Visual Culture and Political Correctness
In the book of Eilean Hooper Greenhill "Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture", visual culture is defined as a social theory of visuality, focusing on questions of what is made visible, who sees what, how seeing, knowing and power are interrelated. In this way, visual culture is based on examining the act of seeing as a direct interaction with internal thoughts making procedure.
On another great book called "Visual Culture" by Chris Jenks we get a very accurate definition of visual culture, in a way that it expresses the feeling we all have already into us when we think about images, and the writer manages to put this feeling into words. So according to his theory, seeing is not simply a natural ability, but it is linked to the ways our society arranges forms of knowledge, strategies of power and systems of desire. So, in this way seeing is perception, and perception is defined by a huge system.
We live in a society where as we all know, principles of well-being, of beauty, of success, of lifestyle, of consumption are all diffused globally, with a dynamic of an incessant reproduction only through images we tend to consume with our eyes (and eventually with our brains) every day. It is a whole system of power. Someone pressed the click and since then, it is working on its own...
I will only mention the impact of Times Magazine Cover, created by D.W. Pine, showing president of the U.S., D. Trump in deep, in storm and in a "nothing to see here" place...
Visual culture shapes perception and at its turn perception creates more visual culture.
In Greece in Athens, streets are full of graffiti, most of them referring to political messages. Some of them or most of them according to my humble opinion, are true masterpieces you could find in galleries or simply equal to Banksy's school of graffiti.
Streets in Athens are a public gallery. Whoever cannot see that or feels that pure and clean walls or cement would be better than this joyful and vibrant iconology, is certainly of a different view with mine.
But in the context of this article, i would like to refer mostly to the background and hidden political corectness that booms unexpetedly from time to time, showing only one thing: that control of what is accepted or not is such a lost game, that even state's institutions can become ridiculous in their effort to show a will of power by defending specific stereotypes, when there are no stereotypes or those stereotypes are already "tresspassed" with the allowance of state's institutions.
So with the chance of my article on visual culture, i want to refer to the "Joker" movie with Joaquin Phoenix, which was recently played in the greek cinemas. According to me it was an accurate, important movie, with a severe comment on people who become marginalized, violence and state's acceptance to violence. So the Greek state showed that exactly. It showed it accepts violence with the way it reacted some days ago, when during the cinema play (Joker) policemen intruded some Athenian cinemas and arrested underaged (under 18) young people who were watching the movie unattended.
The Greek state showed this way it accepts and it produces violence, when they only wanted to show that the movie is violent for underaged kids....
And because i have seen the film, i would like to say that first of all it includes no more violence than what we see in everyday life, it is aesthetically sublime in the way it shows even scenes of violence and the violence in this movie is mostly indirect, a violence taking place when people reject someone in the most harsh and brutal way. So it is not a splatter movie full of blood...actually it has nothing to do with this. And there is only one question arising in this context...How can the state's institutions give an order like this and policemen arrest young people watching the movie reminding us of the 1967 era, when they do nothing with the trash played on tv in prime time hours, when kids are watching and adults are accepting all this violence as if it is something natural.
TV in general is a bad place in all european countries and the U.S., but i will refer to the greek trash TV, which continues to underestimate human mentality in the year 2019. This violence is the only violence a state's institutions should put an end to...but they didn't, because corruption is so deep, that the politically correct state we live in, believes human disgrace and humiliation in front of pannels or in studios discussing about personal issues live on TV, or political disputes arranged in such a way that numbers and ratings are as higher as possible is accepted, when at the same time, "Joker" a movie that is a severe comment on the ages of violence we live in, and has the impact of making you think, leaving to you a bad taste and at the same time so many questions on issues we take for granted, by the time you are about to leave the cinema...was characterized as non-appropriate for underaged young people (16-17 years old).
And this incident was not accidental. How could it be accidental when policemen should take an order to do something like that...
Few days ago a poster announcing a meeting for amateur artistic groups of the Aegean Greek islands, was censored because it represented a human-like figure with a human body and the head of a deer...and that was because the deer is a characteristic symbol of Rhodes island. This poster was not accepted as a provocative one and with the fear of losing their sponsor, the coordinators changed the poster.
We had a long time to see incidents like those, because Greece is a country where varied opinions and views are largely expressed, even though there is always a main direction...But still you can feel the democratic vibe in the fact so many political and social disputes have been captured in this country...
But these incidents nowadays, show a decline of democracy, of free spirit and of thinking and judgement. It feels like TV and its concept rule upon the political scene of the country...and we don't know yet...when the ship will reach the land after so many storms...
Visual culture shapes and gets shaped back again, and i hate and at the same time refuse to believe that TV ethics and political corectness will shape my future visual culture or my neighbours one...
written by Themis Panagiotopoulou, PhD in Political Science