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FIRST:
- Read Goldbard, A. (2017, April 18). Culture and Art: Belonging as a cultural right. Othering and Belonging: Expanding the Circle of Human Concern.
SECOND:
Based on the reading, ANSWER the following questions:
How does this reading (Culture and Art: Belonging as a cultural right) connect to your module’s reading and video:
Sayre, H. M. (2009). Using Visual Information: What to look for and how to Describe what you see” Chapter excerpt from Writing About Art (pp. 28-63). Writing about Art (6th ed.). Pearson Prentice Hall.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2009). The Danger of a Single Story. TED Talks.
https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
Be concrete and specific. Your answers should connect to specific information in the article and your reflection should be in detail.
ARTICLES ATTACHED & VIDEO LINK BELOW:
Belonging as a Cultural Right
Arlene Goldbard in Articles
The US Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) may sound like a government agency, but
unlike the National Endowment for the Arts, it can’t be eliminated with a pen stroke by the
president. The USDAC is the nation’s only people-powered department—a grassroots action
network inciting creativity and social imagination to shape a culture of empathy, equity, and
belonging. Through national actions and local organizing, the USDAC engages everyone in
weaving social fabric and strengthening communities through arts and culture, builds capacity
and connective tissue among socially engaged artists and cultural organizers, generates
momentum and public will for creative policies and programs rooted in culturally democratic
values, and infuses social justice organizing with creativity and social imagination.
Ten days after the 2016 presidential election, the people-powered US Department of Arts and
Culture (USDAC), where I have the privilege of serving as chief policy wonk, launched Standing
for Cultural Democracy, our ten-point policy and action platform. One by one, members of our
national cabinet picked up a lightsaber and took to the stage at CULTURE/SHIFT 2016, the
Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis and the USDAC’s first national convening on
community arts. The venue was chosen in large part because the region has shown this nation so
much about the importance of human and cultural rights and because it is home to so many
dedicated and accomplished cultural organizers. Two hundred people cheered every point.
Platform Point 5, calling for investment in belonging and cultural citizenship, starts with this
assertion: “Our chief cultural deficit is belonging.” It urges every public institution and private
organization to adopt a “policy on belonging,” one that establishes standards of belonging to
ensure that all public statements and policy and program decisions “assert, protect, and embody
the primacy of belonging to the health of local culture and community . . . guaranteeing full
belonging to each and every community and resident within our borders.”
The Policy on Belonging was proclaimed by Roberto Bedoya, cultural affairs manager for the
city of Oakland and secretary of belonging on the national cabinet. He’d taken office just a few
months before. Only weeks after the convening, Oakland’s December 2016 Ghost Ship fire
ended the lives of thirty-six mostly young artists attending a gathering at a carelessly converted
and poorly inspected warehouse. The USDAC responded with a piece in The Hill citing policies
in our platform that could address the gentrification and displacement that have created
Oakland’s disaster of belonging.
In that piece, we cited Platform Point 8. It calls for adoption of a “cultural impact study,”
analogous to an environmental impact report, requiring assessment and amelioration of potential
damage to cultural fabric before authorizing development or rezoning. It amazes us that while an
endangered plant or insect can halt incursions into the built environment, there is no comparable
standing in law or policy for human cultural rights and well-being.
How did Standing for Cultural Democracy: The USDAC’s Policy and Action Platform come to
be? What impact can it have? I’ll tell the story from the perspective of the Policy on Belonging.
It begins with the creation of the USDAC and the first iteration of its annual civic ritual, the 2015
People’s State of the Union.
Founding the People-Powered Department
The USDAC’s public launch took place in October 2013, with a press conference led by Norman
Beckett, deputy secretary of arts and culture (a.k.a. Adam Horowitz, USDAC chief instigator,
who first conceived of the people-powered department). The press conference was held at the
annual convening of Imagining America, a national association of higher-education institutions
and community groups involved in culture and community engagement. A few days later, right-
wing pundit Glenn Beck denounced the department on his television program, sharing the
USDAC’s Statement of Values as an example of a vast conspiracy by “well-funded radicals.”
(As our budget was approximately zero at the time, we could only wish.)
That press conference was preceded by more than a year of research and planning with a handful
of dedicated volunteers. We knew that if the USDAC were to succeed, we’d have to learn from
past efforts at cultural organizing, and that had to start with interviewing artists and activists
who’d been involved and could offer wisdom on how a twenty-first-century movement for
cultural democracy might be built. Guided by their experience, we began scaffolding a
volunteer-driven project that could engage people in both local and national organizing toward:
• welcoming each individual as a whole person;
• valuing each community’s heritage, contributions, and aspirations;
• promoting caring, reciprocity, and open communication across all lines of difference; and
• dismantling all barriers to love and justice.
• Our research made it remarkably clear what the USDAC’s core values should be.
Pleasure and purpose aligned
The USDAC is simultaneously an organizing project and a collaborative art project. As we like
to say: “This is an act of collective imagination. Add yours.”
We play off a government frame with quasi-official trappings: national cabinet, cultural agents,
regional envoys, and so on. Cabinet members choose their own titles. For example, Makani
Themba, minister of revolutionary imagination; Lulani Arquette, catalyst for native creative
potential; Judy Baca, minister of sites of public memory; Bob Holman, minister of poetry and
language protection; and many such others. One might imagine the creativity of these titles
would be a dead giveaway, but when I announced some years ago on Facebook that I had been
appointed chief policy wonk, I got perhaps one-hundred congratulatory messages on receiving a
public honor, most of them seeming entirely sincere.
The aha moments generated by the gap between expectation and reality have been a good
organizing technique. People say, “I didn’t know the United States had a Department of Arts and
Culture,” and once they read further and realize it isn’t an official arm of the public sector, it’s a
quick hop to saying it should be. This is the macromanifestation of our own aha moment, the
realization that cultural organizing—which uses arts-based methods to engage people, express
their concerns and aspirations, and involve others who care about them—is a uniquely powerful
mode precisely because it engages emotions as well as intellects, bodies, and spirits, offering
simultaneous pleasure and purpose.
I think of art as sacred play, a practice that engages the whole person in contrast to the many
conventional activities that invite only our fragmented selves. In a social context, art making and
arts experience can cultivate much-needed empathy and social imagination—the capacity to put
ourselves in the other’s place and feel something of the other’s truth, the capacity to envision a
social order different from the one that powerful forces would like us to see as natural and
inevitable. The threshold for participation in community cultural work is low. People come
together because they want to share stories or music or paint and draw, for example, and the
satisfaction of deploying those art forms with others who desire belonging, love, and justice
leads to a heightened disposition to take part again.
When I look at conventional activism through a cultural lens, I often marvel at how people
expect to nurture a sense of belonging by using cultural forms that telegraph exclusion. The
public hearing where experts pronounce authoritatively and the rest of us line up to hold the mic
for one or two minutes—this sort of thing is a cultural form for which few acquire a taste. If
pleasure and purpose were the boundary conditions for activism, just imagine who would take
part and how it would change.
“Our chief cultural deficit is belonging.”
Radical inclusion
Through our research, experience sent an unmistakable message: start out as you mean to go on.
The historical map of arts and cultural organizations is dotted with groups that start as
overwhelmingly white and later rush to remedy that bias with typically failed attempts to
“diversify.” Often, the invitation reads as “come make us look good” rather than “let’s cocreate,”
and often, the answer is, “No thanks.” Who wants to be used as a signifier rather than engaged as
an equal partner?
We knew that from the start, multiple art forms, ages, races, ethnicities, faiths, orientations,
regions, abilities, and more had to shape the work. For instance, I am forty years older than our
chief instigator, Adam. Clearly, it would be a challenge to craft messages and structures that
appealed to both our generations. But we had a strong hunch that if we succeeded, we’d also be
able to scoop up the generations in between. This has proven correct: each of our actions since
has drawn participation from students to elders. Indeed, one of the great successes of
CULTURE/SHIFT 2016 was participants’ experiences of arriving so soon after the election,
dazed with uncertainty, and easily crossing generational lines to console, support, and learn from
each other.
When we put out our first call for cultural agents in 2014, more than one hundred individuals
applied to serve as these volunteer local organizers, taking part in a learning cohort and
organizing Imaginings—art-infused planning dialogues—in their own communities. We were
surprised at the volume of response, but not its breadth. Each of the three cohorts of USDAC
cultural agents has reflected our intentions, with a majority of women of color, with folks from
both small towns and urban centers, and with many types of artists, educators, and organizers.
There was a consistent disparity, to be sure: the vast majority of applicants were women, and no
cohort achieved a proportionate number of men. (Though we can speculate about its origins,
none of the popular theories—low compensation and job insecurity in progressive cultural
arenas, an evidently greater proclivity to volunteer on the part of women—suggests a useful idea
of how to resolve this imbalance. It’s one I encounter in every cultural convening I attend, in
higher education, and in the majority of community-based organizations. Does the invitation to
belong resound differently for men?)
People say, “I didn’t know the United States had a Department of Arts and Culture,” and once
they realize it isn’t an official arm of the public sector, it’s a quick hop to saying it should be.”
To name the condition of belonging without barrier, we use the phrase “cultural citizenship,”
always being careful to say one doesn’t have to be a citizen in the legal sense to belong. The
concept of citizenship is contested, of course, because even using the word reminds people of all
the ways immigrants and refugees have been stigmatized and excluded as “illegal” and
unwanted. But we are not inclined to surrender contested words to those who use them as clubs
to beat others into disbelonging: democracy, art, culture, and citizenship are fundamental human
rights. In a condition of true cultural citizenship, everyone feels at home in their own
communities. All heritages are honored for their contributions to the collective culture.
Difference is embraced as a source of richness and wisdom. And wanting to know each other
takes the place of fearing the other.
We live in a society in which the fullness of cultural citizenship is denied, even to most people
who possess legal papers entitling them to vote and travel. How many Americans long to see
their own communities of people portrayed on television as something other than criminals and
degenerates? How many students are offered a version of history that consigns their own heritage
to a footnote? How many are denied the right to culture as expressed through fundamental acts of
expression and association: walking or driving while black, dancing together in a nightclub,
visiting with friends while waiting for public transit.
Multiple levels of engagement and impact for individuals and groups
Gazing out at the cultural landscape, we saw many groups doing powerful local or regional
work, and a few organizing on a national level. But generally, the two didn’t connect up. As with
other forms of progressive organizing, within a national frame, the scope of individual
participation was often distant and superficial: sign this petition, click this link, read this message
letting you know if a bill passed, and donate money.
The challenge of a movement for cultural democracy is that it is all about culture, a collective
creation most fully expressed in all of life’s textures, in person. Culture describes the ways that
human beings form communities, communicate, enter into relationships, and create the crucible
in which identities and meanings are forged. You can’t do that by clicking a link. Therefore, we
knew we would need to adopt an approach that:
• engages everyone in weaving social fabric and strengthening communities through arts
and culture;
• builds capacity and connective tissue among socially engaged artists and
cultural organizers;
• generates momentum and public will for creative policies and programs rooted in
USDAC values; and
• infuses social justice organizing with creativity and social imagination.
