I liked what Wysocki had to say in this article. It was a stimulating read. I must confess, however, that I did have difficulty following her line of reasoning at times, and I’m not sure I fully grasp fully what she is trying to say as regards the ultimate answer to the problems she puts forward, the answer to how best teach the designing of visual arguments to our students. At the end of the essay for example, she tells us what she does not do in the classroom and what she does do. The second part of the sentence was not very clear to me:
“I do not start my teaching with design principles, then, but … by asking people in classes to collect and sort through and categorize compositions of all kinds, to try to pull “principles” out of those compositions and their experiences.”
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In general, however, I got the drift of what she was saying, and the essay gave me a greater appreciation for the complexities involved in teaching visual argument. Wysocki argues for a visual argument that achieves genuine communication between the composer and audience. She calls for a “shaping relationship,” and is concerned with how this might be taught in the classroom. Clearly she feels it must be – needs be taught – in order to help the students from falling into serious pitfalls that have far reaching implications for the student composer, the viewer (audience), society, and culture. Wysocki is at great pains to outline the consequence of visuals that fail in this way, referring to them as one-sided, sterile, and ultimately untrue because they lack the complexity of life:
“The desire for abstract formality we have learned – the Kantian universal formalism embodied in the layout of the Peek ad as well as in the vocabularies of Williams, Arnheim, and Ban – separate us from our histories and places, and hence from each other. If we believe that to be human is to be tied to place and time and messiness and complexity, then, by so abstracting us, this desire dehumanizes us an dour work and how we see each other. This is dangerous.”
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Her exploration of Kant and its limiting interpretations of the world also made for some instructive reading.
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2 comments:
I too had a hard time following Wysocki's reasoning. I wished she'd used more specific words with concrete meanings with which I was familiar. I wasn't sure if I was sometimes lost because I'm ignorant of visual rhetoric, or if she was indeed being confusing at times.
I think Wysocki attempts to express this kind of new thinking. So maybe visual rhetoric influences textual rhetoric. I struggled with the chapter as well. I get the point in general but it is difficult to get into the details.
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