuralism and the thoughts of Roland Barthes to demonstrate why this image is of interest to the viewer.  The object is to be formally analyzed.  The content of the image is then to be investigated. Through the ideas of semiotics and structuralism, I wish to extract the signified notions from these signifiers from within the text. I then wish to add external text to give the analysis a poststructuralist viewpoint. This will take the form of historic, biographical, autobiographical and sociological texts. Intertextuality will also play a part in expanding the analysis. This will take the form of referring to similar historic biographic works which were done by Richter during the time that Aunt Marienne was painted.

     The image in fig1 is an image of an oil on canvas painting which measures 120cm. x 130cm..  The colours are in black and white monochrome. The original painting is on view in the Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kuntsammlungen, Dresden, Germany.  It was painted in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1965.  it is based on a photograph from the family album belonging to the painter. The original photograph was taken in 1932. 

        The image shows a very young looking women holding an infant swathed in blankets and sheets supported by a number of pillows against a black background. This is a portrait of Marianne Schonfeld  and Gerhard Richter as a four month old baby. Marienne Schonfeld is Richter’s aunt.  The monochrome painterly image blur quality to it. This has been termed as a photorealist style.  The composition takes the form of a tri-angle in the same manner as a Madonna and child icon.  This genre of art was and still is for Christian meditative purposes where the Virgin Mary together with infant Christ child are venerated. This genre of painting has a long pedigree going back to the earliest representations of Christian art.    Marienne holds a far away glazed expression while the infant artist with his enlarged cranium looks out directly out to the viewer as if he has something of gravitas to announce.

              It should be stated that all Richter’s artistic decisions are deliberate and intentional.  They have not come about as a result of an uncontrolled accident.  These decisions are not only to do with the the nature of the painting but also factors such as the choice of the original photo, the date and place of production.   These decisions can be viewed as signifiers in semiotic analysis.  The choice of oil painting from a photograph reflects the tensions of the debate on the hierarchy of image which has taken place since the advent of Photography.  The choice of oil and canvas signifies gravitas.  Similarly the use of the blur which is one of Richter’s motifs in his works is also part of the dialogue between painting and photography.  The triangular icon like structure signifies notions of a religious nature such as virginity, fertility and the gospel message.  The positions and the relationships of the figures raise a number of questions. Infant Richter is the figure who engages with the viewer in a direct adult to adult manner.  Although held by his aunt he is at the same time detached and remote from her.  She appears to be connected to the mysterious dark background.  Why has the author of this text decided to depict himself as a four month old in this quasi religioso manner? 

           The analysis of the author in the author’s work poses a problem in semiotic theory.  Roland Barthes in his essay, Death of the Author says,” to give an author a text is to impose a limit to the text to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing analysis”.  Thus a purely structuralist approach would exclude the author from the analysis.  Self presentation theory would argue that one of the motivational factors in self portrature is to make an artistic statement. Therefore there is a tension in this work that probes the limits of semiotic analysis.  The addition of a post structuralist approach such as referencing other historic and biographic texts would provide a further dimension to the analysis. 

         Here are some of the Marianne’s  biographic details. She was aged fourteen when the original photograph was taken in 1932. This was the year before Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party came to power in 1933 in Germany. Marianne went on to develop a mental illness which was thought to be a form of schizophrenia.  In 1937 she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, The National Institute  Arnsdorf, outside Dresden where she was compusolury sterilized under the 1933 law; “Law for the prevention of hereditary diseased offspring”.  This was one of the earliest pieces of legislation brought in by the Nazis on coming to power.  It is estimated that over 400000 individuals were compulsorily sterilized during the time of Nazi rule.  This was a manifestation of the eugenics movement that was prevalent in Europe and American in the early decades of the twentieth century.  It emanated from a socio-political extrapolation of Darwins view of evolution. This distorted view fitted neatly into the Third Reich’s racial policies.  Marianne was eventually deliberately murdered by starvation in the Institute Gross Scheidnitz.  She was was one of five thousand patients to be killed at this Institute under the Nazi medical profession.

      The biographic details of the artist himself is of interest to the analysis.   Richter had spent his formative years under the Nazi regime followed by communist rule in divided East Germany.  He escaped to the capitalist West Germany from Dresden in 1962; settling in Dusseldorf in 1962.  This was three years before the picture was painted. This change of culture gave Richter a sense of objectivity on socio-polical issues of the west.  One of these taboo subjects in the prosperous West Germany of the 1960s was its relationship with its recent Nazi past.  Many of those who were orchestrating the prosperity of West Germany had connections with its Nazi past.  These historic themes feature in Richter’s other pictures done at the time.  Most notable is the painting of Richter’s own uncle Rudi in SS uniform. fig 2.  The picture could therefore be seen as signifying the author and West Germany confronting their Nazi past. 

          When consulting other texts to illuminate the analysis there is ambiguity about this straightforward conclusion.  Richter himself is remarkably reticent, equivocal and elusive when he talks about his past and about these historically inspired images.  He says in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2005 when questioned about his past said  that “ ..... facts do not interest me”. In the biography on his own web site he describes his aunts demise as  “a regrettable end to her life”.

