Chapter 2 and 3 in Picture Theory

Metapictures (chapter two)

In this essay, Mitchell wants to move away from picture aesthetics and identify a representation that is inherent in the picture, which he would call a metapicture: pictures that reflect upon themselves.  He proposes to observe these pictures in a context he calls “ordinary language” (the disciplinary name is iconology) (36).  His method is ekphrastic: give “a faithful description of a series of pictures that seem to be self-referential in various ways” (38). In my next post, I hope to elaborate further on ekphrastic because I think it is more complex than this definition (and Mitchell suggests seeing Chapter five for clarification of ekphrastic). Nevertheless, Mitchell begins by exploring several drawings from “The New Yorker Magazine” that reference or represent themselves, often enabling boundaries, such as “outside” and “inside” and first- and second-order representations, to disappear. I’m a little confused in how Mitchell discusses what these metapictures do to capture their “metapictureness”:  First, it sounds like Mitchell posits that when a metapicture conflates or blurs the structures of “inside” and “outside” and first- and second-order representations, it appears to cease its “metapictureness.”  He remarks, “an image of nested, concentric spaces and levels is required to stabilize a metapicture, or any second-order discourse, to separate it cleanly from the first-order object-langauge it describes” (42). This remark, as I read it, suggests that distinct boundaries structure the picture to be a metapicture.  Yet, simultaneously, it is the reading of two different views (in the example of Saul Steinberg's The Spiral, are the views Steinberg’s and ours? or clockwise and counterclockwise) and a “dissolv[ing] [of] the boundary between inside and outside, first- and second-order representation, on which the metapictorial structure depends” that enable such a picture to be a metapicture.  I feel as if Mitchell is contradicting what exactly constitutes a metapicture. 

Mitchell continues his argument in the next section in which he interrogates Alain’s “Egyptian Life Class” and concludes that two readings are offered: the Egyptians are inferior in the range of visual knowledge  and the Egyptians have a “sameness” about themselves as much as Westerns do about themselves (44-45).  Both of these readings function dialectically and enable the drawing to be a metapicture.

“Metapictures are pictures that show themselves in order to know themselves: they stage the “self-knowledge” of pictures” (48). 

A slightly different kind of metapicture is the multistable image (such as the duck-rabbit, the necker cube, double cross, and my wife and mother-in-law), which creates explicitly ambiguous boundaries of ordered representations.  What multistable images do is flip the lens of the observer back onto itself, ultimately resisting a formal metapictureness (and rather becomes a “discursive or contextual self-reference”) (56).  Mitchell remarks, “they do not refer to themselves, or to a class of pictures, but employ a single gestalt to shift from one reference to another” (48).  This shift, specifically in the duck-rabbit picture as Mitchell’s analysis suggests, creates a “nesting” in which picture self-references itself (its representations, identities, narratives).  “Pictorial self-reference is . . . not exclusively a formal, internal feature that distinguishes some pictures, but a pragmatic, functional feature, a matter of use and context.  Any picture that is used to reflect on the nature of pictures is a metapicture” (56-57).

An explicitly formal metapicture is Las Meninas by Diego Rodriquez de Silva Velaquez, a picture that epitomizes its own self-knowledge and engenders self-knowledge of the observer.  As a viewer, we shift identities: we are classic observers of the painting; we are the king and queen as we watch our royal child posing for Diego to paint; we a mirror reflecting the royal child image or a reflection of ourselves (as royal child).

Mitchell soon shifts to the relationship of metapictures and words, offering Rene Magritte’s Les trahison des images as an example to illuminate how “metapictures elicit, not just a double vision, but a double voice, and a double relation between language and visual experience” (68).  A strictly metapicture functions on two levels of order ― first and second ― but when words enter a visual experience, they create a third-order metapicture, one in which “the very identities of words and images, the sayable and the seeable, begin to shimmer and shift in the composition, as if the image could speak and the words were on display” (68).

In order for pictures to be identified as metapictures, there needs to be a dialectic with the first- and second-order (as well as third-order when written words are presented) of representation. 

