Customer Reviews

What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images

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Professor Mitchell has put together an intriguing collection of essays that are distinctly devoid of the presumptuous art talk so often seen in the top periodicals and art blogs of our time - thank you sir! Since these essays are the work of an exceptional scholar, some of us mere mortals may have difficulty in following the abstract constructs and thoroughly academic ponderings. That said, I believe Professor Mitchell poses an interesting fundamental question as to whether the experience of viewing images has evolved within our minds to the point where we actually wonder if they have a life or consciousness of their own. If this is the case, the next question one may ponder is, what do they want? Professor Mitchell is quick to point out that in taking on the exercise of this thought experiment, we are not to proceed as though we are engaged in finding a cure for cancer here - my words, not his - but to proceed on a path of open-ended exploration. In attempting to answer this question, the author guides us along an extensive path that deals with numerous invocations, comparisons, analogies, postulates, arguments and other worldly considerations. Not only are the considerations of the world, but they contain a sampling of nearly everything in the world as well, from biblical chapter and verse to Marx, Blake, Nietzsche, Chaucer, Freud, Dante, et al. In the first half of this book, Professor Mitchell has indeed composed a concerto of tribute to much of Western Civilization. There are worse things one could do. That said, I would encourage the good Professor, in his ninth book (this is his eighth) to forsake his colleagues in academe just enough (heaven forbid!) to leave the huddled masses with fewer more distinct concepts and a more consistent theme. A reduction in the scope of considerations may help the reader to come away with a perception that there is a more differentiated hierarchy of importance amongst the contents of the book. In all fairness, each chapter of this very worthwhile book deserves its own review. I would also submit that the educational potential of this subject matter would not suffer in the least if the Professor were to delete his political inclinations, which, as interesting as they may be, do not enhance the subject matter of this book in any way. Anyone who wants to understand how we really relate to images should read this comprehensive book.

In the chapter titled the same as the book title, in laying out the grounds for his innovative exposition on images and culture, Mitchell explains, "[Images] present not just a surface but a face [italicized] that faces the beholder." Elsewhere in this chapter, he remarks that images may not have the power attributed to them; which supposed power is seen as absolute and all-encompassing in postmodern culture. Not suggesting that images ave no power, Mitchell takes the position that "the problem is to refine and complicate and refine our estimate of their power and the way it works." The author allows that his perspective based on what pictures "want" rather than what they "do" can at first blush seem to anthropomorphize pictures or give them an aboriginal animistic nature. But Mitchell explains that he means this as metaphorical, conceptual, and theoretical; not literal as in animism or even symbolic as with icons. Mitchell's provisional approach thus corresponds to the provisional quality of postmodern culture to bring extraordinary illumination to this contemporary culture.

Fantasy, multiple selves, and virtual reality are other terms used to express this provisional quality of postmodernism. Playfulness is another--and Mitchell's book, while sound literarily and with extensive learning and cogent though, exercises the principle that playfulness can take one farther in some cases. Whereas in postmodernism, play with its provisional, usually somewhat artificial attributes is a manner of avoiding commitment and engagement with fundamentals, with Mitchell it is a technique for coming to grips as much as possible with the elusive, ethereal nature of postmodernism. It is impossible to encompass or define postmodernism; whose primary attributes are contingency, continually changing imagery, and pseudo-events and provisional personas to play to the media. But Mitchell has managed to relate postmodernism's sprawling nature and what accounts for this.