Understanding discourse of art - a reception study report

Abstract

I see art as a product of a multimodal and multimedial shared semiotic code. The process of interpreting art is what we may call a conceptualization of meaning of a product of this code. This process is a cognitive one, nevertheless, it is possible to investigate mental processes of art viewers by examining how they talk/write about art, namely the discourse about art. In order to understand these mental processes I propose MuCADA, the Multimodal Critical Analysis of the Discourse of Art, which draws upon the following theoretical approaches to language analysis: Conceptual Metaphor Theory Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999, Dancygier and Sweetser 2014, Forceville 2011, 2013, Kwiatkowska 2013, El Rafaie 2015), Social Semiotics (O’Toole 2011, O’Halloran 2008), and Discourse Historical Analysis (Wodak and Reisigl 2009). My research question asks whether MuCADA reflects the understanding processes of the art viewer. I assume that an artwork is a stimulus that activates certain cognitive processes which can be expressed in communicative acts. The analytical procedure focuses on these linguistic expressions and searches within them for the evidence of conceptual metaphor, embodied cognition and socio-cultural contexts. The data for this presentation come from 27 interviews conducted with 42 visitors of the Tubman Museum in Macon (GA) and High Museum of Art in Atlanta (GA). The preliminary results show systematic patterns in meaning construction triggered by the artworks. The research trip was partially financed by ESSE Bursary Type A which I received in 2018.

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