reading5

Taussig, Michael. “The Language of Flowers.” Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp.189-218.

Michael Taussig is an anthropologist and a professor at Columbia University, who has a background of medical education which is shown by his engagement of human body and plants throughout the essay.

Taussig begins his essay by explaining how violence is depicted in visual representations. In cartoons, characters get mashed in wars then get right back up again but in real life, this is a jive which never happen. But those cartoons exist because the real is too troubling.[1] He says that this maneuver is to put us back into war and is a strategy he sees relating to a Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarria’s photographs, which the artist places human bones like plants to make them appear to be botanical drawings, titled Corte de Florero, The flower vase cut, in reference to the Colombian violencia. Each photograph has own hybrids species names in Latin suggesting the grotesque.[2] I better understood this example of Echavarria’s work with what Campbell said in his essay ‘Horrific Blindness’ –“The meaning of image is produced by the intertextual relationship of captions, titles, surrounding arguments and sites for presentation.”[3] Without the title, and the captions the photographs lose what they intend to deliver to the viewer.

Throughout the essay, he posits a few different examples of images that have significance in delivering ideas around death and violence. The one that particularly interested was Barbara Stewart’s description of the scene of flooding flowers being “heartbreakingly bright and fragile’ throughout the city after the attack on the World Trade Center. Campbell argues that ‘the dominant social understandings existing at the moment of production and reception are more important than the specific form or content of the image for the creation.’[4]

By posing these examples, Taussig draws a point that actual visual images we encounter can be interpreted totally differently within political context. I think we need to be aware of the way we use visual representation of political issues, especially of violence, and of the possible impact the outcomes can bring out as creators/presenters of images which bring ‘a particular kind of power to the portrayal of death and violence.’[5]

[1] Taussig, Michael. “The Language of Flowers.” Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, p.190

[2] Taussig, Michael. “The Language of Flowers.” Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, p.191

[3] Campbell, David. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”, Journal for Cultural Research Vol.8 No.1, January 2004, p.70

[4] Campbell, David. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”, Journal for Cultural Research Vol.8 No.1, January 2004, p.71

[5] Campbell, David. “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”, Journal for Cultural Research Vol.8 No.1, January 2004, p.71