Beholding

Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception

Ken Wilder

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350088412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte

Beholding considers the spatially situated encounter between artwork and spectator. It argues that artworks created for specific places or conditions structure a reciprocal encounter, which is completed by the presence of a beholder. These are works which demand the 'beholder's share', but not, as Ernst Gombrich famously claimed, to sustain an illusion. Rather, Beholding reconfigures Gombrich's notion of the beholder's share as a set of 'licensed' imaginative and cognitive projections. Each chapter frames a particular work of art from the remit of a complementary theoretical text. The book establishes a transhistorical notion of the spatially situated encounter, and considers the role of the architectural host in bringing the beholder's orientation into play. The book engages a diverse range of practices: from Renaissance painting and group portraiture to intermedia practices of installation and performance art. Written within the broad remit of reception aesthetics, the book proposes a phenomenological theory of beholding, argued through an in-depth examination of artworks and their spatial contexts, selected for their explanatory potential. These various encounters allocate different constitutive roles to the beholder, bringing not only spatial and temporal orientation into play, but also a repertoire of anticipated ideas and beliefs.

PART I

SACRED IMAGERY

CHAPTER 1

THE BEHOLDER AS WITNESS

Masaccio, Trinity (c.1425–7)

Sven Sandström, Levels of Unreality (1963)

I

The genesis of this book began with a 2008 journal article on Masaccio’s Trinity (c.1425–7; Plate 1), which sought to make the case for a role for the external beholder.¹ For some time, this extraordinary painting has been central to my thinking about the relation between in situ art and beholder. Not least, Trinity represents a rare paradigmatic shift in the history of reception – a work engaging an implicit beholder as integral to its semantic content. Not only is Trinity widely credited as the earliest extant painting using a systematic linear perspective,² but it depicts a novel architectural schema where the bounding frame is fully integrated with the illusory architecture of the vaulted chapel.³ Crucially, Trinity distinguishes between those parts of the fresco depicted as being spatially in front of the supporting surface (the painted architectural frame, the two patrons and the sarcophagus on which a skeleton is laid to rest) and those implied as behind (the scene within the vaulted chapel, at the threshold of which stand the figures of the Virgin and John the Evangelist): a categorical distinction in degrees of reality that is fundamental to the work’s meaning. The illusory painted architecture is thus tethered to its host church, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, and directly related to the beholder’s address. Moreover, all the figures are life-sized, with the painting’s centric point (what later is termed the vanishing point) somewhere in the region of 172 cm above ground (i.e. head height). However, this is not a straightforward demonstration of perspectiva artificialis; as we shall see, the location of the Trinity within the implied space of the painted architecture is impossible to verify, the implication being that it lies outside of empirical time and space.

Overfamiliar, as we are, with self-contained easel painting, cut off from the space of the viewer, we need to remind ourselves not only of the situatedness of frescos but of the role of the host religious space in priming our engagement with in situ works. Locked into its institutional context, the viewer of Masaccio’s Trinity occupies an already sanctified space, differentiated from empirical space; the beholder is thus primed not only by certain expectations as to the work’s content but also by the ritual behaviour that accompanies such a setting.

Writing of how such bounded works structure a relation with an embodied beholder, Thomas Puttfarken registers the importance of taking the beholder’s position into account:

The bounded image is thus described as a two-dimensional structure, which somehow organizes our vision of a pictorial world behind it. Yet before we look at what is behind the picture, we must gain a clearer view of what is in front of it. We must look not only at the relationships between boundary, surface and space behind, but also at the relationships of all three to the viewer: to the fictive space behind the surface we must add both fictive and real space in front of it, between the picture and the viewer.⁴

Puttfarken takes his notion of the bounded image from Meyer Schapiro, who refers to the ‘late’ invention of the frame as ‘a finding and focusing device placed between the observer and the image’.⁵ As Schapiro notes, while the frame belongs to the space of the beholder, ‘rather than of the illusory, three-dimensional world disclosed within and behind’, in some circumstances, ‘the frame may also enter into the shaping of that image’.⁶ This is particularly true of painted frames, which evolve in relation to the organizational demands of picture cycles such as Giotto’s Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni) in Padua (c.1305–6; Figure 1.1). Here it is necessary, as Puttfarken suggests, to treat Giotto’s individual scenes not as isolated easel pictures but as part of an integrated solution with a strong centralizing tendency.

Figure 1.1 Giotto: Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni), c.1305–6, Padua.

Getty Images/Eric Vandeville/Contributor.

