Vignettes and Vines: Faster Seeing

The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates with the wish to return to a more artisanal, purer past—when images still had a handmade quality, an aura.

Susan Sontag On Photography

One of thomas bewick’s engravings, “Jane Bewick Pulling Hair from a Horse’s Tail” (A General History of Quadrupeds [1792]), shows at centre a large cart horse, its tail being pulled by a young child, while a woman (her mother or nursemaid) appears in the upper right background running over a stile by a cottage toward the impending disaster. At the left side of the picture, two lovers are heading off into a small forest, their relationship paralleled by the two horses in the far left middle ground. Thus this vignette (which oed defines as “an ornamental or decorative design on a blank space in a book or among printed matter, esp. at the beginning or end of a chapter or other division, usually one of small size or occupying a small proportion of the space; spec. any embellishment, illustration, or picture uninclosed in a border, or having the edges shading off into the surrounding paper; a head-piece or tail-piece” [1751]) incorporates a narrative, becoming a miniature version of the normally much larger “story-picture” or genre painting.

The engraving has a “handmade,” authentic quality, yet it is in fact one of countless reproductions, made possible first by Bewick’s innovative use of the hard end grain of boxwood for engraving. Technological change makes seeing faster by effecting the wider dissemination of images. Is this development in itself evil? Or is it the inevitable result of our collective impulse to transmit art to ever-increasing numbers of viewers? In considering these questions, I thought of two historically and generically different art forms and how these two forms might be said both to fulfill this wish and yet, ironically, to express the unfulfillable, elegiac desire to fix time. The first is the vignette and the second is the Vine.

Vines are six-second looping videos that anyone can produce and upload to the Internet via the website Vine: they are prodigiously popular. By August 2014, Vine boasted over 100 million viewers each month, with Vine loops playing over a billion times per day (Honan). Like vignettes, Vines are elliptical, often humorous, and usually narrative in form: many are fragmentary sketches or recorded moments featuring one or more performers; others are more complex. As in the Bewick engraving, some Vines develop a narrative to which the viewer, via the loop, returns repeatedly in order to play out the story to its more or less satisfying conclusion. As Susan Sontag has said, “Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle” (109–10). More than most media, Vines radically miniaturize experience, transforming ordinary daily events into spectacle.

Olan Rogers’s Vine Lost Keys uses six one-second shots to dramatize loss and recovery: shot one, we see Rogers standing in a room in an obviously suburban house and asking “Where are my keys?” Two, we see him, his back to the camera, in another room, throwing cardboard boxes. Three, we see him throwing up his arms in a hallway, screaming, in front of a door. Four, he appears beating his right fist against the door frame. Five, we see him in a backyard at a distance, again raising then dropping his arms. Six, he is sitting on a doorstep outside when he opens his left hand and sees the keys. Each shot is silent but for one sound: the question, the bumping boxes, the scream, the thud of the fist, the slap of his hands when he drops them, and the tiny jingle of the keys at the end. Although the Vine deploys sound and motion, whereas the vignette is silent and still, like a photograph, nevertheless, as in the Bewick engraving, here the viewer’s attention shifts rapidly from one point to the next—time is effectively telescoped.

Walter Benjamin notes that “Graphic art was first made technologically reproducible by the woodcut, long before written language became reproducible by movable type...