Midterm Exam

Format: You will be asked to write two short essays from a choice of three topics in the areas listed below. I may project images for you to write about in relation to the texts we have been reading/talking about, and I may ask you to write about things you saw at the museum exhibitions.

Assessment: You will be graded on your comprehension, critical engagement with and synthesis of the texts and concepts that we have addressed. Your essay should clearly demonstrate that you understand the basic concepts and frameworks in the readings. A higher score will be given for essays that clearly explain concepts from the texts, but also reflect on them and offer your critical appraisal (for example: by discussing further implications of the material or by raising questions or arguments about the limitations of the authors' ideas). You will be given points for:

• define key terms that you will be using (ones that have particular meaning in the context o the texts). You can do this up front or in the context of the essay as they are introduced. In studying for the test you may want to use the glossary in Practices of Looking. another good source is the wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/
• being concise (to the point). Longer isn't necessarily better.
• directly referencing concepts, statements, or examples made in the reading
• qualifying or critically engaging the authors (for example posing further questions or noting about exceptions to a theory or making an argument against a position in the texts)

1. Semiotics/Authorship/Viewers as producers of meaning

Reading: Cartwright Stuken Chapter 1 and 2; Barthes' essays

Concepts:

• The sign and the "arbitrary" relation of the signifier to the signified.
• Photographic truth
• Photograph as a text
• Attempting to understand photographs as linguistic signs present a paradox.
• Is the relationship between a photographic image and it's referent arbitrary?
• Two dynamic relationships among text and image:
  • Anchorage (directs toward a particular meaningÑselective)
  • Relay (adds to meaning, information not in the picture--extra diagetic)
• The photo has three messages: linguistic; coded iconic; non-coded iconic
• The traumatic image-the suspension of language or connotative meaning.
• Looking is active. Looking involves relationships of power.
• Images (and their meanings) are embedded in subjective relations.

Key Terms:

• Sign/Signifier/Signified
• Connotation and Denotation
• Language: Langue and Parole
• Myth
• Ideology
• Taste
• Icon
• Iconic (iconic sign)
• Dominant/Hegemonic Reading
• Negotiated Reading
• Oppositional Reading
• Stuart Hall
• Ferdinand de Saussure
• Charles Peirce

2. Spectatorship /the gaze/power and visual knowledge

Reading: Cartwright Sturken, Chapters 2 and 3; Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity"

Concepts:

• Meaning is shared, but not uniformly.
• Meaning is contextual.
• Producers' intended meanings and received meanings of viewers (reception theory)
• Spectatorship theory attempts to provide an analysis of the viewer as subject
  • considers mediation of psychic and political subjectivity
  • identity as a process
  • identification (with the apparatus of cinema or production)
• The idealized viewer (and interpellation)
• Gender plays a dynamic role in the prodcution of representations and in relationships of looking.
• Impressionism can be seen as a response to changes brought on by modernity that affected different gendered and classed subjects in different ways.
• Which [impressionist] paintings are valued and why depends upon your relation to the history of modernity.
• When studying the relationship of gender to the history of images we can think about the space within representations, but also the social spaces that generated/framed representational practices.
• Woman as the other (of modernity)

Key Terms:

• the Gaze
• Ideology
• the Subject
• Agency
• Modernism
• Modernity
• the Other
• Interpellation
• Identification
• Panopticism
• Luis Althuser
• Michel Foucault
• Laura Mulvey

3. the Museum/Ethnography/Institutional Gaze

Reading: Lidchi (158-162, and 168-192) Clifford "on Collecting Art and Culture", Visits to the museum exhibitions will also be drawn upon. [particularly--be comfortable with the evolution of the museum, so that you can describe contemporary museums and their conventions of display in terms of their past]

Concepts:

• History of the museum (especially the ethnographic museum) and the changing conventions/purpose of collecting institutions.
• Museums as systems of representation that embody particular modes of knowledge/power.
• Clifford's diagram of meanings and institutions--systems of classification are unstable (and more so today than ever).
• Collecting may be universal, western collecting practices take a particular form related to the expression of possessive individualism.
• The fetish object vs the pedagogical/edifying object: Clifford sees the recognition of objects' status as fetish as a possible mode of resistance to classification that would "remind us of our lack of self-possession, of the artifices that we employ to gather a world around us."
• (scientific) cultural objects vs (aesthetic) works of art
• Collections are selective and strategic.
• The display of the cultures of others (and of cultural others) is at odds with an emergent present.
• Ethnographic museums are part of a broader history of managing our contact with subjects of colonization (and industrialization). they are akin to circuses, world fairs, freak shows, etc...
• The order of the collection supplants the original context. Objects metonymically stand in for larger sets of practices or whole cultures.
• "While the object systems of art and anthropology are institutionalized and powerful, they are not immutable." They change over time.
• Expectations of wholeness, continuity and essence underlie Western ideas about are and culture (and therefore pervade museums classification systems and conventions of display).
• Museums and exhibitions by native Americans challenge many assumptions about he representation of their cultures as immutable and essentially tradition-bound.

Key Terms:

• encoding / decoding
• authentic / authenticity
• colonialism
• ethnography/ethnographic
• classification
• taxonomy
• fetish / fetishization
• Musaeum Trandescatianum
• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer, Cabinet of curiosities
• chronotope
• surrealism
• appropriate / appropriation
• Baktin
• Levi-Straus