Our approach had to be prefigurative and realistic, demonstrating to the greatest extent possible
the quality of reciprocity and mutuality that so many people desire in the world and that we are
working to bring about. We could not adopt modes of interaction that repeated the gross or subtle
injuries of the dominant system: treating people like categories instead of individuals, like
numbers rather than living beings; speaking for people rather than together creating channels and
invitations for all to speak their own words in their own voices; treating challenges that affect
individuals and groups differentially, as if they were separate from each other or subsidiary to
whatever may be deemed the most important challenges to freedom and justice; or adjusting to
an absurd system and insisting that everyone play by its rules.
It became clear that just as we needed a network of local organizers and communities to support
and learn with each other, we needed a national cabinet rooted in lived knowledge (as opposed to
credentialed expertise that may dismiss the value of ground-level experience in favor of research
at a distance, about rather than of) to act on local wisdom. Cabinet members could hear what
those communities held dear or felt to be threatened in these times, and help translate that
knowledge into national ideas, both policy and action interventions. We think of our model as a
perpetual circuit: local work generates information that informs national deliberations, resulting
in policy and action proposals that can be tested at the local level, yielding experience that
refines the national perspective, improving community work—and so on.
People’s State of the Union
The USDAC’s first National Action was founded on a principle that incorporates belonging and
infuses all our work: democracy is a conversation, not a monologue. The first People’s State of
the Union (PSOTU) in 2015 set the pattern. In November of each year, we invite people across
the United States to hold Story Circles during a ten-day period beginning in late January, sharing
stories that reveal something of the state of our union as they experience it. Their stories are
uploaded to Story Portal, where anyone may peruse and use them. Then a group of invited poets,
inspired by the stories, composes the collective Poetic Address to the Nation, which is
performed, live-streamed, and published. The 2017 Poetic Address was presented on March 11 at
the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, demonstrating the second principle
shaping the PSOTU, that all our lives are the material of art, and all our experience is worthy of
being uplifted into poetry.
A Story Circle is a small group of individuals sitting in a circle, sharing stories—usually from
their own experience or imagination—focusing on a common theme. As each person in turn
shares a story, a richer and more complex story emerges. By the end, people see both real
differences and things their stories have in common. A Story Circle is a journey into its theme,
with multiple dimensions, twists, and turns. Theater makers, such as Roadside Theater and John
O’Neal, have been central in developing the practice for use in creating original performance and
community telling and listening projects. For instance, both companies typically use their own
method of story circles to elicit stories that yield incident and dialogue for use in devised theater.
It could be said that sitting in a circle sharing stories is one of the world’s oldest forms of cultural
practice. It’s easy to imagine ancient ancestors passing a tale around a campfire. We’ve made
Story Circle into a proper noun to acknowledge the specific techniques the USDAC has adapted
for our purposes.
When we invite people to come together to share stories, certain concerns are paramount.
Unstructured dialogue on contentious issues, such as the state of the union, tends to break down
quickly into a contest of opinion. To avoid this, we are careful to specify that stories come from
direct experience, with a beginning, middle, and end. The difference this makes is remarkable:
when I tell a story that starts out “One day, I was walking along and met a woman . . . ,” there are
no grounds to contest my account. I am the world’s foremost expert on my own experience, and
the Story Circle framework embodies that honoring of each person’s truth.
We offer a free toolkit and training to anyone who wishes to take part. Each person in a Story
Circle has equal time—generally three minutes or less—to share a story in response to a prompt.
Prompts are generous in conception, questions that everyone is equally free and able to entertain,
but once offered, they are not enforced: any story a teller chooses is the right story to tell. For
PSOTU 2017, these were the prompts:
• Share a story about something you have experienced that gave you insight into the state
of our union.
• Share a story about a time you felt a sense of belonging—or the opposite—to this nation.
• Share a story about a time you broke through a barrier to connect with someone different
from yourself or with whom you disagreed.
Circles are small, optimally around eight people including a facilitator and a scribe if the stories
are to be captured for future use (with tellers’ consent, of course). They are emphatically not
performances. We urge people to focus on deep listening, not on crafting one’s own story,
assuring everyone that a story will arise when their turn comes. Participants are asked to observe
a few simple guidelines: total attention to each teller; no contradiction, cross talk, or comment—
even positive—that pulls attention from the teller; a moment of silence between stories to allow
them to settle. After everyone who wishes has shared (usually once or twice around the circle),
the group reflects on what is revealed by the body of stories: What touched them? What stood
out as notable differences or common threads? What might be learned from the aggregate of
stories shared?
By now I’ve been privileged to hear hundreds of stories in dozens of Story Circles. The practice
astonishes me with its simplicity and power to embody real belonging. Equalizing time and
attention means that the middle-school principal and the sixth grader sitting in the next chair
have a rare experience of reciprocity. The principal may start out by thinking, “Oh no, now I
have to listen to this kid!” while the sixth grader may come in thinking, “No one told me the
principal would be here!” But inevitably, in the telling—in the polite insistence that the principal
heed the time limit, in each person’s surprise at what a deep and revealing story the other shared,
in the sixth grader’s delight at finally getting total attention, warm and respectful, from a group
of adults—those feelings change.
The metastatement of the Story Circle and the PSOTU is that everyone deserves the experience
of belonging without barrier. Perhaps it is that glimpse of true belonging afforded by the Story
Circles that authorizes people to share so many stories of belonging and what Roberto Bedoya
has called “disbelonging.” Consider this 2017 story uploaded by Shelle from Albuquerque, New
Mexico:
The question of belonging hit me very hard today. Generally, I have always felt like I belong to
many groups—belong as an artist, belong as an educated white woman, belong as a bilingual
New Mexican. My children are biracial, so I feel like I belong in the conversation about black
identity and racial equity—it concerns me every day. I am married to a Hispanic man, so I
belong to his family and culture, and I feel that deeply. But now, today and lately, I feel that
sometimes I belong to a group, and other times I don’t belong to any of those groups.
I think of my biracial boys, as youngsters, who are now teenagers. They say what I said to my
parents, like, “You don’t understand what I am going through.” And when my boys were very
young, I realized this would be true for my boys in a way that was much deeper than it was when
I said it to my parents. And during this election cycle, I carry this sense of being sure where I
belong.
The morning after the election, my husband and I were getting ready to board an early morning
flight to Chicago (and I was sad and fearful to leave my black teenage boys that day). My
seventeen-year-old son got up after a long night of election results (he was checking on his
phone throughout the night), and he said to all of us (my sisters-in-law were also there), “Let’s
all share our biggest fears this morning after this election!” He said he’d go first. “I’m most
afraid of national stop and frisk.”
No one said anything for a full minute. What could we say? And I was afraid, too—of that (and
of so many other things) and that my beautiful young man/son was afraid. He grew up with a
black president and sense of empowerment—and on the verge of his adulthood, it all feels and
sounds completely different. And I don’t know how to hold those two realities in my mind—my
elementary school biracial boys watching the inauguration of the first biracial president and my
young adult black sons living in a rise of racism and hateful, public rhetoric.
Analyzing the yield of all three PSOTU iterations to date, so many different stories speaking of
the same fears and desires—that led us to the opening sentence of Platform Point 5: “Our chief
cultural deficit is belonging.”
Damon Davis | St. Aiyana
The Policy on Belonging
When we set out to base policy and action proposals on the stories people across the country had
shared with the USDAC, we understood that the USDAC’s policy initiatives had to break with
the conventional model. They had to focus on policies and actions that promoted universal social
goods instead of singling out certain people and organizations for special support.
In the global policy arena, cultural policy has significant scope, encompassing
telecommunications, education, training, preservation, regulation, and research, as well as
funding—a whole universe of cultural aspects reflecting the inclusive nature of culture as a
concept. Indeed, in the broadest sense, it’s accurate to say that everything not given as part of
nature belongs to the category of culture. Consider the way this understanding is encoded in the
cultural programs of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), for instance, the largest international agency with cultural policy-making
responsibilities. UNESCO Initiatives focus on diversity, sustainable development, world
heritage, and much, much more. The commercial cultural industries, such as broadcasting,
publishing, film, and television, are part of the ecology just as much as museums, dance
companies, orchestras, and community arts centers.
In contrast, here in the United States, there’s been a determined effort to sequester the nonprofit
arts from the vastly larger and more influential commercial sector. Almost always, when
advocates talk about this policy arena, they mean it very narrowly, as arts not culture: grants for
artists and nonprofit organizations, arts-in-schools programs, and not much more.
There are complicated reasons why this view is promoted. To mention just one example, when
the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was established in the midsixties, with a Cold War
chill in the air, the major institutions and funders advocating for a federal agency were frightened
that they’d be defeated if legislators thought they were leading to some form of state art. They
were careful to position federal funding as a junior partner to private philanthropy and box-office
income, to always assert that the private sector should lead.
As I write, the present occupant of the White House has called for elimination of the National
Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, agencies
targeted by Republicans since Ronald Reagan became president. As always, threats to eliminate
funding that amounts to a fraction of 1 percent of federal discretionary spending are framed as
cost cutting. But since they actually have no fiscal impact, we must understand them as symbolic
gestures, garnering headlines and distracting the electorate from noticing that we have spent
more than three annual NEA budgets a day on war since 2001, or that new tax breaks for the
wealthiest will more than cancel the minuscule savings proposed.1
We knew that the USDAC’s policy initiatives had to be framed in this larger context, rather than
follow the failed conventional approach of special pleading by direct beneficiaries for their own
budgets. Attempting to say something beyond “Support us; we’re wonderful,” most past arts
advocacy has been couched in weak arguments for art as an economic stimulus. Advocates say
those who buy theater tickets also contribute to the economy by buying parking and meals when
they attend performances, but of course, going to a football game has exactly the same impact.
Although this approach is a failure—in absolute dollars, the NEA 2016 budget hasn’t changed
since 1980, but its real value has declined by more than half—advocates loyally pursue it.
The impact on belonging and cultural citizenship has been deeply distressing. When public
policy follows private-sector proclivities, the beneficiaries tilt toward those who offer reflected
glory to wealthy donors. Elite and largely white organizations—the red-carpet opera companies,
ballet companies, major museums, and symphony orchestras—continue to receive
disproportionate public and private funding, paying lip service to diversity but showing no
inclination to surrender privilege.
Instead of following the conventional arts funding pattern of plucking the best fruits, we have
chosen to water the roots, advocating initiatives that benefit everyone, including artists along
with many others. And the most important root to nurture is belonging.
In Standing for Cultural Democracy, we quoted Roberto Bedoya’s (undated) essay for Arts in A
Changing America:
The state of our society is under a great deal of stress triggered by the continuing recession and
its challenges to our economy, the growing plutocracy’s abuse of our civil rights, the Cultural
War 2.0 battles over women’s rights to control their own bodies, the rights of Union workers, the
rights of Mexican American students to study Latino literature, the right to be free of racial
profiling, the right of gays and lesbians to marry their loved one, immigrant rights . . . you can
add your own example of the politics of dis-belonging at work in civil society.
We added this call to action:
To sustain a functioning civil society that even aspires to full cultural citizenship, the challenge
of belonging and dis-belonging must be acknowledged and addressed. There is a long way to go
to achieve even the first step here, awareness. Has any city or state adopted a policy on
belonging, let alone invested in new initiatives to cultivate a universal sense of belonging?
