voi Ces(prelli 2006: 5). But how does an artist who might care about his art being accessible,
decide whether it is the audience which is not capable or whether his art isn’t capable of
communicating with an audience? i am suggesting here that art researchers employing
rhetorical tools can produce scholarship which contributes to how we see the world
and how we construct the world with what we see. on the one hand, art practitioners
push the boundaries of communication in media other than words. on the other hand,
the world could benefit from knowledge about how to see the ideas through other
media. Rhetoric’s methodology can form the bridge between and among media which
represent knowledge in various forms.
even in ancient greece, aristotle recognized that:
all men by nature desire to know. an indication of this is the delight we
take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for
themselves; and above all others the sense of sight ... The reason is that this,
most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences
between things.
(aristotle 1984: metaphysics 980a)stafford (1997), Kress (2007) and others note that since that time a logocentrism
increasingly forced out other forms of expression to the point of having ‘dampened the
full development of all kinds of human potential’ (Kress 2007: 157). While the balance
may have tipped towards the alphabetic, current scholars who have applied rhetoric
to the visual, demonstrate that the power relationship between word and image at
any given moment shapes a cultural reality and therefore the ability to produce a
particular kind of artefact (word or image). art practitioner research can contribute
to this examination of how word and image, language as expression, works. They can
join their understanding of their medium with rhetorical analyses to communicate
what they see and how they see it. This cannot only push their own art to a new
level, and push the understanding of their art to a new level, but also push a culture’s
understanding of itself to a new level. so arts- rhetoricians, because they can work with
a dual perspective, might study how the application of logos to image or performance
affects communication of that object(ive); the insider perspective provides a unique
position for producing new knowledge – and new alphabetical and non- alphabetical
vocabularies.
according to martin Jay (1988), the West holds to a Cartesian perspective that
separates the observer from the observed, giving to the detached researcher the ability
to analyse from a privileged position. That distancing stance presumes a panoptic vision
while, in reality, the position limits what is experienced, and what might be produced. To
either view or to produce a written document about a visual or aural object is therefore
to see from a position that limits engagement with that object. however, schachtel
describes an alternative ‘allocentric perception’; one ‘characterized by “profound
interest in the object, and complete openness and receptivity toward it, a full turning
toward the object which makes possible a direct encounter with it”’ (Fleckenstein
2007: 14). This more eastern perspective produces a very different relationship
and product, one more familiar to the artist: descriptive rather than analytical, one
situated in meditation and oneness rather than on the gaze and separation. nobel