What are you saying you're seeing?
Ian Hutson discusses visual literacy – Report by
Kim Manning
Ian Hutson cheerfully admitted to not only using but also appreciating editors when he spoke to the gathering at the July meeting of the Society. He said he loves it when a paragraph of his purple prose is neatly pruned to a compact sentence.
The current investment climate at QUT (where Ian works as a lecturer in the School of Visual Arts in the Creative Industries Faculty) is a bit weird because the university isn't putting much into developing areas like the visual arts (it is, instead, going into real estate). Nevertheless, it is still a vibrant part of the uni community where staff practice the 'cascade' model of information dissemination so that info flows evenly along and down (although Ian prefers the 'bidet' model because he feels that the source comes from underneath).
Some of the challenges Ian faces in his work include dissuading people that cartoons, as a particular form of visual literacy, don't just 'dribble out of the end of your arm' — they take time to conceptualise, draft and refine — and also that programs and processes that took ten or more years to learn can't be delivered in a two-hour workshop.
Ian believes that the importance of being both visually and verbally literate is underestimated. Using a PowerPoint slide show to punctuate his points, Ian showed us a variety of viewpoints, provocations and eye exercises to make us think about how we look at and approach this subject. Damien Hurst, an English artist, was quoted as saying: 'There are so many ear people and not many eye people'.
We saw a picture made up of six squares of facial parts that made our eyes tell our brains 'Prince Charles', but the visual cues had led us astray because it was actually bits of six different people (for example, one eye belonged to Laurence Olivier); this illustrated Ian's point that seeing has, in our culture, become synonymous with understanding (we 'see' the point; we 'focus' on the issues, etc.).
Ian feels that digital technology de-skills and popularises (some would say democratises) artistic competency … but that the end aesthetic and communal output is basically banal. To bring this point home to his postgrad students, Ian takes them to art galleries and they note down only the didactic text about art works; they don't look at the works themselves. They then go back to class and tear the texts apart to find out what they are actually saying — this usually results in a verdict of '60% of the texts say zip' about the art works. Ian agrees with a behavioural psychologist called Humberto Maturana who has said that we only see when s t r es se d.
Ian followed this up with the subject of the interpretive filters that Vincent Lanier believes get in the way of seeing.
We contemplated Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights and Ian walked us through his visual interpretation of the right-hand panel, speculating on why Charles I might have had this work hanging on his bedroom wall (to remind him that strangeness doesn't just exist in his court room?) and whether this really would be viewed by the mind through Lanier's 6th filter. To this end, Ian pointed out that it is really important to leave space between the word and the image that the viewer can inhabit. He illustrated this by showing us the word 'love' on a plain background: so powerful …everyone can participate; however, add an image to it and it immediately genderises it and changes the visual interpretation, usually to something less potent.
Ian feels that more emphasis needs to be given to preparing preservice teachers to handle guiding future students on interpreting visual and verbal literacies (they currently receive about an hour and a half of instruction to support them through this part of the curriculum).
He summed up by saying that, as editors and having to work with words all the time, we must occasionally get a bit tired of text and look forward to revelling in images to break up the paragraphs.