To cultivate belonging, we proposed five actions, excerpted below:
• Adopt a policy on belonging for public institutions, such as municipal or state
governments, and private organizations, such as community centers. Adopting such a
policy is the foundation for any action taken to extend and deepen belonging.
• Support long-term artists’ residencies at the neighborhood level by artists with
experiences and skills in community cultural development to assess the state of belonging
in their communities and creatively conceive and test ways to strengthen it. This includes
recognizing and supporting the contributions of local artists and culture-bearers, as well
as preparing and supporting allied outside artists to enter communities, listen deeply
without preconception, and respond to specific needs and opportunities in each place.
• Support community-based centers that engage people directly in art making and art
experiences as laboratories for belonging, offering ideas and experiences that can be
replicated or adapted widely as sites of belonging that anchor a community, integral to
strategies to resist displacement, preserving and strengthening existing social fabric.
• Support creative use of underused spaces such as schools, houses of worship, and public
plazas, reimagining the untapped commonwealth these spaces represent, making
maximum use of them for learning, making art, public performances, and other
gatherings.
• Repurpose disused spaces such as vacant lots and empty storefronts as pop-up
community cultural centers, engaging people in art making and art experiences as they go
about their day. A key consideration is to anchor these spaces in existing community
culture so that they don’t invite gentrification and displacement.
Taken together, these actions express our understanding of the challenge of creating true
belonging: that like rights, policies are meaningless without sufficient resources to safeguard,
express, and extend them. To declare that “everyone belongs” but fail to encode that principle in
enforceable public decisions and actions adds up to a meaningless gesture that actually repeats
the injury it ostensibly addresses.
If we assess the US cultural landscape, we see well-provisioned, prosperous communities side by
side with neighborhoods that are home to immigrants or low-income communities, often
communities of color, where underused public space is guarded by high fences rather than made
available for community use. We see largely white and well-off neighborhoods, where city
planners would never consider rezoning in ways that disrupt social fabric, side by side with less
privileged neighborhoods, where planning decisions are undertaken without the slightest
consideration of cultural rights, razing sites of public memory and rezoning to attract new tenants
to displace those whose contributions created rich community.
The model Policy on Belonging we have offered for public and private adoption requires “all
public statements and actions to assert, protect, and embody the primacy of belonging to the
health of local culture and community, and mandat[es] that all public actions and statements
reflect the letter and spirit of this resolution, guaranteeing full belonging to each and every
community and resident within our borders . . .”
It begins by stipulating the past actions and current conditions that call for such a policy, goes on
to define the relevant terms and conditions, and concludes with a participatory review process
resulting in a decision to “reject the proposed action for negative impact on the right to culture,
belonging, and/or full cultural citizenship; recommend one or more of the alternatives set out in
the request for review or a superior alternative emerging from the review process, indicating
approval if the recommended alternative is substituted for the original proposed action; describe
mitigating action necessary for resubmission of the proposed action for approval; or approve the
action as proposed.”
In this moment, with othering being decreed via executive order, belonging is more imperiled
than ever. In January, when the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries was announced,
the USDAC circulated a Pledge on Cultural Rights and the Muslim Ban:
The first step in a top-down campaign to obliterate cultural rights in the United States has been
taken. We are called to stand together in response.
On January 27, 2017, a presidential executive order was issued blocking refugees and
restricting immigration from Muslim countries. Protest has been immediate and massive.
History teaches us that authoritarian regimes start their mission of domination with the right to
culture: limiting cultural communities’ freedom of movement and practice, condemning or
restricting press freedom, condemning or restricting artistic expression, and denying the fullness
of belonging to all but a privileged few. Artists and creative activists have key roles to play.
The response was rapid and enthusiastic.
The message of defending and extending cultural rights and belonging has been carried through
all our 2017 initiatives to date, both in the PSTOU and in the #RevolutionOfValues, the day of
creative action on April 4, 2017, which is the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s
groundbreaking speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”
To declare that “everyone belongs” but fail to encode that principle in enforceable public
decisions and actions … repeats the injury it ostensibly addresses.
This spring also marks the launch of a concentrated USDAC campaign to adopt the Policy on
Belonging, inviting all those who signed the pledge to do more than declare their commitment.
In an alternate universe, such a campaign might go straight to Washington, focusing on adoption
of a national policy. But current reality is that belonging must start with the smallest units of
social organization and build up. We can’t expect belonging to take shape out there, to be
granted courtesy of some distant authority. But even in such perilous times, community
organizations and institutions and agencies of local government remain more accessible and,
therefore, potentially more responsive.
We want to extend this invitation to all readers of Othering & Belonging. Spend a moment
exercising your social imagination: How would your community change if a policy on belonging
were adopted and implemented by the city council, the school board, the local neighborhood
center? Everything created must first be imagined. The Policy on Belonging begins as an act of
collective imagination. Please add yours.
Access the Policy on Belonging to download the toolkit.
References
More history and data sources are contained in “Symbolic Gesture Comes Out of
1. ↑ Retirement,” the USDAC blog post we published on January 20, 2017, when elimination of
the federal cultural agencies was first threatened.
Arlene Goldbard
Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the
intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded
from her website. She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. Her two newest
books on art’s public purpose—The Wave and The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The
Future were published in spring 2013. Prior books include New Creative Community: The Art of
Cultural Development; Community, Culture and Globalization; an international anthology
published by the Rockefeller Foundation; Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture; and
Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in In Motion Magazine, Art in America,
Theatre, Tikkun, and many other journals. She has addressed many academic and community
audiences in the United States and Europe on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts
practice to the development of integral organizations. She serves as Chief Policy Wonk of the
U.S. Department of Arts and Culture and President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom
Center. She was named a 2015 Purpose Prize Fellow for her work with the USDAC. She was
named one of the YBCA 100 2016.
USING VISUAL
INFORMATION
What to Look For and How
to Describe What You See
Probably the greatest stumbling block for most people confronting the
prospect o f writing about art for the first time is what they take to be the
specialized vocabulary o f the art connoisseur, a vocabulary with which
they are not conversant. Actually, the vocabulary o f good art writing is rel
atively simple and based on common sense. W hat is more esoteric and
sometimes totally alien to the uninitiated is the jargon o f technical and pe
riod styles that has developed as a sort of shorthand descriptive tool— a
rhetoric that includes words like “ classical,” “ baroque,” “ romantic,”
“ modern,” and “ postmodern.” If these words were not useful, they would
not have the wide circulation that they do, but it is not necessary to feel
comfortable with them in order to begin writing about art. They originate
out of distinctions among the ways that subject matter, the more common
elements of form, certain principles of composition, and questions of
media are employed. Most o f you are quite familiar with the less special
ized vocabulary of art writing— words like “ line,” “ color,” “ balance,”
“ rhythm,” “ sculpture,” and “ video”— and this more usual (and useful) vo
cabulary is far less threatening and more accessible than concepts such as
“baroque.” But there are many ways in which you can use this less
28
U s i n g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 29
specialized vocabulary to your benefit as a writer. W hat does it matter, for
instance, that an artist employs line in a certain way, or that the elements
in a painting repeat themselves in a visual rhythm?
It is important to point out here, again, that all art worth the name is
a question o f conscious choices. Given two points and the opportunity to
draw a line between them, you can choose to draw a straight line, or a
curved line, or a line that turns back on itself and meanders hither and yon
until it finally ends. Your choice, which may or may not be deliberate and
studied, reveals a good deal about your temperament and even about the
way you approach the world in general. A work o f art is a compendium of
such choices. Artists, who make such choices as a matter o f habit and pro
fession, make them a good deal more deliberately than you and I. This is
not to say that artists necessarily think out in advance the implications of
every line they make, or every application o f color. Any artist will tell you
that much of what they do is intuitive. However, every artist has the op
portunity to revise and redo each work, each gesture— and indeed, very
often artists take advantage o f that opportunity. It is probably safe to as
sume that what you are seeing in a work o f art is an intentional effect, that
the artist knows what he or she is doing.
A summary o f the kinds o f choices an artist can make follows. Any
work o f art involves the artist in choosing among a number o f different
possibilities: the subject m atter must be decided upon; the artist must
choose which o f the various available media is best to portray or express
that subject matter; in achieving the work, the artist will employ the
form al elements, such as line and color, in the distinctive and particular
ways that are part and parcel of the artist’s style or that express the artist’s
intentions in a clear way; and, finally, the artist will decide how best to or
ganize these elements into a whole by means o f what we call the
principles o f design or composition. The following sections will give you
some sense o f the things you need to consider when you are trying to de
cide what a particular work of art might be about or why it m ight be sig
nificant or interesting. This is by no means a complete survey o f the
various media, principles o f design, or formal elements that artists have at
their disposal. It is simply an outline o f why an awareness o f them might
help you learn to ask the right types o f questions and then write a better
essay. If you need more information about any given element or principle,
you can consult any of the many authoritative art appreciation texts, where
most o f this material is treated in greater detail.
30 U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n
CONSIDERING THE S U B JE C T MATTER O F T H E W ORK
Subject matter is the sum of the identifiable objects, incidents, and mono
graphic or narrative references that are recognizable in a work of art. In
representational painting, these references are sometimes clear, but even
in representational painting, they can be obscure. Iconography presents a
special problem. Iconographic references are symbolic conventions that
are widely recognizable in a given culture: for instance, the meaning of
the cross or a crown of thorns is widely known in the Christian West. But
recognition of iconographic references depends upon one’s familiarity
with the culture at hand. A Buddhist might not understand such references
at all. just as most Christians probably would not understand the icono
graphic significance of the different positions of Buddha’s hands in sculp
tures representing him. Even within a given cultural tradition, the
iconographic significance o f various elements in works of art can be lost
over time or even change. Thus, the iconographic significance o f various
elements in many medieval paintings is fiercely debated by scholars, for
example, a dog at the feet o f a lady in a Renaissance painting might rep
resent fidelity but in a later. Baroque painting by, say, Rubens, the pres
ence of a dog might represent our basest animal instincts.
Very often simply consulting the title will make a work’s range of
reference more explicit. In abstract painting, however, the title may or may
not help you understand the subject matter of the work. Full Fathom Five,
the title o f the Jackson Pollock painting discussed in the next chapter
(Figure 31), is very helpful indeed, but Untitled, the “title” of many of his
later works, is far less so— except, o f course, insofar as it asks us to ques
tion why he chose not to title his later works. It is possible to say of
Pollock’s untitled paintings that since they announce no overt reference,
their subject matter might be paint— or the act o f painting itself.
One o f the most important things for you to remember when dis
cussing subject matter is that it is in no way comparable to the meaning of
the work. One o f the classic examples o f this distinction between subject
matter and meaning was developed by Joshua C. Taylor in his handbook,
Learning to Look. Taylor points out that Pietro Perugino’s Crucifixion
with Saints (Figure 11) and Carlo Crivelli’s The Crucifixion (Figure 12)
have the same subject matter, but the meaning that subject matter assumes
in each is dramatically different. For Taylor, the Perugino “ would seem to
quell the possible anguish and effects o f suffering which might be associ
ated with the scene and to establish a serenity and calm, a complete relax
ation of the emotional and physical forces which might be expected to
operate in connection with such a subject matter.” In contrast, in the Criv-
elli there “ is no rest, no calm, or contemplation. Instead we take upon
U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 31
Figure 11 P ietro Perugino, The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, Sa in t Jerome,
and Saint M ary M agdalene (central panel), c. 1485. Oil on panel transferred from
w ood to canvas, 39% in. X 22% in. National Gallery o f Art, W ashington, D.C. Andrew
W. M ellon Collection.
ourselves the anguish and physical hurt which seem to motivate the ac
tions o f the figures. And nowhere is there escape, no point on which our
attention can fix itself to bring order to our excited emotions.” 1 There are
many structural and formal reasons for this difference— and Taylor’s
analysis occupies ten pages o f text— but it should be sufficiently clear that
whatever meaning these works possess, it is independent o f subject m at
ter. It is as if one artist sees in the scene the promise o f salvation hereafter,
whereas the other sees the misery o f our life on earth in the here and now.
