Art And The Committed Eye

The Cultural Functions Of Imagery

Richard Leppert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429719660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In Art and the Committed Eye Richard Leppert examines Western European and American art from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. He studies the complex relation between the "look" of images and the variety of social and cultural uses to which they are put and demonstrates that the meaning of any image is significantly determined by its function, which changes over time. In particular, he emphasizes the ways in which visual culture is called on to mediate social differences defined by gender, class, and race. In, Leppert addresses the nature and task of representation, discussing how meaning accrues to images and what role vision and visuality play in the history of modernity. Here he explains imagery's power to attract our gaze by triggering desire and focuses on the long history of the use of representation to enact a deception, whether in painting or advertising. explores art's relation to the material world, to the ways in which images mark our various physical and psychic ties to objects. The author analyzes still life paintings whose subject matter is both extraordinarily diverse and deeply paradoxical—from flower bouquets to grotesque formal arrangements of human body parts. Leppert demonstrates that even in "innocent" still lifes, formal design and technical execution are imbued with cultural conflict and social power. is devoted to the representation of the human body—as subject to obsessive gazing and as an object of display, spectacle, and transgression. The variety of body representation is enormous: pleased or tortured, gorgeous or monstrous, modest or lascivious, powerful or weak, in the bloom of life or under the anatomist's knife, clothed or naked. But it is the sexual body, Leppert shows, that has provided the West with its richest, most complex, contradictory, conflicted, and paradoxical accounts of human identity in relation to social ideals.

Part One
Sights/Sites for Seeing

Representation need not be art, but it is none the less mysterious for that.

—E. H. Gombrich
Art and Illusion

Something [as] meaningful to us [as art] cannot be left just to sit there bathed in pure significance, and so we describe, analyse, compare, judge, classify; we erect theories about creativity, form, perception, socialfunction; we characterize art as a language, a structure, a system, an act, a symbol, a pattern of feeling; we reach for scientific metaphors, spiritual ones, technological ones, political ones; and if all else fails we string dark sayings together and hope someone else will [elucidate] them for us. The surface bootlessness of talking about art seems matched by a depth necessity to talk about it endlessly.

—Clifford Geertz
"Art as a Cultural System"

Introduction

IT IS LOST on no one that a significant portion of our conscious and unconscious understandings of ourselves and our immediate world is framed by the imagery of advertising, both in the medium of print and on television. This imagery urges what sort of bodies to have and to desire—or to build (even the seeming natural "given" of our fleshly frames is terrain for future construction); it influences our sense of self, our belief systems, our individuality, and our status as social beings; it encourages what clothes to wear or car to drive, which political party to vote for, and so forth.

We understand several fundamental things about the advertising image. The information it provides is not unbiased or neutral (buy this instead of that, and you will be happier, better for it, more successful). It specifically exists to get us to do something we might otherwise not do. It promises future happiness, though by trying to make us dissatisfied with our past and, especially, with our present. And even when we recognize the fictions upon which advertising's pleas depend for their success, we commonly find ourselves being sucked in by the very possibility of the narrative. Thus the appeal to men made by jeans manufacturers of inordinate sexiness, coolness, group identity (lots of buddies), and athleticism; the appeal to women by pantyhose manufacturers of inordinate sexiness, beauty (long legs magnetically attracting an equally attractive man), being loved, and so forth. We understand—certainly once we've spent our money—that the promise remains just that. But despite our resistance and growing cynicism, we remain to one degree or another caught in the light of what we see—what we are shown.

Images show us a world but not the world itself. Images are not the things shown but are representations thereof: re-presentations. Indeed, what images represent may otherwise not exist in "reality" and may instead be confined to the realm of imagination, wish, desire, dream, or fantasy. And yet, of course, any image literally exists as an object within the world that it in one way or another engages. When we look at images, whether photographs, films, videos, or paintings, what we see is the product of human consciousness, itself part and parcel of culture and history. That is, images are not mined like ore; they are constructed for the purpose of performing some function within a given sociocultural matrix.

Outlining the Territory

This is a book about paintings produced during the broad expanse of time that marks historical modernity, from the early Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century. The images discussed are Western European and American, the earliest dated c. 1428 and the most recent, 1967, but most were painted between the early sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth. This period encompasses the production of so-called representational art, the history of which ends near the beginning of the twentieth century, and the general move toward abstract imagery.

