thats the wee cunt responsible for my mental illness
[ID: four images of a marble statue, depicting the head of a person, which has been knocked off, lying on the ground. The photos zoom in on the neck hole, through which we see a tiny marble person sitting in the empty space where the brain would be. End ID]
okay so i want to talk about the function of picture IDs for a minute here, and how trying to describe art like it’s just pictures of things does a disservice to the art and the viewer.
i definitely don’t mean to scold or shame @dullahandame at all, but they’ve done something i find really fascinating from the perspective of a queer art major, and that i’ve noticed in a few other photo IDs i’ve seen floating around. they’ve described a work of art like it’s a photo of people, when that’s not what it is at all.
this is a ceramic sculpture from Andrea Salvatori, who–after a quick google search– turns out to be a ceramicist interested in exploring fantasy and gender through surreal juxtapositions.
so, it’s not a “marble statue depicting the head of a person.” i’d bet money that that’s a ceramic cast of the head of michelangelo’s david. and the “tiny marble person” inside is a porcelain woman, done in a particular historical style: of precious, dainty-cute, feminine porcelain (or ‘china’) figurines.
i have no firm idea of what salvatori means to be doing here with this work! but i know enough art history to know that this is a deliberate juxtaposition of genders, materials, genres, and purposes. michelangelo’s david is a huge, imposing, unquestionably male, heroic work. china figurines are meant to be precious but they’re also mass-market commodities, faux-valuable, collectible, disposable, commercial. they’re displayed in different contexts, they’re made for different contexts, they mean very different things. so what does it mean that this little woman is alone inside david’s literally cavernous head? i don’t know! but that’s food for thought, isn’t it? it invites you to speculate.
to describe an image succinctly is a difficult task. to make gendered assumptions can be an imposition to someone’s identity. but to describe a work of art without reference to gender or history is to miss the forest because you don’t want to mention the trees.
how much of a problem is this? probably not much of one. i’m not mad, and i don’t think anyone should be mad. is there a solution? i don’t know that either. try to research art more, i guess? it can’t hurt. art is a huge, weird, endless frontier, and engaging with something that has no firm answers can be extremely rewarding. ask more questions! find out more things! why not?
a I get what @roach-works is saying, but I want to defend the approach that @dullahandame takes here.
What’s important to keep in mind is context, what the function of the image description is specifically in this case.. The describer made the choice to reblogging the version of this post with the joke on it; the purpose of their description is to translate the visual element of that joke.
The caption says: “The wee cunt causing my mental illness.” The image being referenced is of a little person in a hollowed-out head. “Marble statue” isn’t literally accurate, because it doesn’t need to be; the phrase “marble statue” brings to mind some piece of fine art, and the heart of the joke is the contrast between the language (wee cunt) and the image (a sculpture by a ceramicist interested in exploring fantasy and gender through surreal juxtapositions).
For example, there’s a scene in the movie The Naked Gun featuring some statues. The audio description describes them as, paraphrasing, “statues of nude men.” There’s no need to describe the sculptures in any detail, with any context as to the material or art movement or anything like that. The whole scene is going to be about Frank Drebin suggestively grabbing the statue’s dick, and the AD sets up that joke.
If this was an art documentary or an art film where those statues related deeply to story’s themes, “statues of nude men” would deny important information to blind and low vision audiences. It especially would if this was AD used in a museum. In that case, the listener is expecting, reasonably, specialized art history knowledge; they might even have paid for it. Image and audio description of art is a specialized field that takes skill and expertise.
@dullahandame is some person, probably not an art major because most people aren’t, taking time out of their day to add an image description to a Tumblr post, anticipating no reward or recognition, just to be helpful (probably, most people won’t even bother checking the notes to see if there’s a post with an ID before reblogging one without). Their description is accurate, succinct, and serves the purpose of making a really funny joke make sense. (I mean, it’s funny to me, I can’t tell you how to live your life). It’s not a bad or lazy or low effort. They just made the judgement that they didn’t need to give the artist’s name to explain the joke.
Also, we should take into account that a lot of sighted viewers aren’t going to really take in more information than what’s in the description, because we’re casually scrolling through our dash, looking to just chill for a while. A lot of us will probably just say, “huh, that’s cool looking,” and go about our day. You’ve said yourself that you have to do some “quick googling” to figure out the context you describe. If the picture really piqued my interest, I’d do that googling, and so would a visually-impaired reader. If I’m not in the mood to learn about art today, I won’t.
I’m not some anti-intellectual who thinks that learning about art is lame and boring; I’m just a film nerd who finds it personally more interesting to babble about AD. (If this did some interest piquing for you, Naked Gun is available on Netflix with AD, and I recommend it).
Also, look at that wee cunt. She knows what she’s doing.