One o f the most common mistakes student writers make is to confuse
subject m atter with meaning. A typical sentence describing one of these
paintings might read: “ Perugino [or Crivelli, take your pick] has painted a
crucifixion, with all that implies.” The assumption here is that the mean
ing o f the crucifixion is clear, but such assumptions often stymie the
32 U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n
Figure 12 Carlo Crivelli. The Crucifixión, c. 1480-1490. Tem pera on panel,
29 ‘A in. X 21% in. W irt D. W alker Fund. 1929.862. The Art Institute o f Chicago.
Photograph © The Art Institute o f C hicago. All rights reserved.
development of ideas. The crucifixion may imply something very specif
ic to the student writer, but Taylor’s point is that the crucifixion implies
something entirely different to each painter, and that implication may or
may not coincide with what the writer feels about the same subject matter.
One way to assess the meaning o f a given work, then, is to try to
imagine other handlings o f the same material. It should follow that one of
the best ways to write an essay about Perugino’s Crucifixion is to compare
it with Crivelli’s. From the differences between the two we are able to rec
ognize some of the important decisions that Perugino made and thereby
learn a great deal about his intentions.
Or imagine a painting of a red barn in a green field. What does it
matter that it is bathed in sunlight? What is the effect o f the startling color
contrast between red and green, and how would the same scene feel
U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 33
handled monochromatically as a winter scene, in the snow, at dusk? Does
it matter that the bam is silhouetted against the summer sky and that your
point o f view is relatively low? Does it make a difference that its lines and
angles are clearly delineated? Would it seem less appealing, more lonely
and foreboding, if it melded into the landscape and shadows? In short,
given just such a set o f questions and a broad enough selection o f bam
paintings, a reasonably significant essay on American attitudes toward
landscape could probably be written. Similarly, art historians will often il
lustrate the difference between two stylistic periods or schools by compar
ing works o f similar subject m atter but distinctive handling. Even
particular phases within an individual artist’s career can be understood by
means o f this device. What, for instance, are the obvious differences in
handling between the two versions o f M ont Sainte-Victoire by Paul
Cézanne that appear later in this chapter (Figures 24 and 25), the second
of which was painted nearly twenty years after the first? D on’t you sup
pose that this difference tells you something about Cézanne’s intentions?
Thus, while subject matter (or the lack o f it, in a nonobjective paint
ing) is the most readily apparent aspect o f the work, it is also, by itself,
one o f the least useful in discussing the w ork’s meaning. Rather than ask
ing yourself what the subject matter o f a particular work is, ask yourself,
“W hat does the artist think o f his or her subject matter?”
W hat artists think of their subject matter will be revealed in their
handling o f the various formal elements, the way they employ the princi
ples o f composition, and their choice o f medium.
DESCRIBING THE FORMAL ELEM ENTS
YOU DISCOVER IN THE W ORK
Line
A line is any relatively narrow, elongated mark. It is the primary
means we have for defining visual form, and it stands to reason that it is
one o f the most important elements to be considered in preparing to write
about a work o f art. The difference in its use in the Perugino and Crivelli
Crucifixions probably accounts, more than anything else, for the differ
ence in meaning that we detect in these works. In the Perugino, line is de
termined largely in relation to the strong vertical and horizontal axes
defined by the cross itself. Working off these axes are a series o f isosceles
triangles, the most obvious o f which is defined by the relative positions of
the heads o f the Virgin Mary and St. John at the two bottom comers, and
Christ’s head at the apex. The apex and central axis of each o f the compo
sition’s other triangles remain constant, but a wider, higher triangle can be
34 U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n
seen stretching across Christ’s feet, each side defined by the trees left and
right; another is defined by the outside legs of Mary and St. John, their
toes pointing to the bottom corners o f the triangle, and another by the al
most perfectly balanced sweep of their garments across their legs. A
smaller, more precise set of triangles can be seen emanating from the di
amond shape of the cross at Christ’s feet. Most subtle of all, this pattern
is repeated in the folded fingers o f both the Virgin and St. John. The curvi
linear features of this painting, from the disposition of St. John’s arms to
the arched bridge in the background, seem to wrap around this triangular
structure in the same manner that a circle fits neatly around an equilater
al triangle.
In contrast, and although the cross divides the canvas more or less
along the same geometric axes as in the Perugino, not a single line in the
Crivelli seems to work in harmony with any other. If line seems to func
tion in a more or less centripetal way in the Perugino, it is centrifugal in
the Crivelli, as if erupting from the scene. Most tellingly, the painting’s
lines all seem to fall away from the central axis. Both the Virgin’s and St.
John’s head tilt back rather than in toward the path of their gaze. St. John’s
hand points away from the scene. The effect is not unlike the curious sense
of disorganization achieved by Courbet in his Burial at Omaris (Figure
10). Despite the strong horizontal order achieved in Courbet’s grouping,
especially in relation to the landscape behind, and the verticality of the
figures (a horizontal and vertical structure emphasized, as it often is in
Western art, by the crucifix rising over the scene), Courbet fragments the
composition by having each gaze— including the dog’s—turn in a differ
ent direction. There is no focus to the scene. Implied lines of sight explode
in every direction away from the supposed center o f attention, the burial
itself. Similarly, in the Crivelli the nervous fractures of the cliff at the
painting’s bottom serve to create a general sense of linear disorder that
stands in stark contrast to the linear regularity and harmony o f the cross,
let alone the balance of the Perugino. This disorder is emphasized espe
cially by the curved crack that seems to emanate from the skull, together
with the clutter o f linear detail in the painting— tufts of grass here and
there, tree limbs reaching every which way.
To emphasize this difference, Taylor contrasts the treatment of
St. John in both paintings. In the Crivelli, he notes,
the vertical structure-line o f the figure | i.e., the fact that he is standing up in a
m ore o r less vertical w ayl has little m eaning w ith regard to the effect o f the
w hole, because the diagonal lines o f his c loak are so strong that they destroy
all possib le sense o f a vertical com pact m ass. A nd co n sid er the nature o f the
lines them selves. Every curve is flattened and broken so that the line seem s to
struggle to reach its destination . Furtherm ore, if w e iso late the line o f the
U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 35
cloak , w e see th a t fa r from su ggesting the b a lan ced arc o f a c irc le , it seem s
ra th e r like the lash o f a w hip . A nd th is eccen tric line is rep ea ted th ro u g h o u t, in
the ro b e o f the V irgin , in the ro ck s, and even in the body o f C hrist. H ow co n
trasting w ith th is is o u r schem e o f the St. Jo h n o f P erug ino . T h e lines o f the
P erug ino seem to w ra p them selves to g e th e r in to a sm o o th -p laned vo lum e,
w h ile th ose o f the C rivelli d isp e rse in to the air.2
Even more than in the figure o f St. John, the difference between the
two paintings is manifest in the way that each recessional plane in the Pe
rugino is clearly outlined, the landscape receding into the distance in a
reasonable and logical way, while in the Crivelli the landscape seems
hopelessly confused. Notice, in the Crivelli, how the drapery on Christ’s
right leg sweeps in a continuous line into the-landscape beyond, how the
tree, which must be some distance behind him, seems to catch the drapery
in the wind, and how another tree behind St. John seems to merge into the
cliff across the bay. In contrast, each plane in the Perugino is distinct. Line
seems to serve a regulatory function. It is as if line preserves the integrity
of the space it describes in the Perugino, whereas in the Crivelli it violates
that integrity, disrupting our sense o f organization, order, and harmony.
S hape and S pace
It should be obvious, from the previous discussion, that one o f the
primary functions o f line is to describe shape and space. One o f the first
questions to ask yourself about a work o f art is how do its lines describe
shape and space? In a consistent and orderly way? Or in an apparently dis
ruptive, even random way?
Normally, shape and space are defined in consistent and accessible
ways, although the lines operating to define these elements may not al
ways be immediately obvious to you and may achieve very complicated
effects. But if you learn to see these lines in the first place, and the shapes
or spaces they describe, you can begin to come to grips with other, more
complicated effects achieved by the artist. When you first look at Claude
M onet’s Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris (Figure 13), for instance, you may not
notice the diamond-shaped space that defines the center o f the composi
tion. Its top is defined by the roof o f the train station, and its bottom is de
lineated by two implicit or compositional lines that meet in the hazy
locomotive in the center distance and that run along the tops o f the two
closer locomotives on each side o f the center track. The area is very inter
esting because it seems to describe both shape— a two-dimensional dia
mond on a flat plane— and space— the airy volume of the train station
itself. In fact, the bottom two lines are achieved by M onet’s reference to
the traditional laws o f mechanical perspective, the geometric system of
compositional lines perfected in the Renaissance for rendering the illusion
36 U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n
Figure 13 Claude M onet. G ate Saint-Lazare, Paris: The A rrival o f a Train,
1877. Oil on canvas, 32M in. X 40 in. Courtesy o f The H arvard University Art
M useum s. Bequest, Collection o f M aurice W ertheim. C lass o f 1906. 1951.53.
of three-dimensional space. Often imaged as a road (or set of railroad
tracks!) disappearing into the distance, traditional perspective is based on
the observation that parallel lines seem to converge toward a common
point in the distance, referred to as the vanishing point. In the Monet, the
tops (and bottoms) o f the trains converge on a hypothetical vanishing
point that exists directly across from our point o f view, somewhere behind
the distant central locomotive. The serpentine central railroad tracks
would also converge on this point if they were straightened out.
Thus, the bottom of the diamond shape is composed of two lines that
define three-dimensional space, while its top is composed o f the two lines
that define the two-dimensional edge of the roof. M onet seems to be will
fully playing off the illusion of three-dimensional space against the actu
ality o f the two-dimensional surface o f the canvas (paintings are, after all,
two-dimensional planes), a sense of play that the curvilinear railroad
tracks emphasize since they seem to be themselves a joke on the traditional
U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n 37
representation o f the laws o f perspective. Why would M onet want to do
this? Would it surprise you to discover that he was interested in drawing
our attention not only to his choice o f subject matter, but to his handling
o f it as well? Doesn’t it make sense that he might want you to consider the
surface of the canvas as a composition o f effects to be enjoyed in their own
right? His style of painting was as new in 1877 as the steam locomotive
itself, and we move between them, the subject and its handling, in much
the way that our eye moves between the two-dimensional design of the
surface and the three-dimensional representation o f space.
