Session 5: Culture and the Contexts of the Visual

Session 5: Culture and the Contexts of the Visual
Chair: Barbra McKenzie

Transforming Literary Classics into Visual Spectacles: The Impact of Consumerism on Perceptions of High Culture
Joe Grixti
School of Social and Cultural Studies, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

The paper will explore the impact of consumerism on the types of choices made by screen writers and producers when they adapt canonical works of literature with the aim of making them widely appealing to contemporary audiences. I am particularly interested in the extent to which such adaptations depend for their success and appeal on the use of visually striking mise-en-scene, editing and technically accomplished special effects.
The adaptations I want to consider range from comparatively sedate but opulent costume dramas aimed at relatively well educated (and possibly middlebrow) viewers to more obviously commercially-oriented movie popularisations specifically targeted at less classically literate (and usually younger) viewers. Examples of the former include BBC television adaptations of canonical 19th Century novels, and I want to look particularly at Andrew Davies’s 2005 adaptation of Bleak House, which was billed as reinterpreting Dickens in terms of the visual style, structures and generic conventions of popular television soap operas. In the case of more teen-oriented popularisations, the protagonists of classic literary texts are often transformed into American College teens preoccupied with the all-consuming demands of dating, sex, football and fashion – as in Hollywood movies like Clueless, 10 Things I Hate about You and She’s the Man. Though the processes of re-interpretative repackaging involved in these two types of adaptation are significantly different, both are products of an attempt to appeal to relatively large contemporary audiences through the incorporation of the visual styles, motifs, connotations and branding techniques commonly associated with mass marketed entertainment. In both cases, classics that have traditionally been considered to be of enduring and trans-generational value are being repackaged in order to meet consumer-market criteria, which, in the words of the sociologist Sygmunt Bauman, “set a preference for instant consumption, instant gratification and instant profit”.
There is an inherent conflict at work here – one which derives from the types of contradictions which have been thrown up by the consumer-market imperatives of the postmodern condition. If works of art (or ‘high culture’) are indeed of trans-generational value, what exactly is happening to our understanding, appreciation and assessment of their contents, contexts and meanings if our encounters with them are often triggered or dominated by their constantly changing re-incarnations as consumer oriented spectacles?

Attention and the Visual World in the “Society of Risk”
Beatriz Tomši? ?erkez & Primož Urban?
Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Visual messages are all around us. Visual literacy is necessarily directly linked to our capacity of attention. Many “traditional” thinkers would not accept the idea of attention as a malleable, entropic force susceptible of fatigue, distraction and external management. They would defend a monolithic technique of attention that would impose unity, clarity and consistency on the most dispersed, ambiguous and kinetic of psychic contents to determine a universal structure of attention linked to perception. The fragmentation, dissociation and fluctuations of ordinary perceptual experience conceal what is actually invariant and constitutive of those perceptions. Attention emerges as a discursive and practical object at the moment when vision and hearing have become progressively severed from the various historical codes and practices that had invested them with a level of certainty, dependability and naturalness. Every day life shows that this is a paradox if we consider the actual alienating conditions of our perceptive life which we concentrate on and decode with difficulty. These elements easily become a load for our minds imposing the way we should act, see, smell, hear and believe in our “free” society of risk. Their function has practically nothing or very little to do with aesthetics or pleasure but with a language of ideology and persuasion.

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Visual Literacy for Deciphering Cultural Identity: The New Central Bus Station in Tel-Aviv
Shoshana Sitton
School of Arts and Technology, Kibbutzim College of Education, Israel

This paper presents the findings of an ethnographic study of everyday life at the New Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, focusing on the material/visual culture of the station’s users.
The New Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv exhibits a complex of multi-cultural combinations deriving from encounters among the diverse population in the station, most of whom belong to lower socio-economic strata: merchants, shoppers, and passersby. The groups in different parts of the station belong to a variety of cultures and communities. They include women, foreign migrant workers, teenagers, soldiers, immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, Druse and Christian groups.  The interaction among these groups is of a dual nature. While each group reinforces its original culture vis-à-vis other ethnic groups, these intercultural encounters allow cultural groups to broaden the ways of expressing their identities, by adopting and  combining signs associated with other identities.
This lecture will undertake a critical analysis of the various cultural identities in the New Central Bus Station by means of a semiotic analysis of visual codes. These codes can be analyzed in terms of several different kinds of maps: the geographic map, which refers to the location of the Central Bus Station, a spatial map delineating the areas within the station, the demographic/social map, which divides the station into various cultural communities, and finally, the users’ mental map. These maps are dynamic, changing as a result of the interaction among cultural groups.
This paper will present the signifiers, that is, the visual codes of each map, and the function and organization of these codes. The analysis reveals the signifieds of these visual codes. Finally, the signs constitute the critical interpretation of the processes by means of which cultural identities are formed through visual codes.

Download Draft Conference Paper –