It is Masaccio’s particular innovation to align the newly evolved structuring device of perspective with the work’s religious content. Indeed, that fictive space in Trinity encroaches into ‘our’ reality raises problems with Erwin Panofsky’s much-quoted claim that with perspectiva artificialis ‘the entire picture has been transformed … into a “window”’.⁷ The simile of ‘seeing through’ fails to account for the fact that so much of a work such as Masaccio’s Trinity is implied as being on our side of the wall. The theoretical implications are drawn out by Patrick Maynard, who argues that the theoretical ‘mix-up of pictorial and (transmission) projection planes’ leads to a conflation of ‘pictures with their real or hypothetical projection surfaces’.⁸ In other words, the hypothetical projection plane used for constructing a measured perspective (i.e. the intersection of Alberti’s visual pyramid) does not have to align with the picture surface. While this conflation can occur (and does so, in part, in Trinity), Maynard notes that ‘the history of depiction shows we can imagine depicted scenes (perspectival or not), in whole or in part, to be behind picture surfaces, also at those surfaces, in front of them – or in no spatial relationship to them’.⁹ This has particular relevance for Trinity, in that the space that we imaginatively ‘enter’ is not that of the religious representation, but the space of the church we ‘share’ with the donors and skeleton, depicted as being in front of the supporting wall.

As Wolfgang Kemp notes, ‘perspective achieves more than connecting the space of the beholder with the space of the painting’, in that it also ‘regulates the position of the recipient with regard to the inner communications; that is to say, the presentation of the painting with its demands on how it should be viewed’.¹⁰ Indeed, throughout the book I utilize this premise of reception aesthetics in order to make a case for a work’s prepositional structuring of its conditions of access, functioning to orientate the beholder with respect to the artwork’s different levels of implied reality. As such, there are two performances operative here: that of the artwork, conceived not as a ‘thing’ but as an ‘event-like’ entity; and that of the beholder, who must imaginatively enact such a performance, using cues contained within the work to orientate herself within the situated context.¹¹

As an encounter involving both imagination and ideation, this does not, of course, exhaust our engagement with the work as painting, but rather supplements and informs the perceptual encounter it affords. Perspective, combined with framing, has a particular role in structuring our implied spatial relationship to painting; and Masaccio’s Trinity, by allying its perspectival schema to its religious content in such a way as to acknowledge the embodied viewpoint of the beholder, constructs an unprecedented proximity to the religious image that, in turn, demands means to delimit this engagement if requisite decorum is to be upheld. While reciprocity is facilitated, our role as beholder is that of a witness. As Rona Goffen observes, ‘Renaissance verisimilitude is both psychological and physical. It concerns both the representation of emotions in a manner intended to engage the beholder’s empathy and the representation of visible reality in terms of space and light.’¹²

II

The notion of different levels of reality being operative within the same painting is the subject of Sven Sandström’s 1963 Levels of Unreality. This book, little known outside of narrow art historical circles, sets out an analysis of the role of degrees of reality-effect in structuring the relationship between different parts of a picture. It offers a functional account, which, despite its formal concerns, is distinguished from ‘formalist’ accounts such as that offered by Heinrich Wölfflin. Indeed, Sandström differentiates his position from Wölfflin’s by stating that the ‘concepts “degrees of reality” and “planes of reality”’ refer to ‘the functions of a work of art, instead of being associated with the enduring properties or qualities of the painting’.¹³ Nonetheless, Sandström acknowledges a debt to Wölfflin, whose 1899 account of the Sistine Chapel in Die Klassische Kunst was the first to employ the concept of a ‘different level of reality’ when distinguishing between Michelangelo’s narrative scenes and his portraits of the prophets and the sibyls.¹⁴

Sandström evolves a theory where an interplay of degrees of reality is described as providing ‘structural conditions which are syntactic in a pre- or non-linguistic meaning’.¹⁵ For Sandström, visual images are thus ‘cognitive structures’, such that ‘viewing a scene or object must be understood as a highly structured cognitive activity which relies heavily on a variety of mental resources – something more comprehensive and much more intellectually qualified than what immediate perception usually is meant to be’.¹⁶ With its debt to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Sandström thus seeks to distinguish his approach not only from ‘illusory’ perceptual models such as Ernst Gombrich’s¹⁷ but also from linguistic models of depiction; he identifies a non-linguistic notion of ‘spatial’ syntax – apprehending images as spatial constructs – as an organizational principle founded upon implied relations to (in the specific case of fresco) the mural’s surface and bounding frame.

This is a graduation that concerns not so much reality itself, but ‘on the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• PLATES
• FIGURES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I SACRED IMAGERY
• PART II GROUP PORTRAITURE
• PART III ABSTRACTION
• PART IV INTERMEDIA
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• PLATES SECTION
• Copyright Page