rhetoriC: writing, reading and ProduCing the visuaLin the case of An Experiment ... focusing our sight on the bird in the air pump
may lead us to read the painting as an allegory of life and death, that is, unless
the bird is mistakenly identified as a dove. in the latter case, the painting
will become a Christian allegory, referring directly to the place of god and
redemption in a secular society.
(hill and helmers 2004: 84)however, instead of studying this as art history, through reading, lectures and slides,
and then writing the above typical response, such arts- directed rhetorical scholarship
might result in students creating visual, performative or aural responses that represent
an articulation of others’ works. This can be a way for students to become as articulate
and used to thinking about how their art further contributes to the long tradition
of production in their area – how it produces more knowledge, more thought, more
understanding about all of us who create the world by interpreting and explaining it.
While helmers’ examination of An Experiment is similar to an art historian’s
analysis, her use of rhetorical appeal and location of context within, as well as outside,
an audience has much to teach an artist about how a work might – or might not
- be understood, received, valued. For many art students, instruction, feedback and
studying art history is seen as playing little part in nurturing their own talent. much
to the frustration of their instructors, these novices hold instead to the myth of the
single genius in the atelier whose talent runs out of their arm into a work of art. in
interviews conducted between 2001 and 2004, art and design instructors in the us
and uK noted their students’ reluctance to examine how others have created works
of art is too often validated by other instructors who may have learned to support that
same myth.^4 in a recent essay addressing the same problem in creative writing modules,
Kimberly andrews notes that tutors often comfort:
creative writers who are intimidated by the enormous body of literature and
criticism that encircles them; it is much easier to speak of the genius of creative
writing, to say, like a bad infomercial: ‘you, too, can cultivate this genius in
yourself!’
(andrews 2009: 247)They encourage the genius myth instead of providing research opportunities from
which students should draw. among art practitioner- instructors, that means asking
students to do more than walk into a museum and look at the work or perhaps, more
than only sketching what one sees.^5 using rhetoric to examine the relationship between
student attitudes towards art and their communicative productions would contribute
to new knowledge in arts practice.
That students need tools to develop skills in visuality is supported by research such
as that of desousa and medhurst. They gave 130 communications students a two-
part survey designed to test their abilities as visual interpreters. Results indicate that
student respondents were surprisingly inaccurate in determining the correct meaning
and elements of political cartoons, perhaps because of ‘visual illiteracy,’ ‘cultural lag’ or
‘low socio- political awareness’ (desousa and medhurst 1982: 50). Rhetorical research
such as this could be performed by art practitioners in order to find such gaps in their