Ron Burgundy, 9/22

Today’s lesson took us out of the classroom and into the Cornell Fine Arts Museum. Having never been there before I didn’t know what to expect from the exhibits, I only had the knowledge of what he learned from the recent theorists to aid in my experience of the works. The three different exhibits that we looked at were all extremely interesting and played a different role in explaining some aspect of the postmodern era and key terms recently discussed in class. While looking at one exhibit in particular, “Kertesz: On Reading”, a profound point was made by the museum guide that connected largely with one of the theorists discussed in class. The guide asked the class what the most prominent aspect of the different photographs in the exhibit were and several students answered all noticing different elements of the works. As he noted this observation he went on to discuss how each picture could be seen as a text that speaks differently to each observer and how the story can change each time you approach the picture as you may view it in a different way or notice different things you never saw before. This idea is directly connected to the concept that Macherey discusses in his piece, “A Theory of Literary Production”. Macherey explains the importance of the said versus the unsaid within a text and the meaning that the unsaid, once acknowledged, can bring to the whole of the text. The guide asked us if in fact these pictures could be considered texts, and because of the several different responses that were given from different students about a single picture I believe that they can. Each person that had spoken up in the discussion of the picture recognized a different aspect of the unsaid within the “text” that was the image, and therefore the picture could have told a different story to them than another person. As I heard different responses from my peers on the image I also connected their ideas with the concept of how the author cannot fully appreciate their text because they cannot anticipate what experiences their audience may bring to a text to understand it, a key concept of Macherey. Each student seemed to recognize something different in the image because they looked at it with their own perspective, which led them to see certain things and ignore others.