Visual Culture- The Self

This weeks visual culture lecture was titled 'The Self' and was an introduction to Representation Theory. The theory covered over many different areas including, form, semiotics, iconography, art history,ideology and culture. The topic is very personal towards you yourself as an artist and how you choose to represent yourself and your work, your style and your work communicates to the audience a message and a point, it's key to do this in the most artistic representation of yourself possible. The street artist Banksy was brought up in the lecture with many of his works, which take pop culture references and cross them over with political and world issues relevant at the time.

The Auteur Theory is a good mention when talking about Representation of Self, as it centres around the idea of a film or a piece of art reflecting the primary artist's (Director) personal creative vision. Examples like Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick are the best arguments for this theory as their work is so unique and their style is so personal to them, that it cannot be recreated. In our second lecture with our tutor, we looked into the Idealised Human Body (Originated in Ancient Greece) and John Berger. Berger said nude was 'Naked yet not exposed', meaning physically you can be naked but to be exposed is another thing altogether. We also talked about portraits and what it means in different contexts, an example of a definition given in the lecture was 'Planned and considered composed image of a person in still form.'. A link back to film and a way we could maybe create portraits is by character profiles, when building a character and writing a profile you're painting a portrait of who they are and how you want them to be seen.

Further into the discussion, Sigmund Freud was brought into the talk and his idea of the Pleasure Principle. Freud had said ' Human life is engaged in a constant battle to repress our desires' meaning we don't allow ourselves to enjoy what we want, we try to avoid them and hide them. The Pleasure Principle is a structure of 3 stages, the Ego, Reality and Instinctive. This explains how at our core we know what we want and instinctively want to get it, but our ego and reality get in the way and deny us the pleasure. I very much am intrigued with the Pleasure Principle and agree with its structure and basis. The very in-depth and relating topics and subjects brought up in this weeks lectures was quite engaging, it offered a lot more for an open discussion and was very interesting to learn about.