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Spring Quarter Essay — March 2003

On Visual Literacy
by Andrew Rush    ©2002

 

In recent months I have enjoyed observing our three year old granddaughter at her small art table, "doing her work", as her mother says. Like most children, Ivy's earliest efforts were limited to the simple physical pleasures of scribbling and color. "Very modern" we proudly commented, only to see such beginnings slowly displaced by her intention to actually outline (to "de-scribe") a something--eventually a face, a flower, a cat. And then, one day not long ago, with shining eyes, Ivy wrote her name for me. The adventure of literacy had begun anew, as another human being joined our ancient yearning to connect and communicate her inner life with others.

Historically, the origins of writing and drawing are joined at the hip, and still are, because as writers know, words and images are joined at the hip as well. From the hieroglyphics (picture- writing) of ancient Egypt and Mexico, we can trace the evolution of many of the systems of images into the encrypted symbols of the written languages of the modern world. And while the first definition of ‘literacy’ refers to the ability to read and write, it is all too obvious that we are now experiencing an expansion of communication systems well beyond the book, most of them new languages, and most of them visual. Hence the need for a new term, for which I here propose ‘visual literacy’

And what are these new systems? Some examples: Visual displays of many varieties and subsets, starting with the photograph and cheap high speed offset color printing; TV and Film; multi-media computer graphics and the magazine industry; new visual ways of displaying quantitative information; animation; commercial art and fashion; and to anyone with a computer. easy access to image libraries and even access to world history of art images. And more.

As new as these technologies may be, they were all latent and concealed within the actual invention of moveable type printing in 1438 by Gutenberg, starting a process that has profoundly 'bent' the historic flow of human culture ever since.The printing press and its first child, the printed book, literally reconstituted society and all of its institutions by redistributing the power of ideas from the palace to the streets, launching the global, political and social evolution in which we are still engaged.

Looking back, it may seem odd that the ability to read & write did not become commonplace for four hundred years. However, transportation was slow, and most people were too occupied either farming or fighting to survive, leaving the reading of books to the power centers of church and state. Literacy began its world-wide spread only with the coming of the machine, the modern industrial city and the first public schools, which were established to assure that immigrant factory workers could read and write.

But just as Henry Ford failed to notice that literacy contained the seeds of true democracy, our modern leaders have failed to notice that visual literacy, with its laser -like power to multiply images via modern media, is now engaging, educating and inciting people in ways the written word cannot touch. And what's worse, (or better) access to these new visual languages is now available even more widely than the printed book-- anywhere, for any purpose, to anyone who takes the time to learn the tools and the visual grammar. Little wonder that totalitarian regimes like China and Saudi Arabia (as well as some of our local despots) are even now engaged in campaigns to censor or block the new global visual systems of film, TV and the Internet. Like the book-burnings of old, letting go of power and control dies hard.

Curiously, however, the formal study of visual literacy has yet to be understood, much less embraced by primary education as necessary to modern survival. As a result our children (and the rest of us) are left to passively absorb the visual languages mostly on their own, and mostly at the effect of the manipulations of commercial television and film, the internet, popular magazines, etc.under the guise of entertainment or marketing.

Not everyone, however. Time's art critic Robert Hughes noted in his book The Shock of the New, "every year in the 1980s, about 35,000 graduate painters, sculptors, potters, and other 'art-related professionals' issued from the art schools of America, each clutching a degree"...a trend that has continued for more than another decade, depositing a pool of over 800,000 certified visual artists, most of them largely unemployable into our culture.

Are modern art professionals all that blindly impractical? Or might they be up to something a lot more practical than limiting their options to the linear languages of the nineteenth century? What I do know today is that the issue of visual literacy is now operant in the world and here to stay.

The growing flow of students of all ages coming to our open and non-credit programs at The Drawing Studio to study art is not just about making art commodities or even about personal fame. I believe it is a deep and intuitive response to this paradigm shift of how we hold and communicate life itself via the language of images. People naturally want to be a part of this conversation, which starts with learning the studio practices of art where visual literacy begins.

©2002 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reprinted in any form without permission