Essays into the Imagetext: An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell

This is an edited transcript a two-hour interview with WI. T Mitchell, conducted by Christine Wiesenthal (CW) and Brad Bucknell (BB) on March 10,2000 at the Fort Carry Hotel, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Professor Mitchell delivered the University Manitoba Sidney Warhaft Memorial Lecture titled Offending Images: Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum on March 9,2000, at the Plug In Gallery, Winnipeg. CW You describe your recent book, Picture Theory, as basically [the] sequel and companion volume promised by Iconology back in 1986. I thought we might begin with the very obvious material fact the size differential between these two books. It occurred me that while Wittgenstein's Duck Rabbit pops up once as a hypericon in Iconology, in Picture Theory, it seems proliferate wildly as a meta-picture. These are Fliegende Blatter, if I ever saw them! [1] Could you talk a little bit about the structure and the organization Picture Theory as an exercise in applied iconology, and could you mention some the factors that were relevant in the way the book eventually took shape? WJTM Well, I've always been interested in book design, particularly, the design illustrated books. My doctoral dissertation (later my first book) was called, Blake's Composite Art, and it was about the relationship text design in Blake's illuminated poetry. So that was my first and formative scholarly problem, try think about a mixed representation, a mixed medium. I grew up in the golden age comic books as well--the era Mad, Astounding Science Fiction, and the Classic Comics. The idea image and text working in a collaborative form had always been fascinating me. So, when I wrote Iconology, I saw it as a kind askesis--that is, I was trying listen the problem the image-text relation rather than look at it. I said at the beginning Iconology I wanted write a book about pictures for the blind, a book rumors about pictures and how people talk about them behind their backs as it were--what you would imagine pictures were if you couldn't see them, but could just hear what people said about them. So Iconology is short partly because it doesn't give any space pictures except for a couple drawings. It's really focused on what people say each other about images, the invisible aural/oral aura fantasy and anxiety that hovers around them. I felt at the moment Iconology that it was an important theoretical gesture not be distracted by looking at visual images as if they were transparent or self-evident. In Picture Theory, then, I made exactly the opposite move. What I wanted in that book was be still, silence the theoretical chatter (at least momentarily) and let pictures talk and allow visual images attain some kind theoretical status. In art historical discourse the is so often treated as an object or target, and as we talk about it, the language pre-empts the picture, a pre-emption that I tried air out in Iconology. The commentary replaces the thing. In Picture Theory, I wanted treat the pictorial object as a subject capable self-reflection, so that pictures could become self-theorizing symbols or metapictures.' That is what motivates strange, awkward title, theory. It expresses an imperative to picture theory rather than construct a theory of pictures. The aim is let pictures do theory and give theory a physical, visible, figured body. The other difference between Iconology and Picture Theory is that the earlier book took theoretical texts as its object--Wittgenstein, Burke, Lessing, Gombrich, Nelson Goodman, Marx--theorists who have important things say about the relations between verbal and visual representation. The images Iconology are mainly verbal and figurative, pictures, as Wittgenstein puts it, that lay in our language. They are hypericons such as the cave, the camera obscura, and the tabula rasa, addressed the mind's eye, and designed explain the very process by which the mind produces and apprehends images. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.