W hile Monet does not quite say that the design o f the composition
is more important than its subject matter, it is quite clear that, along with
a number o f his contemporaries, he initiates a logic that will eventually
argue just that. Franz Kline’s’s Mahoning (Figure 14), painted in 1956,
almost eighty years after the Monet, has made that very step. Here the
canvas is all surface; there is no illusion o f depth; there is only a criss
crossed tangle o f broadly painted lines. This is a very difficult type of
painting for most students to talk about because it seems to have no
Figure 14 Franz Kline, M ahoning , 1956. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 8 in. X 8 ft. 4 in.
W hitney M useum of A m erican Art, New York. Purchased w ith funds from the
Friends o f the W hitney M useum o f Am erican Art. Photo: Steven Slom an. C ollec
tion o f the W hitney M useum o f Am erican Art, New York.
38 U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n
subject matter. If you consider, however, that one o f its primary objectives
might be to free the painted surface o f the necessity o f representing three-
dimensional space, then you might discover that you have something to
say after all. Like Jackson Pollock’s Full Fathom Five, discussed in the
next chapter (Figure 31), the painting is about painting itself, the act of
painting.
In the late 1940s, Kline had projected a number o f his representa
tional drawings onto a wall. So magnified, they seemed to him to capture
a sense o f dynamic tension that mirrored the force and energy o f the mod
ern world. Mahoning is, in fact, the name of a township in Carbon Coun
ty, Ohio, very near to where Kline grew up in Lehighton, an industrial city
in the heart o f Pennsylvania’s coal country. As a child, Kline was sur
rounded by factories, foundries, and, especially, the trestles and rails of
the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which carried anthracite coal down the valley
and was the city’s largest employer. Mahoning does not represent the in
dustrial landscape o f Kline’s youth, but it does suggest it. In the broad
strokes of his brush on canvas, one senses the furious activity o f industri
al America.
Light and Dark
Kline did not think o f his painting as black lines on a white ground.
“ I paint the white as well as the black,” he said, “ and the white is just as
important.” The tension between black and white— that is, between
opposites, light and dark— is one o f the primary sources o f the sense of
energy that K line’s canvases evoke. But Kline also understands that in
addition to the traditional system s o f geometric perspective, one of
the primary ways to evoke the illusion o f three dim ensions on a two-
dim ensional plane in painting is by im itating the effects o f light as it
falls on three-dim ensional surfaces. His painting, in effect, violates that
expectation, and as a result, turns its back on the representation o f three-
dim ensional space.
Gradual shifts from light to dark across the same surface generally
indicate that you are looking at a rounded or contoured form. Georgia
O ’Keeffe’s charcoal drawing of Alligator Pears in a Basket (Figure 15) is
an almost classic example o f this modulation, ranging from the darkest
blacks in its shadowed areas, through shadings of gray, to areas o f white
where an intense light strikes directly off the foremost surface o f the pears
or off the back o f the basket itself. This technique of creating the sense of
a rounded surface by means of gradual shifts and gradations of light and
dark was perfected in Renaissance Italy, where it came to be known as
chiaroscuro. In Italian, chiaroscuro means light (chiaro) dark (oscuro)— and
U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 39
Figure 15 G eorgia O ’ Keeffe, A lliga tor Pears in a B asket, 1923. C harcoal on paper,
24% in. X 18% in. The National M useum o f W omen in the Arts, W ashington, D.C.,
Gift o f W allace and W ilhelm ina Holladay. © 2005 The G eorgia O ’ Keeffe Foundation/
A rtist R ights Society (ARS), New York.
notice how language here reflects technique, as the end o f the first word
melds into the beginning of the second, creating a seamless transition
between “light” and “dark.”
The relative level o f lightness or darkness o f an area or object is tra
ditionally called its relative value. That is, a given area or object can be
said to be darker or lighter in value. In O ’Keeffe’s Alligator Pears, the
areas o f the pears closest to the source o f light are lighter in value than
those farther away. These areas, which directly reflect the light source and
which are indicated by white, are known as highlights. Highlights are
often left “blank,” revealing the unmarked paper or canvas beneath. As the
object moves through the shadings o f gray to dark black, different depths
o f shadow are evoked. Darker even than any shading on the object itself
is its cast shadow, seen here at the bottom left. Note that just above the
40 U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n
cast shadow, at the bottom of the basket, is an area o f light gray. This is
an area o f reflected light, cast indirectly from the table on which the bas
ket rests, lightening the underside of the shadowed surface.
The revelation o f form and space through chiaroscuro and shifts in
value is one o f the primary techniques o f printmaking, used to great effect
in Kathe Kollwitz’s etching The Downtrodden (Figure 16). Perhaps more
than any other printmaker in history, with the possible exception o f Rem
brandt and Goya, Kollwitz was able to manipulate contrasts o f light and
dark to create highly dramatic and emotional images. In this etching, the
figures barely emerge from a shroud of darkness. Only the edge of the fa
ther’s hand, which hides his face in the upper right corner o f the compo
sition, and the angelic face o f the dead child in the lower left corner are
fully lit. Between these poles o f light, poles o f innocence and despair, the
Figure 16 Kiithe Kollwitz, The Downtrodden, 1900. E tching and aquatint on
paper, \2V* in. X 9Y, in. The National M useum o f W omen in the Arts, W ashington,
D.C. G ift o f W allace and W ilhelm ina Holladay. © 2005 Artists Rights Society
(ARS). New York/VG Bild-K unst, Bonn.
U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n 41
mother reaches down, letting the child’s hair fall between her fingers. Just
above, the father’s hand reaches out aimlessly. And the m other’s face, re
alized in a powerful middle-tone gray, displays an extraordinary range of
emotion, at once infinitely sad and ultimately tired. It is as if Kollwitz’s
gray has become the very color o f bitterness and resignation.
Sometimes you will encounter works of art that employ little or no
contrast between light and dark. The light seems uniform throughout. If
the drama in Kollwitz’s etching is palpable, minimal contrasts of light and
dark usually have the opposite effect. A work o f art that seems uniform in
tone, such as Perugino’s Crucifixion, usually evokes feelings o f calm and
harmony.
Color
Though it is easier to think o f questions o f light in terms o f black and
white, the same rules apply to color as well. Think, for instance, o f the dif
ference between pink and maroon: one is red saturated with white and the
other is red saturated with black. W hen we refer to someone who wears a
lot o f pastels, we mean someone who dresses in colors light in value. It is
not hard to imagine a painting o f a red ball that moves in value from a
white highlight to a black shadow through all the various tints and shades
of red (the color that results from adding white to a pure hue is called a
tint o f that hue, and the color that results from adding black to the hue is
called a shade).
Yet color functions in works o f art in terms more complicated than
just those o f light and dark. In fact, in the same way that black and white
can be considered opposites, each color has its opposite number as well.
These opposites are called complementary colors. Complements are pairs
o f colors that, when mixed together in almost equal proportion, create
neutral grays, but that, when standing side by side, as pure hues, seem to
intensify and even contradict one another.
The traditional color wheel (see the back cover) makes these oppo
sitions clear. Each primary color— red, yellow, and blue— has, as its com
plement, a secondary color— green, violet, and orange, respectively. Thus,
the standard complementary pairs are red/green, yellow/violet, and
blue/orange (and, obviously, the intermediate hues have complementary
opposites as well— the complement o f red-orange is blue-green, for in
stance). Furthermore, just as gray moderates between black and white— as
white becomes gray with the addition o f black and vice versa— each color
gradually moderates into the hue of its neighbor with the addition of
its neighbor. Thus, the more yellow one adds to green, for instance, the
more yellow-green the color becomes. Neighboring colors on the color
42 U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n
wheel are called analogous colors. Unlike complementary pairs, which
create a sense of contradiction or opposition to one another, analogous
pairs usually seem to rest harmoniously beside each other. The analogous
blue-green-violet relationships are commonly referred to as cool, and red-
orange-yellow combinations are said to be warm , or even hot.
Color theory is a vastly complicated field— one that is hardly settled,
even among physicists— and the scheme described above is a vast over
simplification o f the ways in which colors interact. (If you wish to explore
color interactions more fully, try to locate Josef A lbers’s Interaction o f
Color, originally written in 1963, but reissued in 1993 in an interactive
CD-ROM edition by the Yale University Press. Here you can have hands-
on experience manipulating and experiencing the properties o f color in a
simple, easily accessible format.) Nevertheless, in writing about art, it is
important to understand the basic complementary and analogous group
ings because a great many works depend upon them to some degree in
order to achieve their effects.
Much o f the power of Vincent van Gogh’s work depends upon his
use of complementary color schemes. In a letter to his brother Theo, he
described his famous painting The N ight Café (Figure 17) in the follow
ing terms:
In m y p ic tu re o f the “N ig h t C afé” I have tried to express the idea that th e café
is a p lace w here one can ru in o n ese lf, run m ad , o r co m m it a c rim e. I have tried
to ex p ress the terrib le p assions o f hu m an ity by m eans o f red and green . T he
ro o m is b lo o d -red and dark yellow , w ith a g reen b illiard tab le in the m iddle;
there a re fo u r lem on-yellow lam p s w ith a g low o f oran g e and green.
E very w h ere th ere is a c lash and co n trast o f the m ost a lien reds and g reen s in
the figures o f little sleep ing h o o lig an s in the em p ty d reary room , in v io le t and
b lu e . . . . T h e w h ite coat o f the patron , on v ig il in a corner, tu rns lem on-yellow ,
o r pa le lum in o u s green.
So I have tried to express , as it w ere, the pow ers o f dark n ess in a low w ine
shop, and all th is in an a tm o sp h ere like a d ev il’s fu rnace o f pa le su lp h u r .. . .
It is co lo r not loca lly true from th e po in t o f v iew o f the s te reoscop ic realist,
but co lo r to suggest the em otion o f an a rd en t tem p eram en t.4
The color scheme, especially the contrast between the complements
red and green, is meant to suggest the tension of the scene, the sense that
beneath the surface an almost violent energy or fury is about to erupt.
Things do not go together here, either literally or pictorially.
In a painting such as Pablo Picasso’s Woman with Book (reproduced
on the back cover), virtually the full range o f complementary contrasts is
employed. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the painting seems to be unified in its
overall effect. Except for the presence o f a profile that does not seem to be
her own in the mirror behind the seated woman— an image that suggests
U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n 43
Figure 17 V incent van Gogh, The N igh t Café , 1888. Oil on canvas,
2 8 ‘A in. X 36 ‘A in. Yale University A rt Gallery, Bequest o f Stephen Carlton Clark,
B.A. 1903. 1961.18.34. Photograph by Jospeh Szaszfai.
an intruder or an unseen observer, perhaps the painter himself— nothing
of the tension and turmoil o f van Gogh’s painting seems to inform our vi
sion. Rather, we observe a woman in meditation, gazing vacantly up from
her book, daydreaming. Picasso’s painting, as opposed to van Gogh’s , is
not a nightmare, but a reverie.
This is surely the result, in part, o f Picasso’s subject matter: His
model is M arie-Thérése Walter, who was also his mistress. But it is also a
result o f the fact that he is trying to make contrasting elements work to
gether in harmony. Just as he has rendered the face o f M arie-Thérése si
multaneously in both profile and three-quarters view, just as he made her
seem at once fully clothed and half-naked, Picasso’s sometimes stridently
discordant colors here manage to coexist. It is apparent from the blackness
outside the window to the left that it is night, and the darkness outside
contrasts strongly to the brightness inside. Notice how the shadowed side
o f M arie-Thérése’s face is rendered in green and violet and how these two
colors dominate the darker, cooler side of the painting. On the other side
o f the painting, the warm red glow of the chair, its orange back topped by
the yellow frame around the mirror, seems almost to generate heat. It is as
44 U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n
if Picasso has realized here something o f which van Gogh only dreamed.
