Wednesday, February 2, 2022 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Speaker: Terry Smith
Amidst the plethora of imagery that swarmed, during the summer of 2020, on all the mediums that carry the constant construction of the world’s self-picturing, three constellations stood out from the usual business of depicting everyday life, selling commodities, enacting governmentality, and showing natural forces undergoing global warming. These were: Graphic imagery of the coronavirus and its national and global spread, plus film of its effects in hospitals, at testing sites, and on crowds, masked and not; the events staged by Donald J. Trump across a variety of mediums; and the cut-through impact of the cell phone video of a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd as he died.
What is the nature of the larger “system of images” within which these went viral? How can art historical and visual cultural analysis help us to understand its structures and changes, repetitions and differentiations? For some decades, and particularly since 9/11, I have thought that the workings of an economy—in several senses of the word—might be discernable in the generation and circulation of images.
Part 1 of Iconomy: Toward a Political Economy of Images tracks key conceptualizations of the relationships between images and economies, from Yolŋu Dreaming stories and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave through Byzantine iconoclasm, Marx on commodities, Benjamin on the reproducible arts, and Debord on spectacle, up to contemporary theories of iconomy. It shows that each of these were or are propositions about the kind of political economy required by their place and their time. Part 2 profiles the image wars mentioned above. I will share these as a contribution toward our efforts to develop a course on “The Viral Image.”
https://pitt.zoom.us/my/haadept
Zoom password available on HAA Undergraduate and Graduate Canvas sites, or by request from haadept@pitt.edu.
Image: Warren Brown, “Recession,” The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, June 3, 2020.