Thoughts on Teaching & Images

Teaching Art History Online

Nearly all instructors are using some kind of online learning environment—whether it is simply to post a syllabus, or teach a hybrid course, or one that's fully online. We suspect video and audio may help solve problems that occur when teaching with images online—and with one problem in particular—the way we ask our students to divide their visual attention between text and image). This is also true in traditional textbooks.

Michel Foucault articulated part of the problem when discussing Rene Magrette’s painting The Treachary of Images,

Either the text is ruled by the image...or the image is ruled by the text.... What happens to the text of the book is that it becomes merely a commentary on the image...and what happens to the picture is that it is dominated by the text.... What is essential is that [textual] signs and visual representations are never given at once. An order always hierarchizes them....

The image is of a pipe, but the text tells us that this is not in fact an actual pipe. And the text wins out—this is not a pipe, it is only a representation of a pipe. The text is the authority, it has a certainty that the image—even in all its clarity and precision—lacks. And this is a certainty that we are reassured by, never mind that the text is no less a representation than the image!

Freeing the Image from the Text

Never is this more true than in a museum where viewers can spend more time looking at a wall label than at the object that they are presumably there to see. In museums, in textbooks, in any environment where text and image coexist, does the text overwhelm the process of seeing? Do we stop seeing when we read? Do we only see what we have read about? Do we look only for what we’ve read about?

Too often we don’t trust our emotional or aesthetic responses. Perhaps it is the very ambiguity of the visual image that is threatening, and the authoritative text of the curator removes that ambiguity. It tells us, we incorrectly think, what the painting means. So given this hierarchy, how can we help students to trust their own responses to a work of art? How can we avoid situations where students rely on the “authority” of the text written by the curator or instructor and don’t trust their own experience or what they see and feel before the work of art. How can we help them to trust their own reading?

Re-introducing voice allows word and image to exist simultaneously in our students’ awareness without diminishing either. We hear and see simultaneously. Our eyes rest on the image while we listen to each other. When teaching images online, we have the possibility of using mutlimedia to engage students.