In the same letter to his brother Theo in which he described the color ef
fects o f The Night Cafe, he claimed that he was always in hope of express
ing “ the love o f two lovers by a m arriage o f two complementary colors,
their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations o f kindred
tones.” 5
Neither Picasso nor van Gogh is interested in representing the pre
cise color o f the scene. The Impressionists had freed painting of the ne
cessity o f representing local color (that is, the color we “know” a thing to
be in the sense that we “know” trees are green) and chose to represent the
optical color of what they saw (in the sense that a hill covered with
“green” trees will appear to be blue in the distance). Picasso and van Gogh
have gone even further. “Colors, like features,” Picasso would later write,
“ follow the changes o f the emotions.”6 As opposed to van G ogh’s, how
ever, Picasso’s emotions here run toward the loving and affectionate. One
o f the most widely known books o f Picasso’s day was an occult classic,
first published in 1901, called Thought-Fonns, written by Annie Besant
and C. W. Leadbeater. It contains a “ Key to the M eaning of Colors” out
lining which emotions are connected to which colors, and not surprising
ly, mint green, the color o f M arie-Thérése’s hair, is the color of
“sympathy,” and violet, the other color that dominates her face, suggests
“love for humanity.” More precisely, violet is “ a mixture of affection and
devotion . . . and the more delicate shades o f | it] invariably show the ca-
pacity o f absorbing and responding to a high and beautiful ideal.” Picas
so might not have read the book, but its classifications were so popular
that he almost could not have escaped them, and, evidently, they are at
work here.
It should be clear, however, even from this brief discussion, that dif
ferent artists use color in different ways. Yellow may be “sulphurous,” as
it was to van Gogh, but to someone else it may suggest the “highest intel
lect”— the meaning, in fact, given it by Besant and Leadbeater. Combina
tions o f complementary colors may create tension in a painting, or they
may be harmonized. Analogous color schemes often create a unified ef
fect, but just as often that sense of unity can transform itself into a feeling
of monotony. Meaningful discussions of an artist’s use o f color must often
rely on a context greater than the individual work— as I have relied on the
artist’s own words, in the case of van Gogh, and upon intellectual history,
in the case o f Picasso.
As a writer, you must always be aware o f the fact that the associa
tions you have with a particular color are not universal. Tf you hear “red,”
you may think “roses” and “love,” while the next person thinks “blood”
U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 45
and “anger,” while the next person thinks “communism.” If van G ogh’s
lines seem violent and disruptive, for instance, this impression would sup
port your notion that he is employing complementary colors in order to
create a sense of disunity and chaos. Ask yourself, how does the artist em
ploy color and what does it mean? But then ask yourself, do other things
about the composition support this reading?
O ther E lem ents
There are a number of other formal elements that might be important
for you to consider. What, for instance, is the texture o f the work? If it is
uniformly smooth, does this smoothness contribute to a sense o f harmo
ny? Consider van Gogh’s N ight Café again. Doesn’t the thickness o f the
brushstroke, its very assertive and gestural presence, express his emotion
al involvement in the scene at the café?
Another formal element, one not quickly associated with art, is time.
Time becomes a factor in sculpture when we find ourselves walking
around or through it. Sculpture changes as the light changes, in the play
o f light and shadow across the surfaces o f the work. This must have been
the effect o f the great free-standing sculptures that once adorned the ped
iment o f the Parthenon in Athens. One o f the surviving fragments o f the
east pediment, which originally depicted the birth of Athena, is the so-
called Three Goddesses (Figure 18). Slightly larger than lifesize, the
sculpture stood on a three-foot-deep platform over fifty feet above the
ground. As the sun moved from directly in front of it to its apex at noon,
Figure 18 Phidias and workshop, Three Goddesses, from the east pedim ent o f
the Parthenon, c. 435 B.C. M arble, height o f center figure 5 ft. The British
M useum , London.
46 U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n
the detailed folds of the draperies, falling across the highly defined bod
ies o f the goddesses, would have made the sculptures almost seem to
move and come to life. The sculptor— or at least the sculptor overseeing
the work, since he was in charge o f the entire sculptural program at the
Parthenon— was the famous Phidias (c. 490-430 B .C .). He was reknowned
for his ability to recreate the human form in a convincing way. Sculpture,
to him, was a dynamic, rather than static, medium. It was active rather
than passive. It seemed to be alive.
Even abstract contemporary sculpture can achieve something of the
same effect. The garden Isamu Noguchi designed for the museum dedicat
ed to his work in Long Island City, Queens, is a dynamic space (Figure 19).
In Japanese gardens, each o f the stone sculptures is believed to be con
nected to the others, as if each were rising out of the great mass of the
earth’s core. We enter a garden, we recognize that we are “floating” on the
world beneath. As we move through it, the garden changes. As Noguchi
him self describes it: “ Its viewing is poly directional. Its awareness is in
depth. With participation o f mobile man all points are centered. Without a
fixed point o f perspective all views are equal, continuous motion with
continuous change.” 8 Noguchi also feels that the stones in a garden
Figure 19 Isam u Noguchi, Sculpture G arden. Isam u Noguchi Garden M useum .
L ong Island City, Queens, New York, 1987. Published with the perm ission o f The
Isamu Noguchi Foundation. Inc. © 2005. The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and
Garden M useum . New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by
Shigeo Anzai.
U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n 47
embody a sense o f time comparable to human time: “ Their weathering
seems to coincide . . . with our own sense o f historical time. . . . There is
a time passage to stone not unlike our own. A mellowing takes place.” 9
Thus in the garden we experience time in its vast geological sense
(through the stones’ connection to the earth mass below), in terms o f the
span of human life, and in “real” time, as we walk through the garden in
the present moment itself.
Time entered the domain o f a rt in radically new terms with the in
vention o f photography in the nineteenth century. Photography seems to
convey the essence of a particular time and place, and this aura of authen
ticity, together with its sense of instantaneous vision, of the moment itself
captured forever, constitutes a large part o f its appeal. Today, it is appar
ent that the dialogue between the present moment of our seeing the pho
tograph— our actual experience o f it in “real” time— versus the way in
which the photograph seems to embody, or make present, something long
lost or far away, has revolutionized our sense o f time and space.
But it is important to recognize that the photograph is composed of
the same elements as the other arts. The photographer Henri-Cartier Bres
son described the photographic process in the following terms:
W e m ust p lace ourse lves and o u r cam era in the rig h t re la tionsh ip w ith the
sub ject, and it is in fitting the la tte r in to the fram e o f the v iew finder that the
p ro b lem s o f com position begin . T h is recogn ition , in real life, o f a rh y th m o f
surfaces, lines, and values is fo r m e the essence o f p h o to g ra p h y .. . . W e co m
pose a lm ost a t the m om ent o f re leas in g the s h u t te r . . . . L ater you can am use
y o u rse lf b y tracing o u t on the ph o to the g eom etrical pa tte rn , o r spatia l re la
tionsh ips, realiz ing that, by re leasing the shu tte r at that p recise instan t, you had
instinc tive ly se lected an exact geom etrical harm ony, and that w ithou t th is the
pho tograph w ould have been life le s s .10
Cartier-Bresson called this the “decisive moment.” Thus, the leaping
man in his 1932 photograph Gare St. Lazare (Figure 20) is suspended
above his own reflection, which creates a sense o f balance in the photo
graph. But his leap is also reflected on the circus poster on the wall behind
him, just as the semicircular arched back o f the poster figure is echoed in
the semicircular form in the foreground water. In fact, the reflection in the
water eerily mirrors the poster on the wall.
Two other art media— video and film— rely even more on time. One
of the traditional distinctions among the arts has been that the plastic
arts— painting, drawing, and sculpture— are spatial media, while the other
arts— dance, music, literature— are primarily temporal and linear in
nature. Video and film are both.
Most o f us think of video in relation to commercial television. How
ever, many video artists purposefully manipulate the medium in order to
48 U s in g V is u a l In f o r m a t io n
Figure 20 Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Gore St. Lazare. Paris, 1932.
M agnum Photos Inc. © 2002
Henri Cartier-Bresson.
distinguish what they do from the television we habitually consume. The
most common difference, again, is the medium’s relation to time. Stan
dard television time is based upon the length of the commercial— 10, 30,
60. and, less commonly, 120 seconds in duration. As David Antin has
pointed out in a detailed analysis o f the medium, there is really no differ
ence between commercial time and the structure o f time in television pro
grams generally. A news “story,” for instance, generally fits into this same
time scheme, and a baseball game is a succession o f pitches, hits, and
catches that fit the same pace.11 Video artists often ignore this pace com
pletely, so to a viewer expecting “television,” their work usually seems
boring. Very commonly, the camera is held in one position, for as long as
an hour. In this way, other aspects of the medium that are generally ig
nored, such as the peculiar way that video represents and distorts deep
space, are foregrounded.
Video artists also commonly create installations in which the viewer
encounters the medium as part o f a larger, sculptural space. Bill Viola’s
Room for St. John o f the Cross (Figure 21), for instance, contrasts the
stillness o f a single image of a mountain shown on a small monitor in a
cubicle at the center of the room (a space comparable to the “meditative”
U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 49
Figure 21 Bill Viola,
R oom fo r St. John o f the
Cross, 1983. Video and
sound installation. © Bill
Viola. C ollection: M useum
o f Contem porary Art, Los
A ngeles. Photo by Kira
Perov/Sauidds and Nunns.
space o f St. John) and a video projection o f large snow-covered moun
tains, shot with a hand-held camera in wild, breathless flights o f move
ment. The world “outside,” in other words, contrasts with the world
“within.”
Perhaps one o f the best ways to think of film, which can reproduce
space in ways far m ore sophisticated than can video, is as an assemblage
of various spatial and temporal points o f view. The fade-in and fade-out,
flashback and flashforward, closeup and longshot, and even the m ulti
image screen, all combine to produce film’s many, sometimes startling vi
sual effects. This multiplicity o f visual techniques combines with the more
purely temporal means o f narrative, dialogue, and musical score to create
one o f the most complex of the arts.
Photography, film, and video have come to play an important role in
contemporary art as means to document live, temporary, or remote works.
As much as Richard Serra would prefer for us to have experienced Tilted
Arc in person, we know it today primarily through its photodocumenta
tion. The artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, purposefully create
large-scale works that are in place for, at most, a few weeks. On June 24,
1995, for instance, the Christos completed wrapping the Reichstag in
Berlin (Figure 22). Originally completed in 1894 to house the German
parliament, the building has great significance to the German people.
Soon after Hitler had become chancellor in 1933, it had been burned, an
act symbolic of Hitler’s desire to end parliamentary rule. Destroyed again
in 1945 during the Battle o f Berlin, it was rebuilt during the Cold War as
a symbol of West Germ any’s dedication to democracy, but it was unclear
what function it should actually serve. With the reunification o f Germany
50 U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n
Figure 22 C hristo and Jeanne-C laude. W rapped Reichstag , Berlin,
1971-95. © C hristo 1995. Photo by W olfgang Volz.
