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A Sign of Times. Omar Calabrese and the Pictorial Turn

The advent of the pictorial turn, proposed by W.J.T. Mitchell twenty years ago, is generally understood as an agency of two complementary principles: on the one side, as an attempt of coming to terms with the pervasiveness and ubiquity of images in contemporary society and, on the other, as an understanding of a general inadequacy of the earlier visual disciplines (like art history and semiotics) to address the new reality of images. In one of his most pregnant insights Mitchell explains the pictorial turn as the “realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or 'visual literacy' may not be fully explicable on the model of textuality” (Picture Theory, 1994: 16). While I am not going to contradict what seems to be perfectly plausible argument, in this paper I am arguing that it was precisely various forms of reading images that allowed for the pictorial turn to become one of the most urgent topic within contemporary interest for the shift in visual epistemologies. In order to make my point I will try to show how unortodox and very nuanced way of semiotic analysis done by Omar Calabrese in his book L'età neobarocca from 1987 has marked one of the paths for what will eventually be known as the method of visual studies. However, in the paper it will be emphasized that Calabrese's analytic pairs, such as limit/excess, detail/fragment, instability/metamorphosis or disorder/chaos provide methodological rigour that neither Mitchell himself nor visual studies as a discipline were willing to follow without giving it a second thought. When it comes to visual phenomena in the more strict sense, especially photography and moving images, visual studies “takes over” at the point where semiotic discourse of representation finds itself confronted with the changing reality of images: computer generated images, virtual spaces and simultaneous activity of presentation and re-presentation. Does the way of making photographies change our reflection upon them? Does the way of theorizing photographies change our perception? Drawing examples predominantly from popular culture, art and science Omar Calabrese in L'età neobarocca anticipates this perplexing and radically new status of visual media that will subsequently be sanctioned by such relevant authors like W.J.T. Mitchell with his concept of the pictorial turn or James Elkins whose “domain of images” aims at recognizing both creative and theoretical importance of the most disparate visual phenomena. Seen in this perspective, Calabrese provides an open (and still underestimated) formula for “reading” and re- contextualizing images after the turn.

Omar Calabrese ; pictorial turn ; images ; semiotics ; W.J.T. Mitchell ; visual studies

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