Discourse Analysis I

From the reading of Discourse Analysis I in Visual Methodologies by Gillian Rose, it mentioned how a lot of people debated the definition of discourse analysis itself. The definition of discourse means a particular form of language that defines a way of thought and how we interact with the idea. However, in my point of view, “discourse” itself is also a discourse. It is also debatable because it couldn’t be certainly defined in terms. The surface meaning could be a similar interpretation by different people, but according to Foucault “discourse was a form of discipline, and this leads us to his concern with power.” But it is based on the idea of our sense of our self is made through the operation of discourse. In contrary, if we put into a fresh mind that does not know anything such as a primitive, which is the time that maybe the idea of “self” isn’t recognized yet. As the definition of discourse will be limited by the period while it is existed in.

According to the reading Nead suggests that “art” can be understood as a discourse which if we imply to Andrea Fraser's Frank and His Little Carp that was made in 2001. It delivers more than a simple video of a museum tour itself but more sexual and modern meanings. As for the process of analyzing the video, we should look at it with fresh eyes. The footage includes visual and verbal images. However, none of them are same to a traditional museum audio-guide and a tour guide of a museum. Andrea Fraser herself is the intertextuality of the video, she as a medium and a carrier for the voice from the recorder. Her reaction and motion were interacted or instructed by the audio-guide, which is similar to how people usually react when the audio-guide ask us to look on. The satire is, the audio-guide wasn’t focusing on the artworks in the museum but more the structure and interior design of it. The discursive formation that deals with her reaction to the pillar and the audio-voice shows Andrea Fraser prostituted herself by wearing a short green neon dress and black high heels in the museum, not only making herself as an object but also declaring how people especially men seem to find all sorts of ways of working phallic imagery.

Moreover, comparing to other people that wore casual but less revealing clothing, every intention that Andrea made in the video shows her own “discourse” of the “regime of truth” in the museum. The hidden cameras that were hidden in different angles in the museum was also a claimed that related to our ways of seeing it. The cameras recorded the reactions of the people in the museum as the “male gaze” that showed in the video implied how different that males and women react with her provocative behavior. This emphasizes the idea of discursive formation that held in arts and how Andrea challenged the society to an advanced artistic scale in our generation.

The iconographic in the video could be interpreted differently in different generations, but as the time dated of the video is in 2001, we should view it as we were watching this video at the same period. During that time, modern architecture just rose, and so does performance art that was just started 30 years ago. Andrea Fraser made an argument of a new form of architecture that wasn’t able to build before computer programming and also her preference for performing art. The provocative performance as for that time might be astonishing, but the way she was performing it became propaganda of a vast improvement in performing art.

The idea of discourse in Andrea Fraser’s performing art is debatable because in this video it shows different reactions from us watching the video, passengers that walked by her, professional critiques that critique on this video and Andrea herself as a subject reacting with the audio and her declaration on this video. This complicated but also simple relations of different discourse could be less rhetorical if we don’t define “discourse” in a term, but from different aspects, which could conclude into Gill’s notes “ all discourse is occasioned.”.