Guia docente 2023_24 Facultade de Belas Artes

Contents

Topic	Sub-topic
Introduction to semiotics.	De Saussure defined semiotics as a science that studies the life of the signs in the breast of the social life. The emphasis in the relation of the sign with the his social context will be fundamental in this approximation. The sign erects in place of something by consensus and common use, no by need. Understanding the arbitrariness of the signs is the starting point to understand that the representation is never natural, neither objective, neither innocent: independently of the his pretensions, it is always impregnated of ideology.
The functions of language. Factors of communication in the work of art.	The ranking of Roman Jakobson of the functions of the language (referencial, expressive, conative, phatic, poetic and metalingual) is the starting point to stimulate the critical faculty when reading. Our position as readers is conditioned by unspoken assumptions of which we are unaware . The knowledge of how language works helps to understand that significant processes are not simple transmission of meanings already established , but the place in which reality is constructed.
Codes of representation. Syntax of the image.	The question of how meaning works is not merely formal, but formal is essential to meaning. It is the fundamental substrate on which the meanings are based. So we have to understand that each code of representation is based on certain formal and technical choices and that each formal election presupposes, in our relatively stable culture, specific meanings. What the work of art tells us is not only determined by the iconographic or narrative choices; the technique employed (for example, the stroke length, the size of an element in relation to the total image size, the use of a concrete perspective, which focuses or blurs ...) are involved in many of his statements .
Relations between reality, perception and representation.	Perception is not a strictly physiological process, a direct recording, but a mental construct based on the sensations, a codification of the world in iconic signs that represent it within our mind. That codification implies a concrete perspective of learned schemes, that is, the world is not experienced without mediation, it is comprehensible only inside speechs, which are historically specific structures of institutions, categories and beliefs. If there is not a perception of the world that is not mediated, there is not either a "natural" representation, since we are talking about an encoding of second grade. Despite all the romantic conceptions of art as a personal, direct and free expression, artistic creation involves a system based on a concrete languaje that we inherit through education in the parameters and conventions of a society. And the question is not only at what extent can a representation reflects reality, we must also understand that those concepts we call reality are forged, in part, through representations. Representations are not just a passive reflection of meanings and values, but active constructions of those meanings and values. Through them we grasp the world and, therefore, to a large extent they construct our idea of the world.
Transtextual relations.	All texts relate, in their writing and their reading, with the joint of texts that preceded them or surround them, so that we can speak of the existence of a transtextual context. As Barthes said, the text is entirely interwoven with appointments, references and echos. Every work of art is a palimpsesto, a text that superimposes to another, that covers it. Following the ranking of Gerard Genette, we will study five transtextual relations: paratextuality, metatextuality, architextuality, intertextuality and hipertextuality. The two last of them are employed in the appropriationist artistic practices, in an era in which the game of images has less and less to do with a (hypothetical) external reality.
Construction and deconstruction of images.	In the era of simulacra, representations are our nature. According to Baudrillard metaphor, the map of hiperreality substitutes the territory of the real. If we accept that representations are determinant in building our concept of reality, we will understand that their power is enormous. Deconstructive practices intend to put in crisis to idea of representation as a natural fact, analyzing and disassembling the ideological codes infiltrated in every dominant representation.
Modes of interpretation of the work of art.	Historical, formalist, iconogical, sociological, structuralist, psychoanalytic critical methods… Along the history of the western art several ways to see and study the works of art have succeeded, based in diverse disciplines that analyze some of the more relevants aspects of art according to different periods and geographies. The diversity of approximations is an indicator that we are treating with open works, expanded by each viewer, that attracts them to his own speculative orbit. Aesthetics of the reception insists in the postestructuralist idea that the images mean only in contact with the speeches that circulate in a society.