1990, the lower house of the German parliament, the Bundestag, moved
, an act symbolic of renewed German unity. The Christos had wanted to
rap the Reichstag since 1971, but were continually denied. Finally, in
994, the Bundestag voted 292 to 223, with 9 abstentions, to let the Chris
s proceed. The wrapping required 1,076,000 square feet o f woven
olypropylene fabric with an aluminum surface and 51,181 feet o f blue
ope. Thousands of people, both in person and on the Internet, watched as
0 climbers and 110 workers created a wall o f folds and draperies remi
iscent of Greek sculpture (see Figure 18). When the building was un
rapped two weeks later, on July 7, it became clear that the Christos had
ucceeded in giving the people o f Germany a “gift,” a celebratory renew
l o f the Reichstag.
The C hristos’ works are always short-lived, “living on” only in the
emory o f those who saw them and in the array o f drawings, models,
hotographs, and films that survive the actual work. As a result, many o f
eir works— Running Fence, an 18-foot-high, 24 ¡¿-mile-long, white
abric fence that ran through two northern California counties in 1976;
urrounded Islands, in which eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, Florida,
ere wrapped with pink fabric in 1983; and the 1991 Umbrellas, Japan—
. S. A., in which 1,760 almost 20-foot-tall yellow umbrellas were opened
in
in
w
1
to
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r
9
n
w
s
a
m
p
th
f
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w
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U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 51
in the Tejon Pass in southern California at the same time that 1,340 blue
umbrellas were opened in Ibaraki prefecture, north o f Tokyo, Japan—
have achieved an almost mythological status. The creation o f this m ythol
ogy is a fundamental part o f the Christos’ work. Their monumental
endeavors acquire something o f the aura o f the ruined monuments o f an
cient civilizations.
Finally, o f all the new media, the com puter and digital technologies
associated with it have offered the artist a unique new set o f possibilities,
opening the image to the possibility o f manipulation by both artist and au
dience. Photography, once thought o f as a medium o f evidentiary “truth,”
a record o f the visual world, has become, in the digital age, a medium in
which new visual worlds can be created. Take, for instance, the work o f
German photographer Andreas Gursky. Many o f his large photographs are
completely unmanipulated, “straight” renderings o f the contemporary
world, but many others, such as the enormous Untitled V (Figure 23), may
well capture the “truth” o f contemporary experience but are themselves
complete fabrications. To create Untitled V, Gursky built a short double
shelf, which he then photographed six times, restocking it with new shoes
in each instance— there are 204 sets o f Nike running shoes in the work—
and then repositioning his camera to create the proper angle. Finally, he
pieced each of the six shots together to make the final image, a sort o f tes
timony to commodity culture, NikeTown gone monumental. If this
panoram a o f com m erce is technically “inauthentic,” it seems, neverthe
less, an “authentic” icon o f contemporary life.
Figure 23 A ndreas Gursky, Untitled V , 1997. C -Print, 73 in. X 17414 in.
Courtesy o f the M athew M arks Gallery, N ew York. © 2005 Andreas
Gursky/A rtists R ights Society (ARS), N ew York/VG B ild-K unst, Bonn.
52 U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n
RECOGNIZING THE PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN
One thing that would suggest that the traditional distinction between spa
tial and temporal media might not be altogether valid is the sense o f visu
al rhythm and repetition we often experience before works of art. Certain
formal elements— lines, shapes, colors— recur, in either exact or analogous
terms, and this repetition creates a sense o f visual rhythm that is analogous
to musical or poetic rhythm. In all the arts, rhythm and repetition serve to
organize, or order, the work into distinct and recognizable patterns.
Rhythm and Repetition
Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sciinte-Victoire (Figure 24) is composed of a
number of repeated shapes and lines that serve to unify the composition.
Notice that the slope of the mountain itself is repeated down the right edge
o f the top o f the central tree, again with uncanny accuracy in the branch
that extends from the right side o f the tree halfway down its trunk, and
rXStóssrí»*
Figure 24 Paul Cezanne. M ont Sciinte-Victoire, 1885-87. Oil on canvas,
25k in. X 32 ‘A in. The M etropolitan M useum o f Art. Bequest o f Mrs. H.O.
Havemeyer, 1929. The H. O. Havem eyer Collection (29.100.64).
U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n 53
again, immediately below that, in the large curve o f the river. The shape
o f the river on the left o f the tree seems to echo, in reverse, the hill that
comes into the composition from the right. A rhythm of arches extends the
length o f the railroad viaduct, and throughout the painting, small, square,
and rectangular areas— buildings, roofs, chimneys, fields— echo and re
peat each other’s shapes. In a later version o f this same m otif (Figure 25),
the precise elements o f the landscape have virtually disappeared, yet here
the small quadrilateral shapes— which now seem to have been created by
single brushstrokes, moving in a sort o f pulse through the composition—
ascend toward the top o f the mountain in a rhythm and movement of
growing clarity and definition finally achieved by Cézanne at the paint
ing’s (and the mountain’s ) summit.
Balance
If you compare Cézanne’s 1885-1887 version o f M ont Sainte-Victoire
(Figure 24) to Perugino’s Crucifixion (Figure 11), you will notice that one
thing these very different paintings have in common is that they can be
Figure 25 Paul Cézanne, M ont Sainte-Victoire, 1904-06. Oil on canvas,
27% in. X 36% in. Philadelphia M useum o f Art, George W. Elkins Collection.
E 1936—1—1 .
54 U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t io n
divided into more or less equal quarters across the axes formed, in the
Cézanne, by the central vertical tree and the arched railroad viaduct and, in
the Perugino, along the vertical axis of the cross and the horizon line. This
geometric division, which echoes and reinforces the shape o f the frame in
each painting, creates a sense o f symmetry and equilibrium in both compo
sitions. The sense of disequilibrium apparent in Crivelli’s Crucifixion
(Figure 12) derives in large part from the fact that, despite its overall sym
metry and balance on a vertical axis, created by both the cross and the over
riding arch, there is no clear horizontal symmetry, and the structure of the
right side o f the composition seems radically different from the structure of
the left. It is as if Crivelli has purposefully defied our expectation o f balance.
There are many other ways to achieve a sense o f balance in a com
position. Radial balance is created when all the elements of the com posi
tion seem to emerge from a real or actual focal point. Many works o f art
utilize an asymmetrical balance in which a perceived center o f gravity
seems to balance elements around it. It is like balancing a teeter-totter
with a very heavy child on one side and a light child on the other: the
heavy child moves toward the center o f the teeter-totter, while the lighter
child sits on the very end. Furthermore, relatively dark shapes seem
“heavier” to the eye than lighter ones.
Sometimes artists purposefully choose to violate the principle of bal
ance. Franz K line’s M ahoning (Figure 14) is a case in point. He once com
mented on the way that black and white exert tension upon one another in
his paintings: “ I thought about it in a certain sense o f the awkwardness of
‘not-balance,’ the tentative reality o f lack o f balance.” 12 His contempo
rary, the abstract painter M ilton Resnick, described the feeling in similar
terms. In his painting, he said, “I’m falling. I keep from falling. I ’m
falling. I keep from falling.” 1’1 For both, the lack o f balance helped to cre
ate a sense o f action and energy in the painting.
Proportion
Proportion is the relationship o f each part o f the composition to the
whole and to each other part. An excellent example o f its use can be seen
in the 1904-1906 version o f M ont Sainte-Victoire (Figure 25). You will
notice that the composition is divided neatly at the foot of the mountain.
This line, with the mountain and clouds above it and the countryside of
Aix-en-Provence in southern France below it, very closely corresponds to
what the ancient Greeks referred to as “ the golden section.” This propor
tion— which is found, incidentally, in living organisms— can be defined
mathematically as follows: The smaller section (in the Cézanne, the area
above the line running across the bottom of the mountain) is to the larger
U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 55
section (the countryside below) as the larger section is to the whole paint
ing. In numbers, each ratio is 1 to 1.618. Not only did the Greeks use this
“ideal” or “ perfect” proportion as the basis for constructing their greatest
buildings, but they conceived o f the human body in the same terms. The
perfect body, they reasoned, consists o f a torso and head roughly equiva
lent to the vertical height o f the top o f the Cézanne composition, the body
from the waist down equivalent to the lower part o f the composition. Such
proportional ideals, it is worth suggesting, dominate our visual thinking to
this day— from our sense o f when a landscape painting “feels” right to our
sense o f the ideal human form.
Scale
Scale is an issue with which we have dealt already in relation to the
“museum without walls.” It is sometimes very difficult, for instance, to get
an accurate feeling for a work o f art’s size from a photograph o f it. To get
a sense o f this principle, you need only think again o f the actual size of
Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (Figure 10) and the viewer’s inability to take
it all in at once, compared with the sense o f containm ent one feels before
it in reproduction. Similarly, only from a series o f photographs or from the
film can you get a sense o f the many elements o f N oguchi’s Sculpture
Garden (Figure 19). Part o f the extraordinarily comic effect o f Roy Licht
enstein’s monumental sculpture Brushstroke (Figure 35) derives from the
fact that it is so large, not only in relation to a normal brushstroke but in
relation to the Hirshhorn Museum, which rises behind it.
Other, more subtle effects can be achieved by manipulating scale. In
Cézanne’s 1885-1887 M ont Sainte-Victoire (Figure 24), for instance,
there appears to be a large bush or tree at the end o f the railroad viaduct
ju st to the left o f the central tree. If it were really a tree, however, it would
be 300 or 400 feet tall. It is, in fact, part o f the pine in the foreground. In
a very subtle move here, Cézanne purposefully draws the most distant
planes o f the canvas up to the closest by confusing our reading o f what is
near and what is far away. As a result, our attention is drawn to the sur
face o f the composition, to its organization as a design, as much as to its
representation o f a three-dimensional world.
Scale is relative. That is, we define the scale o f an object in terms of
its relation to other objects around it. Thus, the two video images in Bill
Viola’s Room fo r St. John o f the Cross (Figure 21) are very different in
scale— one large, one small— and this difference in scale contributes to
the work’s disorienting sense o f space. In another example, the artist
Nikolai Buglaj has transformed a classical example o f an optical illusion
created by a shift in the context in which objects are perceived into a
56 U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t i o n
Figure 26 N ikolai Buglaj, R acial O ptical Illusion, 1997. Pencil and ink on
paper, 30 X 40 in. Courtesy the artist.
commentary on race relations in the United States (Figure 26). The three
figures in this piece are all the same size (if you don’t believe it, measure
them for yourself), but because the figure outside the room is, in effect,
contextless, he looks small. The figure entering the room appears to be
larger, and the figure inside the room appears largest o f all. The surround
ing walls alter the relative scale in which each figure is perceived. The
wall o f the room is decorated with an American flag, and it represents, for
Buglaj, the “system” from which African Americans are excluded, thus
making them appear smaller than they are. Conversely, from the outside
looking in, the white man appears larger than he really is.
