Visual Rhetoric

The depiction I see is that perception of a common visual can change dramatically under different circumstances.

For instance, the three photos in the lower left are very similar. However, due to a slight change of shade, the face furthest right of the three seems to be holding her eyebrows a bit higher than the other two as if she's hiding a secret...perhaps a religious conspiracy ala author Dan Brown.

Some may look at the exposed skin of the upper torso skin in the middle picture of the three and see a conquistador's helmet...Da Vinci protesting 15th century Spanish colonization.

Viewing an image under different conditions may completely change the meaning conveyed. Maybe what I see is less of an argument and more of a commentary on perception.

People see what they see according to their view.

I'm not familiar at all with movable type platform...so, hopefully this will go through.

When I look at the Mona Lisa, I always feel like she is looking me in the eyes. My attention goes to her eyes as well. In all the pictures displayed here she is always looking at me (also when she is upside-down). It’s like she is saying: “Look at me� ….�Look at me�….�Hey, look at me!�…�Don’t get distracted! Look at me!�…again and again. At the bottom of the image – in the three panels starting from the left - she is saying “Now, look closer…and closer…and closer� (the shades work great to make her glance deeper and deeper)…then it’s like she steps back to give us a whole view of herself (fourth picture from the left at the bottom), and finally she reveals that she has a secret (I agree with Tony, there is a secret)….that we will never know because it’s hidden in her hands…

Definitely, a persuasive argument: this mysterious painting ‘contains’ a secrete that belongs only to Mona Lisa, or better to Leonardo.

Having no background in the arts, and being an extrodinarily literal person,I will attempt to directly answer the question: Is this a persuasive arguement?

An arguement for what? I think this collage could make an arguement for the permanence and endurance of this portrait by Da Vinci.

Though the composition of the original painting is perhaps somewhat common of Renaissance portraiture, the painting has arguably established permance because of Da Vinci's extradonary execution.

By emphasizing different aspects of the portrait by the use of shading, coloring and presentation(upright, inverted, sideways), unique aspects of the portrait are highlighted.

Therefore, this collage permits the viewer to focus on individual aspects of the portrait and appreciate the overall importance of the painting.

I started out wondering if this was an argument at all, but now that I’ve tried to describe what’s going on here, I think it is.

So Warhol (this is Andy Warhol, right?) takes this image that is almost synonymous with subtlety, and he takes all of the subtlety away from it. It’s just an outline, like a stamp, that’s being stamped all over the canvas now. But in doing so, has he added a new layer of subtlety? He chooses how to let the stamps overlap, what color to use, what part of the image to crop out, even different levels of contrast and saturation. And in doing so, he has somewhat added enough complexity to the new painting to make almost as hard to capture in a description as the original.

But what is the specific argument? I think that’s still pretty hard to pin down. It seems to be trying to argue for something. But since it’s not telling me what, it’s not doing a very good job of convincing me of anything. So let’s say, yes, it’s an argument, but not a very good one.

Definitely both an argument and a persuasive argument.

I think the persuasive power of this image comes from the source material's recognizability and the artist's style. It is, however, the "ugliness" of the image that has the most impact, I think. The actual Mona Lisa is pretty, I guess, but this is very brash, and has the appearance of very low quality printing. I think that the artist is purposely trying to "cheapen" the Mona Lisa, so to speak.

I'm not really familiar with printing so I can't say for sure, but I think that printers use the CMYK color profile for printing, that is, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black – the colors used in the image. I keep coming back to this idea of printing, or production. Mass production. Something of that sort. There would be no other reason to show the printing colors separately otherwise.

I think this is trying to say something about the diminished "honor" something has if it is mass produced. I don't know. The painting is of a lower quality because it's been "printed." If anything, the image persuaded me to think, so it succeeded.

This image, viewed as an autonomous visual image without cultural associations, presents me either a malformed argument or no argument at all. I see a repeated image rendered in the basic spectrum of printers’ colors. The composition of the image is seemingly haphazard, almost like a test run, or a piece of scratch paper.

This image is not an autonomous visual, however. Viewing the image, we are required to associate a number of cultural and historical notions with our perception of the piece. In my case, the associations went in the following direction: Warhol>Mona Lisa>Leonardo. Coupling those associations with the raw image itself, we then proceed to interpret the creators intended argument. I would say that the artist intended to streamline a work of classic art into a commodity, as a form of commentary on art itself. In terms of persuasion, I believe it works on some levels, but is not entirely persuasive of anything.

It is interesting to note that this image may have been more conceptually persuasive at the time of its creation than it is today. Warhol, or more correctly Warhol’s style has been blunted over the course of time. Many of his ideas have been adopted and exploited by other artists, popular culture, and mass-media in general so as to render the argument less incisive than it once was.

To me, I see this as a persuasive argument for the loss of uniqueness and artists' craft that comes with the mass reproduction of classic images like this.

The repeated, "stamp-like" images and CMYK colors show, to me, an essence of easy and speedy reproduction for commercial resale in a world that is shifting ever closer to global universality. Warhol has taken one of the most revered paintings in the Western world and shown it to be a generic image we've turned into posters, calendars, even a trademark font. While virtually everyone in our culture recognizes the image, most know it only from a reproduction rather than having looked carefully at the artistic brushstroke that made her smile famous.

On the other hand, Warhol's own handiwork in crafting this image should be acknowledged, though it creates tension for me as to whether I should appreciate the image as a crafted work of art or to despise the commercial industry for generalizing these images.

Being a purely visual argument with no "linguistic message," I think the argument is in the viewer's perception of the image.

Agh, this question would be a whole lot easier to answer if Mona Lisa was doing something more with her hands, like holding a Snickers bar or the keys to a hybrid fuel Toyota. But without any props or commercial agendas, I don't feel that there is an overt position here. Or if there is, I have to reach deep into my psyche to access it, in which case it's more of an exercise in what I *think *it's trying to argue than what statement it may be making. So, without any real context from which to say anything definite, I'll roll the dice and say if it's argument, it's only arguing to the extent I perceive it is. So, is the argument (if I decide one is being made) effective? I would say not, since I feel more in control over it's message than the image itself.

I think the piece works as an argument on a few levels. First, as some people have mentioned, there's the level of the loss of originality that comes with reproduction, as evidenced by the colors which are highlighted, the obvious reproductive quality, etc. Second, I think there's the level of imitation of classic works of art-this image pays homage to a painter termed a "master" by the art community, but in a way which questions the need to imitate or study a few works designated as canonical by the art community, and therefore beyond reproach. Third (though this is in a way part of the above) I think the print examines the way in which certain art has been co-opted to serve as commercial fodder. The painting itself may not be an argument-some context in the art or advertising communities (or in Warhol's larger project(s)) is probably necessary to make it so-but I think the necessary context is assumed in the audience to which the arguments were originally addressed (probably primarily the art community at the time).