#metapictures

[jam-it-in-your-box]

What Do Pictures Want

"In Picture Theory I tried to distinguish three different kinds of metapictures: First, the picture that explicitly reflects on, or "doubles" itself, as in so many drawings by Saul Steinberg, in which the production of the picture we are seeing re-appears inside the picture. This is most routinely and literally seen in the effect of the "mise en abime," the Quaker Oats box that contains a picture of the Quaker Oats box, that contains yet another picture of a Quaker Oats box, and so on, to infinity. (Technically, I gather, the term first appeared in reference to heraldry, where the division of a coat of arms into increasingly diminutive sectors containing other coats of arms traces the evolution of a genealogy). Second, the picture that contains another picture of a different kind, and thus re-frames or recontextualizes the inner picture as "nested" inside of a larger, outer picture. Third, the picture that is framed, not inside another picture, but within a discourse that reflects on it as an exemplar of "picturality" as such. This third meaning implies, of course, that any picture whatsoever (a simple line-drawing of a face, a multi-stable image like the Duck-Rabbit, Velasquez's Las Meninas) can become a metapicture, a picture that is used to reflect on the nature of pictures."

(Center for Visual Studies Full Article/Interview with WJT Mitchell)

[jam-it-in-your-box]

While the “hypericons” are philosophers’ strategic use of image to their thought, the “metapictures” are in turn arts’ intervention to the philosophical process to ask the status of them. Nonetheless, both concepts are cooperative, or rather mutually constitutive. Mitchell thinks that the “metapicture is a piece of moveable cultural apparatus, one which may serve a marginal role as illustrative device or a central role as a kind of summary image,” and this is actually what he called “hypericon” which “encapsulates an entire episteme, a theory of knowledge”(Picture 49). The “metapictures” or “discursive hypericons” – such as Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, Alain’s “Egyptian Life Class,” or Steinberg’s “New World” as well as camera obscura, tabula rasa, cave and so on – “epitomize the tendency of the technologies of visual representation to acquire a figurative centrality in theories of the self and its knowledges”(Picture 49). However, these metapictures “are not merely epistemological models, but ethical, political, and aesthetic “assemblages” that allow us to observe observers” and they “don’t merely serve as illustrations to theory; they picture theory”(Picture 49).

( Source: x )

[jam-it-in-your-box]

This is an essay on pictures about pictures — that is, pictures that refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is.

WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory

[suissra]

I worry about images. Images are what things mean. Take the word image. It connotes soft, sheer flesh shimmering on the air, like the rainbowed slick of a bubble. Image connotes images, the multiplicity of being an image. Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel powerful undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality. They serve no social purpose.

E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel