Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. - book reviews

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 462 pp.; 79 b/w ills. $34.95

Visitors to a recent exhibition of the art of Mark Tansey were (to one observer) variously bemused, upset, entranced, and bewildered by the sole three-dimensional object displayed among the vast oil paintings for which the artist is best known. Wheel (1990) is a large, finely finished wood object that suspends three disks of different diameters within each other, each of which can be rotated independently around a common center. Around the edge of each disk are engraved words, parodic "art-worldly" nouns and verbs. Thus, by turning the wheels a vast number of phrases can be generated to produce an "art-speak."(1)

Works like Tansey's exemplify a central aspect of contemporary art, one that underlies the concerns of W. J. T. Mitchell in Picture Theory. Though (puzzlingly) he does not specifically consider such works, Mitchell approvingly quotes Craig Owens's characterization of postmodern art as "an eruption of language into the field of the visual arts" (p. 217, see also 239).(9) Picture Theory is fundamentally an examination of the disparate combinations and fragmentations of meaning that obtain when words and images - modes of verbal and visual coding - play into, and off of, each other. Mitchell is a figure of major importance to this topic. As editor of Critical Inquiry, he has long been involved in the complex, interdisciplinary conversation on theory in the humanities. Far more than otherwise comparable journals, Critical Inquiry has consistently sought to include the concerns of art history and visual representation within this broader range of discussion. We are better off for it. Even more, a central concern of Mitchell's own work has long been precisely this relation between word and image. His Blake's Composite Art (1978) examined, with remarkable inventiveness and imagination, the fusions and divergences of word and image in William Blake's illuminated poetry. A later work, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986) is a groundbreaking study in the nature of images, how they carry meaning, and their social/cultural implications.

Picture Theory should be oriented within this larger continuing meditation on the relation of word and image. Mitchell describes it as "a sequel and companion" (p. 4) to Iconology, going from the former's more abstracted (and unillustrated) conceptualization of the image to a framework considering individual visual and verbal artifacts. Yet, for the same reason, it also marks a return to the sort of "minute particulars" considered in Mitchell's first book (even including a chapter on Blake), though now more infused with the concerns of Iconology.

Picture Theory, then, works to stake out a position between abstract and concrete, general and particular. It is a deliberately paradoxical book, which itself deals with the complexities and paradoxes of visual and verbal representation. In this fundamental sense, Picture Theory is a unique, and also a remarkably generous, book. Its generosity is evident throughout, as Mitchell acknowledges the contributions of numerous colleagues, friends, and family in ways that go far beyond the conventions of academic writing. Further, it is written throughout with extraordinary subtlety, clarity, and wit.

As the author describes it, "This may well be an introduction to a discipline (the general study of representation) that does not exist and never will" (p. 7). This is a tantalizing statement, and not only for introducing its contents under an explicitly nonexistent heading. While Mitchell doesn't exactly argue for the impossibility of a general study of representation, his theoretical constructs are developed in coexistence with the book's particular objects of analysis, both visual and verbal - Robert Morris's sculpture, a cover of Mad magazine, Homer's description of the Shield of Achilles, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, television coverage of Operation Desert Storm, Blake, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, many cartoons, some theoretical tenets of Panofsky, Gombrich, Wittgenstein, Nelson Goodman, and much more. Mitchell's method, that is, appears designed to concretize theoretical concerns in conjunction with treatment of particular objects, as he consistently puts it (revealing the pun in the book's title), to "picture theory." The wide range of objects of study, taken from art history, aesthetics, literary criticism, film theory, and cultural studies contributes to the book's character "as a de-disciplinary exercise to make the segregation of the disciplines more difficult" (p. 7).

Mitchell is thus well aware "that this is a book whose reach far outstrips its grasp," one "likely to offend a lot of specialists," and must be "content with raising questions whose answers are beyond my competence" (p. 7). In this sense, it is quite different from his earlier works, which treat more delimited topics. Yet there is a further reason the book works to demonstrate the heterogeneity and discontinuity of representational discourse. Picture Theory has as much the character of a volume of collected essays as that of a monographic volume. Even as the book's subtitle suggests simply "essays," Mitchell asserts, "This book is not a history of visual and verbal culture, but a theory" (p. 100). Most of the book's thirteen chapters originated as essays written for a variety of edited books, journals, and exhibition catalogues. There are notable overlaps and repetitions among the essays. One finds also a (perhaps inevitable) unevenness of detail and treatment between the different chapters and sections, despite brief introductions meant to place each of the five sections within the book as a whole.