Beskrivning
When semiotics was established as a viable and coherent methodology for art historians in the culturally dominant anglophone sphere, it was through the efforts of the likes of Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson, and Rosalind Krauss. They preferred structural or conventionalist explanatory models and rejected what they saw as a “perceptualist” bias in earlier, more archive-based or "empirical" art history writing. Drawing some of their inspiration from key texts of German Kunstwissenschaft and Russian formalism that had become increasingly available in English translation, they tended, however, to neglect or downplay the importance of scholars who had made significant contributions to the semiotics of visual art from an empiricist or pragmatist position – for example Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996). Representatives of this "new art history" generation of anglophone art historians have also remained remarkably silent concerning the parallel development of visual semiotics in francophone and other non-anglophone circles.In my talk for the GES seminar in São Paulo, I would like to demonstrate how the identification of a secondary or semi-symbolic visual system termed “plastic language” (langage plastique) in the (sometimes conflicting) work of the francohone Greimas school and the Groupe µ can be productively connected to Meyer Schapiro’s earlier analyses of Medieval ecclesiastical art and pictorial conventions. My objective is also to provide some qualification for what I regard to be my main thesis: that many proposed models for understanding visual semiotics still suffer from an aprioristic and cultural bias that should be resolved by means of interdisciplinary dialogue, and that a promising prospect for visual semiotics lies in bringing it into closer correspondence with what Hans Belting has termed “an anthropology of images”.
| Period | 24 maj 2024 |
|---|---|
| Vid | Universidade de São Paulo, Brasilien |
| Omfattning | Internationell |