Unity and Variety
One o f the primary sources o f interest and power in many works of
art is the way their various elements are combined to create a sense o f one
ness or unity. Picasso’s Woman with Book, for instance, on the back cover,
is almost wildly diverse in its color, but its pattern o f repetitive shapes uni
fies it. Round forms— from necklace, to armchair, to M arie-Thérése’s
breasts— draw the various colors together, as do the teardrop shapes that
make up both sleeves o f M arie-Thérése’s dress as well as the bodice o f her
dress. In fact, the pattern o f interlaced curves that circulate around and
across the m odel’s body unifies the entire composition.
U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 57
CONSIDERING QUESTION S O F MEDIUM
Each o f the different media— painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture,
architecture, photography, video, film, fiber, ceramics, metal, and glass,
among others— has its distinctive qualities, and within each there are var
ious subcategories— in painting, for instance, there is oil, acrylic, water-
color, tempera, gouache, and so on— that can elicit far different effects in
themselves. One o f the most important differences between the Perugino
and Crivelli Crucifixions (Figures 11 and 12), which we have so far not
discussed, lies in the artists’ choice o f medium. The first is an oil paint
ing, while the second is painted in tempera. As we have already noted, oil
paint is translucent— light penetrates it and is reflected back— and thus
Perugino’s medium contributes to the painting’s sense o f hopefulness, its
seeming promise o f salvation. Tempera, on the other hand, is opaque, and,
unless varnished, its flat, matte finish seems dull compared to the glowing
surface o f an oil painting, qualities perfectly in keeping with the prevail
ing sense o f misery in Crivelli’s work.
Sometimes a given medium is particularly suitable for conveying a
given set of ideas. Black-and-white film, for instance, lends itself particu
larly effectively to the portrayal o f tension and opposition. Shirin Neshat,
an Iranian artist who came to the United States in 1979 to study art, was
struck, eleven years later, when she finally returned to her homeland, by
the profound change that had occurred. Color had disappeared and every
thing was black and white— the men dressed in white shirts, the women
in traditional black chadors, head-to-toe coverings that reveal only face
and hands. The chador, especially from the Western perspective that N e
shat brought with her upon her return to Iran, represents the oppression of
women in Islamic society, but within the context o f Islam, many women
believe that they are truly equal to men, and they claim that the chador, by
concealing a wom an’s sexuality, prevents her from becoming a sexual ob
ject. This tension is the subject o f N eshat’s 1999 video installation
Rapture (Figures 27a and b). Com posed o f two videos projected simulta
neously on opposite walls, on one side o f the room a group o f men are
seen in a fortified castle, where they engage in ritual activities. On the
other side, women approach the castle, observe the men, then turn their
back on the m ales’ activities, walk to the sea, where six o f them climb into
a boat setting themselves adrift. On the opposite wall, the men, who have
gathered on the ramparts, wave goodbye, as if the gulf that separates men
from women in Islamic culture is, at least partially, unbridgeable.
Video, in other words, brings the tensions implicit in the still image
to life. As a medium, it animates the photograph. Something o f the same
58 U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n
r. .**?:
Figure 27a and b Shirin Neshat.
apture , 1997. Two video produc
tion stills. © Sherin Neshat 1999.
Courtesy Barbara G ladstone
Gallery, New York.
R
effect is achieved in the
relation between, say, the
drawings o f a M ichelan
gelo for the ceiling o f the
Sistine Chapel at the Vat
ican in Rome and the fin
ished fresco, or between
Christo’s preparatory col
lage drawings for his
projects such as The
Gates (Figures 28 and 29)
and the fully realized piece, which was installed in New York’s Central
Park in the winter o f 2005. Although the collages represent one o f the
principal ways that Christo and Jeanne-Claude raise the funds necessary
to create their work— they accept neither private nor foundation support—
they also document the evolution o f Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ideas.
They are, additionally, as Christo has said, “works o f art on their own,”
even if the experience o f the actual installation is a vastly different expe
rience. To see a piece like the Wrapped Reichstag (Figure 22) or The
Gates in person is, in Christo’s words, “ a little bit like if you are a sports
man, if you climb the Himalaya. In a way it is the unrepeatable experi
ence. It cannot be substituted with anything, not the film, or the
photographs, nor books, nor records can substitute that art experience.” 14
BEGINNING YOUR ESSAY BY DESCRIBING THE W ORK
One of the best ways to begin an essay on a work of art is to describe it as
accurately as possible. Description serves two purposes. On the one hand,
it orients your readers by drawing their attention to what you believe are
the most salient features o f the work. But perhaps more important,
– –
U s i n g V is u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 59
«.«<414144
m uittt
Figure 28 (above) C hristo and Jeanne-Claude,
The Gates, P roject fo r C entral Park, N ew York
City, 2004. Collage: Pencil, fabric, charcoal,
pastel, w ax crayon, enam el paint, m ap and fabric
sam ple; in tw o parts: 3 0 ‘A in. X 12 in. and
3014 in. X 2634 in. Photo by W olfgang Volz,
© C hristo 2004.
Figure 29 (right) C hristo and Jeanne-C laude,
The Gates, Project fo r C entral Park, N ew York
City, 1979-2005. Photo by W olfgang Volz,
© C hristo 2005.
description forces you to scrutinize the work yourself. In the process of
describing the work well, considering not just its subject matter and medi
um but its formal elements and principles o f composition, you will almost
always gain a better understanding o f the artist’s intentions and more fully
grasp the meaning o f the work.
The following description o f a photograph by Walker Evans
(Figure 30) was written by a student, Richard Watson, as part of a final
exam essay in a course on the history o f photography. Before reading on,
60 U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n
Figure 30 W alker Evans, Washroom and D ining Area o f F loyd Burroughs’s Home,
H ale County. Alabama, 1936. 35m m photograph. Courtesy o f the Library o f Congress,
W ashington, D.C.
you might find it useful to jot clown a few of your own notes describing the
photograph so that you can compare your own descriptive abilities to
Richard’s. Remember. I think Richard’s description is exemplary, and if your
description does not quite measure up to his, that is probably as it should be.
Richard’s descriptive abilities were nowhere nearly this developed when he
first began writing about art, some three years and seven art history classes
before he wrote the essay from which this description is exceipted.
E v a n s ’ s c r e a t i o n i s a symphony o f s h a p e s ,
t e x t u r e s , l i n e s , and p l a n e s . The round was h b a s i n
s i t t i n g on t h e r e c t a n g u l a r s h e l f , i n f r o n t o f a l
t e r n a t i n g t h i c k and t h i n h o r i z o n t a l wal l b o a r d s , t h e
v e r t i c a l d o o r f r a me , t h e s q u a r e k i t c h e n t a b l e wi t h
U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t io n 61
i t s mult i face ted curved and shaped kerosene lamp,
the beefy square kitchen hutch with i t s rectangular
upper cupboard, and the e legant p i tcher with i t s
graceful curves, a l l contribute to the geometric
harmony o f t h i s qu ie t s e t t i n g . The t ex tures o f the
rough wooden doorframe, the back door s e t against
the smooth f loorboard, the s o f t t a b l e c l o t h , and the
pol ished g l a s s lamp and p itcher o f f e r an array o f
t a c t i l e s ensa t ion . Most notable i s the towel hang
ing in the center o f the photograph, which together
with the heavy v e r t i c a l doorframe cuts the composi
t io n in h a l f and provides the focal point o f the
composit ion.
By combining simple geometric shapes, Evans has
created a powerful ly dramatic composition. The e l e
ments o f l i g h t and darkness (enhanced by h i s choice
o f medium, black-and-white photography) generate a
tens ion o f oppos i t ion and harmony among the shapes
and produce a unique sense o f balance: the white
towel aga ins t the dark doorframe, the black tab le
l eg and i t s shadow cut t ing across the b r ig h t ly sun
l i t f l o o r , and the sun-drenched p i tcher framed by
the black back w a l l , a l l generate a play o f l i g h t
and dark. The e f f e c t i s enhanced by the th ick bands
o f grayish wood in the front wa l l , chopped in to
equal parts by the th in black l i n e s o f shadow that
separate them. The v e r t i c a l frame o f the door, the
t a b le l e g s , and the upper part o f the kitchen hutch
r i s e in j u x ta p o s i t io n to the horizontal plane o f
the front wa l l , the door’s header, crea t ing a s e
r i e s o f short , r ig i d l y uniform l i n e s . The diagonal
run o f the wide f loorboards , broken by t h in , dark
j o i n t s i s echoed by the broad kitchen t a b le , the
l in e d t a b l e c l o t h , and the sun-bathed work space o f
the kitchen hutch.
This description formed the basis o f Richard’s essay. Although he
went on to place the photograph in a larger context— it was one of many
Evans created for the Farm Security Administration during the Great De
pression and it was reproduced without commentary in the opening pages
of Let Us Now Praise Famous M en , a work he published with writer
James Agee in 1941— Richard argued that the formal eloquence o f the
photograph mirrored Evans’s and Agee’s overall purpose. Both writer and
photographer wanted to reveal the inherent dignity o f Alabama’s impov
erished sharecroppers. The order and harmony o f the scene elevate the
banal and humble to the level o f art.
62 U s in g V is u a l I n f o r m a t i o n
ASKING YOURSELF A B O U TT H E W ORK O F ART:
A SUMMARY
The following set o f questions derives from the previous discussion and is
meant as a quick reminder o f the kinds o f things you might ask yourself
about a work o f art. It is by no means complete, and you almost surely will
discover that most works o f art raise still other questions. Nor will every
question be o f particular importance in your coming to terms with each
work you see. Still, this summary list does provide you with a model of
the kind o f analytical process that will help you understand what you see.
(These questions are reproduced inside the front cover so that you can
readily access them.)
One last word o f warning: Don’t take these questions as an outline
of your eventual paper. Good essays are never written by answering a se
ries o f predetermined questions. Consider them, rather, as a guide de
signed to help you take the notes and organize the thoughts that will
eventually lead to writing a good essay.
Q U ESTIO N S TO A SK B E FO R E WRITING ABOUT
A W ORK O F ART
What is the subject m atter o f the work?
• What is its title?
• Does the title help you interpret what you see?
• Can you imagine different treatments o f the same subject m atter that
would change the way you read the work?
W hat formal elements are important to the work and how do they
relate to its subject matter?
• How is line employed in the work?
• Does it seem to regulate or order the composition?
• Does it seem to fragment the work?
• Is it consistent with traditional laws o f perspective or does it violate
them?
• What is the relation of shape to space in the work?
• How do light and dark function in the work? Is there a great deal of
tonal contrast, or is it held to a minimum?
• What is the predominant color scheme of the work? Are com ple
mentary or analogous colors employed?
• What other elements seem important? Is your attention drawn to the
work’s texture? Does time seem an important factor in your experi
ence of the work?
U s in g V i s u a l I n f o r m a t i o n 63
How are these elements organized?
• Is there significant use of visual rhythm and repetition of elements?
• Is the composition balanced? Symmetrically? Asymmetrically?
• Do the w ork’s various elements seem proportional, and how does the
question of scale affect your perception?
• Does the composition seem unified or not?
How has the artist’s choice of medium played a role in the presenta
tion of the various elements and their organization or design?
• Are effects achieved that are realizable only in this particular
medium?
• If more than one medium is involved, what is their relation?
W hat does all this mean?
• W hat are the artist’s intentions? How do these intentions manifest
themselves in the composition? Are there other feelings or attitudes
that the composition seems to evoke, and what specific elements or
design choices account for those feelings?
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