By Megan Kirby
On the evening of April 6, a crowd filled the Student Center for “Can Pictures Think?” a lecture by author and art theorist James Elkins.
Hosted by the painting department, the free lecture was attended by students, professors and members of the Savannah community.
Elkins, the author of “What Painting Is” and “On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art,” spoke about the often hidden visual elements in a painting that shape our interpretations and “readings” of what we see.
“Pictures are objects structured like language,” he explained, along with slides of paintings by Thomas Eakins and Piet Mondrian. Elkins described how our eyes often attempt to find and associate language-like elements in an image to further our understanding of what we’re observing.
“[Paintings] carry a secret language,” he continued, presenting a painting by Cy Twombly filled with a multitude of marks and lines that resemble handwriting. “Even though this is illegible, it’s susceptible to reading; [the marks and lines] are an invitation to think of writing.”
You have an awareness that the object invokes thought, and the sense that the object embodies thought,” he said of the painting.
Elkins, who is the E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has authored six books. Among them is “The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing.”
As Malcolm Gladwell does in his book “Blink,” Elkins deconstructs the neurological and subconscious reactions humans have toward what they view. Elkins elaborated on this during the lecture.
“What do paintings want?” he asked the crowd.
Advancing the presentation so it displayed multiple versions of the famous World War I “I Want YOU” Uncle Sam poster, he suggested, “Do we have a desire to be desired by pictures?”
Elkins’ research about our “ways of seeing” is changing the fields of art history, conservation and research, and his upcoming projects may very well shape our own art-based educations.