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

Further jottings and research on Richter's Aunt Marienne

UWE Visual art update New Mind map for Aunt Marienne

Mind map on Richter's Aunt Marienne


A mixture of ideas and research, apologies to those who wish to decipher.