http://www.iconclass.nl
- Subject-specific international classification system for iconographical research and the documentation of images
- collection of definitions of objects, persons, events, situations & abstract ideas that can be the subject of an image.
- organises iconography into 10 main divisions in which definitions are ordered hierarchically
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html
- comprehensive site
- arranged by time period, geographical region/culture & art movement
ICON: religious image? cultural figurehead? navigational computer image?
ICONOGRAPHY: the language of art? the most direct non-verbal mode of communication within a work of art? uses outside "art" per se?
ICONOCLAST: one who destroys sacred religious images/icons
one who breaks traditions, doctrines, practices.
Learning:
- origins of current typographical forms
- text & image relationships, esp. publishing & art-editorial design
- monuments and site specific communication etc
- European modernism & corporate marks of US consumer culture.
Iconography and post-modernism
Define post-modernism:
as cultural aesthetic:
- continues modernism's themes - rejection of Victorian notions of how art should be made/consumed/interpreted; departure from detachment, fixed morality, objectivity... self-consciousness about production of art... fragmentatiom, randomness, mixed materials... replacement of formal aesthetics with minimalism, spontaneity and discovery through creative process... rejection of distinction between high/low art.
- moves away from modernism's angst about fragmentation, celebrates incoherence, freedom from ideas of what we should do/be
as period of time:
- post-modernity - the Enlightenment onwards; rationality, stability, knowledge for its own sake, knowledge as progress, science providing unalterable truths about the world and directing all socially useful knowledge, rationality of language... knowledge's opposite = ignorance... ORDER OUT OF CHAOS... (machine-like in that respect) binary opposition of the two - disorder necessary to define and offset order, but order strives to cancel out disorder... totality, stability of society... completeness of system upheld by GRAND NARRATIVE on which society is based on & tells itself (american dream, democracy=freedom etc; meta-theories that seem to hold the fabric of that society together)
- critique of grand narratives... awareness that they exist to mask society's contradictions + instabilities... awareness of paradox of order being "bad" but necessary to define order
- favours mini narratives - stories explaining small practices inst. of global concepts. situationist, temporary, often very personal.
- no depth, just surfaces. no original, only copies... a kind of egalitarianism; no one work - one ITEM - is worth more than any of the other copies/prints/recordings - they're all the same. reproduceable work.
- function & organisation of knowledge; to be used rather than for its own sake. skills-based education rather than possession of knowledge. knowledge stored, sorted, utilised. knowledge's opposite = noise - "does not compute", information that doesn't make sense
who decides what knowledge is? is movement towards fragmentation, performance & instability good or bad?
Points of interest:
- post-modernist iconoclasty - rejection of images in favour of performance, found art [recontextualisation] - stripping expensive, painstaking images of their supposed aesthetic and creative/expressive "value" by using moving image, cheap photography, images and objects seemingly without an aesthetic sensibility - "gritty", "mundane" images and objects. Rejection of colour and form in favour of concept & statement; an image is no longer a decoration in any form, but a mode of communication. Everything must have significance and/or usefulness, however small; otherwise useless. Odd, almost paradoxical combination of efficiency and documentation of localised, random phenomena rather than enormous theories. ----> (Hawking & co - scientists now suggesting the universe is composed of many small theories all working with each other rather than one big explain-it-all formula; network of activity rather than everything stemming from one control point.)
- redefinition of "icon" - once a religious image, now a 30x30px image on a computer screen that instantly communicates the identity, function and even corporate ownership (e.g. microsoft office programs) of a computer program/function. Icons once mapped out our moral terrain, then our cultural world - gave us human-shaped figures to aspire to; now they map the virtual terrain of the digital world we increasingly rely on, for work/play/social/financial aspects of our lives. Technology is the new deity; elevated first by modernist belief in truth, reason, logic, order, the infallibility of a well-designed machine; then by post-modernist emphasis on function of knowledge, product rather than artifact, and post-modern use of technology to produce art - video/photography/computers. The computer is the ultimate being; its icons are its saints & stars.