In the final essay/chapter three, “Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method,” of the first section, Mitchell discusses the methods of analyzing visual and verbal representation, particularly in disciplines.  In the disciplines of literature and art history, scholars typically approach visual culture comparatively, sometimes for aesthetic purposes, developing a master-narrative that reinforces the humanities as a universalism, and sometimes for structural purposes (deploying semiotics).  This method often connects to the “pragmatism” of the disciplines and ensures, what I consider, bureaucratic safety.  Mitchell suggests three limitations in the comparative (or interartistic comparison) method:

1. presumption of the unifying, homogenous concept (the sign, the work of art, semiosis, meaning, representation, etc.) and its associated “science that makes comparative/differentiating propositions possibl, even inevitable

2. the whole strategy of systematic comparison/contrast that ignores other forms of relationships, eliminating the possibility of metonymic juxtapositions, of incommensurability and of unmediated or non-negotiable forms of alterity.

3. ritualistic historicism, which always confirms a dominant sequence of historical periods, a canonical master-narrative leading to the present moment, and which seems incapable of registering alternate histories, counter-memories, or resistant practices (87).

Mitchell posits that we ought to shift from comparative analysis (this poem and that painting) because “comparison itself is not a necessary procedure in the study of image-text relations” (original emphasis 89) and approach visual arts with a “literalness and materiality” (90), a method that identifies the dialectics of both image and text. He also highlights “purist” scholars, those who seek the “pure image” and “pure language” and reduce imagetexts to issues of morality rather than empiricism.  These utopian fantasies only underscore, as Mitchell contends, language as a medium (rather than a system).  Although Mitchell pushes aside historicism in the comparative method, he doesn’t simply want a formal description, but “to ask what the function of specific forms of heterogeneity might be” (100).  The function of these forms will inherently connect an imagetext to its historical context, although the “image/text is neither a method nor a guarantee of historical discovery; it is more like an aperture or cleavage in representation, a place where history might slip through the cracks” (104).  What I see here is history amd pictures/images/written text as created in dialectics in which some ideas are perpetuated and others are suppressed. This sounds an awful lot like Barthes’ “anchorage,” in which the text directs the reader through signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching, it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance” (40). Ultimately, Mitchell’s method for visual and verbal culture is dialectics and situating an imagetext within a larger political and cultural context (although it appears he continually attempts to identify an innateness of pictures).  

In this “method” chapter, Mitchell discusses briefly films to highlight how the visual and verbal arts function as imagetexts.  I do not have time to delve into deep critiques (and I apologize in advance for my unjust treatment of the following two films and Mitchell’s argument in connecting them), but I wish to highlight two film examples that came to mind about metapictures: Adaptation (written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze) and Synecdoche, New York. In both these films, we see fictions constructed that reflect upon themselves. In the former film, which is an adaptation from the book The Orchid Thief, Charlie Kaufman (the actor played by Nicolas Cage, but also the actual Kaufman), disabled with writer’s block, begins to write himself into the story’s adaptation and script.  This leads Charlie, with his twin brother Donald (fictitious brother to the real life Kaufman), to seek out Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep), the author of The Orchid Thief, in hopes of accessing more ideas for completing the script. Long story short, the film concludes with scenes not from the short story (and cliché scenes that Charlie/Charlie Kaufman had not wanted in the script/film: sex or guns or car chases or great epiphany or moral message).  The film is a/has metapictures: the real Charlie Kaufman begins to write an adaptation of The Orchid Thief, only to believe that there is no story and so writes himself to the script; Susan Orlean began writing The Orchid Thief about a subject (Laroche and his plan to mass produce the Ghost Orchid), but also writes herself (and finds her passion, a passion that Laroche exemplified) into the narrative; the film simply reflects on its own production (the script it has to follow/the script Charlie is writing); et al. This brief synopsis and these ideas obviously need further elaboration, but I think it would be fascinating to develop a paper that uses Mitchell’s metapicture as a theoretical framework to discuss Adaptation.

Another film that exemplifies a metapicturenss is Synecdoche, New York (again written by Kaufman, but also directed by him). Caden Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director who receives a grant/fellowship to develop an artistic endeavor to his choosing.  Caden constructs in a large warehouse a replica of his life: buildings, his apartment, et al., as well as casting actors to play him and his partnerships.  Synecdoche, New York is a much different kind of metapicture as Adaptation, for example because the latter explicitly has the script writer (a representation of the script writer) in the film, but offers viewers a play upon a play (the film blurs our distinction of Caden’s real life and the play’s life) and a theater director’s self-referential in his work. 

“all arts are ‘composite’ arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes” and so the “medium of writing deconstructs the possibility of a pure image or pure text, along with the opposition between the ‘literal’ (letters) and the ‘figurative’ (pictures) on which it depends.  Writing, in its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable suturing of the visual and the verbal, the ‘imagetext’ incarnate” (95).

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Trans. by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Print.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Print.