Digital Deconstruction: Investigating the postmodern dialectic between word and picture
Thomas Bloom, Drama
2000 TTI Fellow
Email: tab4p@Virginia.EDU
Project website: (under construction)
DRAMA 224: Scene Design, Art, and Architecture investigates the use of paradox in scenic design. Beginning in Fall '98 DRAM 224 students were assigned projects which required them to explore how digital images could illustrate the visual contradictions occurring between the word and picture aspects of the play. Student created digital imagery proved to be a very effective medium for articulating the "paradoxes" of dramatic art. I now propose to integrate digital video imaging and editing into DRAM 224. Our methodology will continue to be one which merges appropriated images and narratives into new, synthetic artworks. The process, often referred to as deconstruction, uncovers unstated assumptions embodied in an artwork and exposes the bias which undergirds the artist's work.
II Pedagogical Aims of the Project
Theatre art consists of storytelling (word) expressed through action and illuminated by design (picture). Throughout the history of western theatre the visual style of scenic design was shaped by the dialectical contradictions occurring between word (drama) and picture (design). DRAM 224 students examine the tension which exists between the word aspects and picture aspects of the dramatic play and the scenic design. The aim of the project is to develop a discriminating way of seeing, apprehending, and understanding all forms of visual expression, with particular attention to how scenic designers shape what the audience witnesses and perceives of the theatrical event.
One of the arguments of DRAM 224 is that artwork embodies the student's own narrative; in other words, aspects of the student's identity are submerged in artwork which at first may appear to be remotely associated to the student's experience. Therefore, each student, or spectator, possesses the choice to allow the artwork to exist. In order to illustrate this premise, DRAM 224 students are asked to write narratives responses to the artwork they select from exhibitions at either the Bayly Art Museum or at the McIntire School of Art's Fayerweather Gallery. Their narratives must consider both the word aspects and picture aspects of an image selected from Bayly or Fayerweather exhibitions. What is of importance is that their response to the artwork embody their own experience; student's are encouraged to allow their own voice to emerge from what first may have seemed to be an artwork with which they seemingly shared little in common. In this way students begin to discover that a work of art which at first seems rather remote, actually is conceived and originates from an impulse or idea shared by the student.
Following the narrative response to an artwork, students are asked to create a "new" image based upon a synthesis of their own narrative with that narrative usually visually embodied in the artist's work. This process requires the student to deconstruct the artist's original image (picture) and the story (word) embedded in the image. The visual process of deconstruction aims at uncovering unstated ideological premises and assumptions embodied in the original artwork and assists the student in apprehending information either ignored or suppressed in the artist's original image. Deconstructed artworks reveal inherent bias or prejudice imbedded in all forms of artistic expression. In the theatre the process of deconstruction calls our attention to the contradictory nature of words juxtaposed against pictures. It is through these visual contradictions that we, as spectators of the theatrical event, are surprised by what we witness and begin to recognize that fundamental aspects of the entire artwork (the play and its design) illuminate the paradoxical nature of our own identity.
To date, DRAM 224's deconstructions are created with the digital camera. At this point in the evolution of the course I would like to introduce video imaging and editing. Combining interactive digital video with still digital images offers exciting possibilities as students deconstruct the contradictory circumstances of narrative based images. Digital video also offers the student the opportunity to explore a process which conveys the transient and fluid nature of identity. Integrating digital video and still imagery also can contribute to the notion that the appropriated "thing" acquires a validity of its own apart from the former, appropriated image.
The visual and theoretical approach of deconstruction is very difficult to convey to first time students of design. Toward this end I have designed a number of exercises and projects which direct the student of design into considering visual approaches which are based upon image appropriation. In general, the results of these exercises accentuate how much of what we assimilate is based upon second hand experience. Let me offer some examples of the ways that digital media have been integrated into DRAM 224 through a three part assignment entitled The Brecht Project .
One of the first tasks of this exercise is to write an objective subtextual response to an image from an art exhibition. For example, in Fall '99 DRAM 224 students developed written responses to an image they selected from Daniel Reeves digital art exhibition entitled Above Memory and Transformation at the Bayly Art Museum. Students proceeded to modify the artist's image and created a "new" image by acquiring a digital photograph of the artwork and manipulating it within the Adobe Photoshop application. Their "new" image was based upon a synthesis of their own subtext combined with the narrative which Reeves placed adjacent to his digital artwork. The final part of this exercise has the student selecting a classmate's digital image and appropriating elements of it into their own, producing yet another synthesis and another revision of their subtext follows based upon the newly created image before them. The exercise, then, is one not only of appropriation, but assimilation/accommodation, and synthesis. The process is one which produces surprises and revelations.
Course Outcomes:
Scenic designs are visual metaphors of the dramatic play's ideas, actions and themes; stylistically the scenic design can be expressed as an emblem, an illusion, or both. The emblematic style emphasizes word aspects of the play while the illusionistic style emphasizes picture aspects. The presence of both word and picture aspects in a dramatic play characterize the inherent antagonism which is at the core of dramatic action. The tension existing between these two forces reflects the paradox of the human condition. Customarily this idea was illustrated to the students enrolled in DRAM 224 through projected slide images of art and architecture presented in a rather straightforward slide-lecture format. Digital imagery generated by still and video digital cameras places within the students hands the means to explore the antagonism existing between emblems (word) and illusions (picture).
In this century, following the decline of Modernism, an artistic movement which rejected representational modes of visual expression in favor of original, formal, nonrepresentative modes of expression which emphasized the relative nature of things which makes the issue of identity a rather open ended question. Following the modernist movement in art, new visual expressions which intentionally denied the significance of originality and creativity have led to visual forms of expression which are reflexive; the contemporary artist employs techniques of deconstruction which call attention to the fact of how the artwork is made.
Issues of originality and creativity reside at the core of modern artworks and theatre. Bertold Brecht, an innovative twentieth century playwright and director, created his "Epic" style of theatre from appropriated fables and plays (e.g. Shakespeare's plays) and created wholly "new" artworks from these borrowings. The issue which "borrowing" raises is one of aesthetic significance because it questions whether the merit of a work defined by its originality. Many twentieth century modern artists would argue that originality and creativity exist in ideas and actions and not in things such as the appearance of the material work of art; they argue that invention and uniqueness are no longer essential in making art. Some artist would argue that originality has everything to do with raising an issue, not with inventing a unique artwork. As a matter of course we copy and repeat what we read or hear without reference to the source from which it came - why should one artist be condemned, then, for copying another artist's artwork? Further, much of what we experience is secondhand experience, at best; through those experiences we perceive and attempt to understand the things around us.