This essay employs a relational anthropological model developed by system-atic art education scholarship to exemplify its art historical applicability in the interpretation of a work of art. To this end the photo exhibition »The Family of Man« has been chosen, which in its intention and structure represents an anthropological study of humanity, seen as social beings inexorably embedded in relations to the reflexive self, co-existing others and a shared cosmos. The following analysis seeks to illustrate what a relational understanding of art and a corresponding relational pictorial practice means. At the same time it makes a substantial contribution to art historical scholarship on »The Family of Man« by clarifying methodological premises which have been overlooked in the decades-long debate on this legendary exhibition.
In dealing with a diagrammatical drawing, Wittgenstein noticed in the second part of his philosophical investigations that in some respect he stands towards it as he does towards a human face: »I can study its expression, can react to it as to the expression of the human face. A child can talk to the picture-men or picture-animals, can treat them as it treats dolls« (WITTGENSTEIN 1968: 194). It can from a childlike angle, moreover, be known where picture-animals look, what may be gleaned from their glances in principle, and what on the contrary, will always be hidden to them. Wallis thinks of a semantic enclave as »a part of a work of art consisting of signs of another kind or from another system then the signs forming the whole work. Some examples: quotations in French in a novel written in English, inscriptions in medieval pictures« (WALLIS 1970: 525). This observation shall be carried on; Wallis’ second example deserves picture-man’s interest. The question of how which semantic enclaves—aren’t there iconic ones, too?—are located within pictorial space renders the basis of a taxonomy to be developed. The problem of semantic enclaves is obviously related, though not in a clear fashion, to the one of semantic degrees. For example: The copper-etching of Galatea’s yet not statue and the likewise copper-engraved Pygmalion are picture-beings which belong to disparate classes; holding unequal semantic station they cannot be in communication. Seeing such icon items—though that would be sensible in a way—in terms of semantic degrees, however, would not account for the grounds, which caused Stachowiak to place oral language on the second and written text on a third semantic step. These reasons are, however, not cogent in the view of the present author, who tries to carry out instead the authentic semantic-degree-concept of Russell and Whitehead in the field of iconics.
The article examines the process to involve power relations increasingly in spatial phenomena. Power needs space in form of a square; logistically seen for the stagings of the mass, as well as through the political-symbolic and iconographic logic of the system square. The central square – as the icon of a city – is the visualised history and the envisioned political situation of a country. Understanding the allocation and shaping of urban space as a question of political intentions enables the decryption of power relations. The study focuses on a nuanced approach to figure out, how the analysis of a central square makes conclusions possible about the demonstration of power in authoritarian states. No place is more significant in the (contemporary) history of Ethiopia than the Meskel Square in its capital Addis Ababa. How has the demonstration of power manifested itself at this point in its genesis to the present? This approach provides a novel contribution to a differentiated understanding of the central square as a visual metaphor for the socio-political shaping of a country respectively of a city.
