The Basic Concepts Of Media And Visual Art Studies

There are some basic concepts of media to clarify to visual art studies such as Hegemony by Gramsci, Orientalism by Edward Said, Representation , Discourse ,ideology and Ideological state apparatuses. We can also see the male gaze by Laura Mulveys. First of them is Gramsci’s approach that is about Hegemony.  Gramsci was one of the most important Marxist thinkers in the 20th century, and his writings are heavily concerned with the analysis of culture and political leadership; he is notable as a highly original thinker within modern European thought. He is renowned for his concept of cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining the state in a capitalist society. He did some research about the Visual Arts with capitalist approach on way of Karl Marx. Gramsci used the term hegemony to denote the predominance of one social class over others. This represents not only political and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as 'common sense' and 'natural'. Commentators stress that this involves willing and active consent.

Common sense, suggests Geoffrey Nowell -Smith, is 'the way a subordinate class lives its subordination.

Other Term is The Orientalism denotes a certain perception of "the East" (the Arab Middle East) by "the West", or Europe and America, that is essentialist and a historical, and covers "all endeavors to establish the Orient as an object of knowledge and domination". Said’s critics agree with his admirers that he has single handedly effected a revolution in Middle Eastern studies in the U.S. As well as Orientalism effected the Art, It is also useful for analyzing media. We can see an example from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It included that white American hero which understood as noble, brave, strong , sexual  and consummate ability. As we said that Orientalism effected Arabic and Islamic countries, The arts, handmade or else has been shaped with Orientalist art.

“Representation means in politic that a chosen few stand for the people as a whole as their “representatives” in Congress or parliament. Similarly, in language , media and communication, representation are words, pictures, sounds and sequences etc.”  When we look at this description , we can say that the easiest way to understand the concept of representation is to remember that watching a TV program is not the same as watching something happen in real life.All media products re-present the real world to us; they show us one version of reality, not reality itself.

Discourse , is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing different disciplines and written , spoken , signed language use or any significant semiotic event. The object of discourse, writing , conversation , communicative event or etc.. are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences , propositions, speech acts or turns at talk. The ideologies in the media discourse have also many perspectives. The first of them is the paradigm of Left, Right and Center. The other is that of status quo and anti status quo, male chauvinistic and feminist. Interestingly, these paradigms are also not that straight as they appear. There will be numerous discourses within each of these categories.

Ideological state apparatuses is” the material or  institutional form taken by ideology in specified historical circumstances in class societies. Known in the trade as ISAs’ and distinguished from RSAs or repressive state apparatuses, the two terms were coined by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser(1971).” “Because Althusser held that a person's desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgments and so forth are the products of social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image.”

“Within capitalist societies, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject endowed with the property of being a self-conscious 'responsible' agent, whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts. For Althusser, however, a person’s capacity for perceiving him-/herself in this way is not innate or "given". Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on individuals the role  of a subject.”

       

Last exploitation is about “Laura Mulvey’s the gaze theory”  Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the "male gaze" as a feature of power asymmetry. The concept has been strongly influential on feminist film theory and media studies. “The concept of gaze is one that deals with how an audience views the people presented.” As the other describing is Gaze theory also is a feminist theory developed to highlight the power imbalance between men and women analysing the way men see women, the way women view themselves and other women. “For feminists it can  be thought of in 3 ways;

*How men look at the women

        *How women look at themselves

        *How women look at the other women”