Well my website is finished and uploaded on to the internet, finally. whoop, I think is the expression.
So moving on from Barthes ‘cardinal’ functions in narrative, the uncertainty aspect is clearly central to the work I am developing, and after reading through passages in a book on aesthetics I notice other moments of uncertainty operate in language.
In discussing metaphor in Aesthetics, Dickie argues around the assertions of Beardsley and his ‘object-comparison’ view, which he refutes, and discusses this in relation to Aristotle and the ‘widely held view . . . metaphor is a disguised simile which makes an implied comparison’. He also discusses an example as an ‘open simile’ in which we are left to work out the context. This later point seems to make more sense on the face of it, than Beardsley’s argument but as Dickie says later, metaphors do not ‘refer’ as such, and therefore if we are to talk clearly about metaphor we should avoid talking about signification on those terms.
What he seems to be alluding to is shifting context as the key and also that the meanings are derived from different origins, which are not definitions. So simile and the object need to stay out of the argument.
From here, in terms of metaphor and also in terms of narrative and cardinal functions, a sense of movement, displacement, uncertainty or deferring operates which creates an expectation or addition to what is expressed. The meanings are not literally evident, but there may be possible available associations. There is something significant concerning this moment of uncertainty.
The most recent piece I made Photoshoot 2, pictured here, suggests the full picture yet hovers in anticipation. Hmm, interestingly moving to a new approach . . .’
The Snapshots photocuts held quite firmly to the genre of family photographs and Un-Fictions cut books interestingly played with what my reading of Ziki describes as a difference between semantic memory and episodic memory, the latter being what you know from your own experience; but the Photoshoot series is different as I have no associations with the images but they do not have cultural associations in the same way. Narrative expectation overrides metaphor in the new work, and I may not be ‘refering’ either, but representation here is taking the viewer somewhere else.
There is something in all this that makes (or may make) sense somehow, and the journey finding out is interesting.
