'What do pictures want?'

“The question to ask of pictures from the standpoint of a poetics is not just what they mean or do but what they want – what claim they make upon us, and how we are to respond. Obviously, this question also requires us to ask what it is that we want from pictures.” (Mitchell 2004, xv).

For my response this week I take my inspiration and cue from both Tilley’s chapter in Body and Image (2008) on kineasthetic experience with regards to the interpretation of ‘rock art’ (Chapter One: “Body and Image – A Phenomenological Perspective”) and W.J.T. Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want (2004), from which I took my opening quote above. As a mental exercise I have taken up Mitchell’s challenge, and have decided to ask myself, ‘What do pictures want?’ In so doing, as Mitchell points out in the quote above, one must inevitably also ask, ‘What do we want from pictures?’ I will start with the latter question first, and will attempt to answer it with respect to the traditional, iconographic approach to the perception and interpretation of pictures/images/art.

What do we want from pictures? '

We want to look at them, to be able to see them.
We want an understanding of where an image/picture fits into our conception or category of ‘art’. We ask the picture: “Where do you fit into ‘art’?” or “What kind of ‘art’ are you?”
We ask the picture: “Who made you? When? Why? For whom? How?”
We then ask: “What do you represent/symbolize? What are you supposed to mean?”

- Within this, we want to be able to identify not only its greater ‘messages’ or ‘meanings’, but we also seek to identify its various elements (i.e. “it shows x, y, z, next to m, n, o, etc.”)

We attempt to assess and identify its formal properties (i.e. dimensions, colour(s), materials used, medium employed, technique(s) employed, etc.), and we do so verbally – we have to translate everything we understand/know about the image into written/spoken language.
We want to totalize the image – we want look at it as a whole, to perceive it as a totality.
We want an estimation of its value(s): aesthetic, monetary, cultural, historical, archaeological, etc.

What do pictures want from us?

To be seen, or conversely, to not to be seen.

                 - This includes imagery created in an inaccessible, invisible place, or which was erased/buried/hidden, thus defying ‘being perceived by the eyes’. In such cases, it demands physical effort and actions on the part of our bodies for visual access to it (think of Chris Tilley’s discussion on how certain images in rock set people in ‘choreographed motion’ around them and demand physical exertion, effort, and/or contortion for the simple act of ‘viewing’).
                 - Sometimes images don’t want to be seen all at once, as a totality – they demand to be seen in sections or pieces, one or more at a time.
                 - This also includes images which want other forms of interaction in addition to, or instead of, simply being perceived through vision (more on this below).

To be touched, or not to be touched.

                 - Some images cannot be physically touched (due to accessibility reasons, or due to their fragility etc.), whereas others necessarily require it (such as images on which you literally have to stand in order to perceive them in any way, or which require tracing/touching by the fingers for comprehension of shape, depth, etc.).
                 - When they do invite physical interaction with your body, they instantly also demand that you feel their presence in a kinaesthetic, physiological way. You are required to sense the image and its medium’s physical characteristics (hot, warm, cold, rough, smooth, chalky/dusty, prickly, solid, soft, etc.). By getting in such close, tactile contact with the image, it establishes a certain relationship of size between you and it: Are you dwarfed by it? Do you dwarf it? Are you the same size?
                 - This close contact also inevitably sets you in the physical position of the image’s creator – thereby forcing you to confront the act or process involved in the creation of the image, and to ponder its creator(s).

Sometimes images want to be perceived at certain times of the day or year (i.e. in certain light, during certain weather, etc.). Or, perhaps, they want to be experienced multiple times, in different times of the day/year, thereby providing a different experience each time.
They want to be heard, touched (mentioned above), smelled, even tasted, in addition to, or instead of, merely being ‘viewed’ or ‘seen’. As Tilley points out, “sensory experience is a totality” (Tilley 2008, 27) and these various ‘senses’ cannot truly be separated from one another when we ‘experience’ anything about or within the world.
They want to be understood within their context(s).

                 - Medium (the stuff their made from/on)
                 - Spatial context (immediate physical surroundings)
                 - Regional/landscape context (wider physical surroundings)
                 - Chronological context
                 - Cultural Context
                 - Archaeological context (if applicable)
                 - Etc.

They want to ‘look at us’/examine us right back.

Upon closer inspection, it would seem that some of the things that we want from pictures are very similar to the things that pictures want from us, but that many are quite different. Both the postulated questions (or categories) are based on the premise that ‘images’ (the most neutral term I can think of, although by no means adequate) and ‘people’ are sentient beings, which exhibit agency, which have desires, and which mutually demand things from one another. Both actively shape and are shaped by one another. In other words, both ‘images’ and ‘people’ are always already both subjects and objects which mutually constitute one another. And as such, the distinctions postulated by the two seemingly opposing questions above become quite arbitrary, as subject and object collapse into one. We shape images in the sense that we impose upon them our views and interpretations, while images shape us in the sense that they contribute information to what we understand about other peoples (across time and space), and in the sense that they challenge us to rethink our preconceived notions about the world and the role of ‘humans’ and ‘images’ within it.

There are certain things we often viscerally urge to know from an image (What are you? Where do you come from? Who made you, and why? When were you made? What are you supposed to ‘mean’?) and too often the image’s response is less than satisfactory – it defies our questions and desires, it refuses to satiate our curiosity. This we can construe as the image’s own agency asserting itself – it does not want, or perhaps it cannot, answer the questions we pose, and instead it forces us to keep pondering, searching, wondering, and thus it engages us further, leading us to new questions, new answers, new methods of interaction. It is the images which most defy the questions we pose that have been the focus of such endless fascination, wonder, frustration, confusion, and ultimately, attention from people (both scholars and others). Perhaps this is why enigmatic prehistoric rock images in particular have provided the impetus for such new and diverse modes of interaction between ‘person’ and ‘image’, and have led to the posing of new questions, as exemplified by the phenomenological approach of Tilley, to name just one. In this way, perhaps the image is telling us something (by, perhaps, ironically saying nothing!) – by refusing to answer the questions that we traditionally pose, it is perhaps ‘saying’ that we are simply asking the wrong questions.

Or, perhaps it is simply studying us - à la Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (also turned into 2 movies), where the humans never realized that the whole time they were ‘studying’ the planet, it was studying them right back in a way that they were never able to consider. Perhaps this is positing a too-mystical or too-alien metaphor onto the complexities of interpreting imagery, but then again, how can we begin to understand what prehistoric humans (for example) were thinking and doing in relation to the enigmatic rock art which they have left behind? We know that skeletally they looked like anatomically modern humans, but beyond that they are perhaps as foreign to us as an alien species. By assuming anything about them we automatically posit some sort of universal ontology about ‘humanness’, and that is inevitably going to be problematic and unstable. Our interaction with such enigmatic images will therefore never end, as we will both continue to mutually constitute one another ad infinitum.

- Emanuela Bocancea