A key text to add to the analysis comes from a Jurgen Schrieber who is an investigative journalist in Germany.  His book which was published in 2003 is called “Richter, A painter from Germany; a drama of a family”.  He discovered that Richter’s father in law from his first marriage was a Prof. Heinrich Enfinger.  He was an SS. gynaecologist and was in charge of forcible medical  sterilizations in the Dresden area in the 1930s. He went on to be a respected gynaecologist after the war.  His image appears as a cheerful smiling family man in another of Richter’s monochrome photorealist pictures called “Family at the sea”, painted in 1964. The over cheerful scene portrayed in this scene is in deliberately marked contrast to the man’s relationship with his extended family and to that of Germany’s recent history.

In conclusion the structural analysis of this image threw up as many questions as it could answer. The introduction of external texts from varied sources and the intertextuality from Richter’s other paintings went some way to throw light on the Aunt Marianne text. How much Richter knew at the time about the full family involvement in Nazi eugenics remains an enigma.

UWE Visual Culture Poster: the Final Submission!

This final submission has been altered since the Crit, last Monday. 
   Several issues emerged and are now hopefully rectified. 
  Firstly, the Richter picture was not big enough. Secondly, the text explained the poster rather than making its message visual. Thirdly, the cartoon bubble were a distraction and fourthly, the font was boring and not related to the message.

UWE Visual Culture: Poster for the Crit.

This Poster is intended to display the image, an argument, some information to contextualise the work and its message, themes behind the work, theories behind the analyse and some of the figures behind this analysis.

UWE. Visual Culture: Retrospective reflections on Laura Mulvey

 Reflections on Laura Mulvey. 

(The original notes were in the form of jottings and annotations on the hard copy of the selected text of Visual pleasure and the Narrative Cinema, scanned copies of these sheets of paper were not appropriate for the blog)

• The following points were the essential themes gathered from the reading and the seminar on Mulvey's writing.
• Mulvey used Freudian psychoanalytical theory in a political way to decode twentieth century cinema; in particular the use of the notion of the castrated women as a way of making sense of the phallocentric and the dominant patriarchal order in twentieth century cinema.
• Mulvey explored the notion of scopophilia using the ideas of Freud and Jacques Lacan to explain how male voyeuristic fantasy has infiltrated into the vast majority of facets that make up cinema. Mulvey coined the words, "the male gaze".
• The exploitative nature of using another person as an object for sexual stimulation through sight was also expanded upon. Mulvey also used Freudian psychoanalysis to explain the associations between voyeurism and sodomasochism.
• Mulvey also analysed the cinema as a focus of alienation where these activities can take place. This lead into how the camera, the audience and the characters are loaded into this phallocentric slanting of twentieth century cinema.
• She illustrated he thoughts with plenty of examples, the most notable were the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
• Discussion about the validity of Muvey's ideas revolved around more or less exclusive reliance on Freuds and associates theories which have been either discredited or not in use in other fields such as psychiatry. The other point raised was the passive and gullible nature of Mulvey's cinema audience. The relationship between the dynamics of the components of cinema with the audience was not fully explored.

Another stab at the poster UWE visual art.

As a result of conflicting instructions on the course, here is a second provisional run at the poster which is more visual in relating to the intended audience and at the same time saluting the brief.

UWE visual Culture: Provisional Poster

Are you a burden to the state? This lady was!

KEY WORDS: Historic, Socio political, Structuralist, Topical.

This is an image of an oil on canvas painting by Gerhard Richter called Aunt Marianne measuring  120cm x 130cm. It can be seen at the Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany. It was painted in 1965 based on a 1932 photo taken in Germany from the artist’s family album. It depicts the artist as a four month old infant swathed in blankets and sheets being held by his aunt, Marienne Schonfelder who was fourteen at the time. The image is painted in a figurative manner using monochrome hues with a blurring technique resembling a photo effect  This haunting image needs further historic contextualization to appreciate its full impact. The aunt suffered from mental health problems, probably from a form of schizophrenia. She was admitted to a mental institution in 1937 where she was compulsorily sterilized under the The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring. In 1945 she was murdered by starvation as part of the Third Reich’s euthanasia program.

           Armed with this information and indexical signs, the image gains further power. This image together with a picture of his Uncle Rudi dressed in SS Officer uniform is one of a series which confronts the artist with his family’s Nazi associations. It was painted in 1965 at a time of increasing material wealth in West Germany. The recent Nazi past was a taboo subject in West Germany at the time; many of the key orchestrators of the new found prosperity had been participants in the Nazi machine. Richter was a recent defector from the communist east Germany. This gave him a detachment of view on West German capitalist society. The use of iconic family portraiture subverted by his photorealist painting technique demonstrates this. If the signified messages to his 1965 West German audience were to do with taboo subjects of their recent past; what are the signified messages in the image 47 years later. Does the image have the same resonance? 

MY ARGUMENT is that many of the signified issues in the picture are being played out in today’s society. The goings on at Winterbourne View and at Dignitas are examples of how  the mentally ill, those with learning difficulties and those with chronic illness are cared for in the UK in 2012. 

Methods of analysis included: Structuralist, Formal, Paradigmatic, Semniotic and intertextual approaches