However broad the books historical sweep, my purpose is not to map or otherwise survey chronologically the history of Western painting, or to introduce readers to the enormous variety of subjects represented during a five hundred-year period, or to trace that visual history via an account of changing styles (the "moves" from Medieval to Renaissance to Mannerism to Baroque, etc.). Instead, my aim is to examine the complex relation between the "look" of paintings and the variety of social and cultural uses to which paintings have been put and to examine in turn how social and cultural forces have functioned to help determine the look of paintings.

In particular, I am keen to understand some of the ways that paintings function within the conflicting realms of power operative by definition throughout any social formation, especially those surrounding differences of class, gender, and race. Following the introductory chapters, I shall address art's relation to the material world—to objects—and to the ways that images mark our various ties to objects. The paintings discussed will be still lifes of things beautiful and, alternately, horrific, from flowers and fruit to human body parts, from the object world as coveted material luxuries to the object world as so much disgusting detritus—and all of it as a means of locating the self within (or outside) a viewing community. In the next section, I shall consider the representation of the human body as a sight—and sometimes as a spectacle—that is, as an object of display and intense interest upon which the viewer obsessively gazes. The represented bodies will be those of adults and children, males and females, of different social classes and races. Some bodies will be clothed, others nude. Some will be represented as pleasured, others as tormented. Throughout this encounter I shall question art's relation to the abstract realms of happiness, desire, fear, and anxiety, which are understood less as individual, private emotions and more as responses to social and cultural conditions.

Seeing and the Social Practice of Making Sense

An underlying and fundamental theme governing this project is that all meaning—thus including the meanings of paintings—results from social practices that are in a constant state of flux and are under challenge by people holding diverse, often conflicting interests. Art-making and its consumption (viewing) are social practices. But in order to consider how paintings have functioned—the "jobs" they have been assigned to perform, as it were—it is crucial to understand that visual representation "operates" with the specificity of the medium of painting—just as literature is specifically different from television, film, and music. Each of these media is richly expressive and communicative, and each is practiced according to its own set of principles. That is, the means by which visual art "says" something to us is in part unique to visual art, and that specificity must be investigated if we have any hope of sorting out how art "works" on us. Accordingly, another of my concerns is to address the question of how representations go about representing.

Sight is the principal means through which we learn to maneuver in time and space. Sight is a "device" for recognition, prediction, and confirmation: This person is mother and not a stranger. (Her identity is "seen" before her name is recognized and long before it can be spoken.) We also understand that seeing is not a simple matter of biology and physics, not a question of light waves' action on the retina. Seeing is very much about the mind and thought processes. The moment I invoke thought, the complexity of seeing increases geometrically, for I have introduced language into the equation— and not mere recognition, as with the basic identity bond between infants and parents prior to language acquisition.

Here again representation enters. The function of language is to represent in repeatable, abstract signs (morphemes) and sounds (phonemes) what comes to us by means of our various senses, sight being principal among them. (Without our senses language is impossible. To be sure, we can get along quite well without one or more of our senses, but not without all of them—which would end life itself.) Restricting ourselves to the sense of sight, what we make of it depends in part on thought, just as thought depends on language: again, representation. We cannot "escape" the web of representational devices—they are what allows us to make our way in the world.¹

However, it is all too easy, and utterly false, to imply that paintings are simply nonverbal substitutes for what might otherwise be expressed or communicated in words—ironically, the vast body of writing about art confirms nothing more than that words often fail miserably to "account for" the communicative and expressive power of images. Paintings are products of human consciousness—thought and feeling—transformed through the physical act of painting into something visible, but silent, and usually devoid of words that might be read (relatively few paintings include texts that the viewer can read). Images are less visual translations of what might otherwise be said (in words) than they are visual transformations of a certain awareness of the world. Conscious (and unconscious) awareness of a given situation, to be sure, has ties in language, but language is only the most obvious, and not the only, means by which people attempt to make sense of their reality. Were that not so there would be little cause to explain the existence of either images or music. Further, it is important to point out that paintings are not simply assertions about the world; they are as much interrogatives, inquiries, and explorations. Images do not so much tell us anything, as make available—by making visible in a certain way—a realm of possibilities and probabilities, some of which are difficult to state in words.

Seeing to Know, Knowing to See

It makes no sense to think about a painting as though it were "a delivery van, conveying meaning to the customer."² Viewers do not wait for a painting's meanings to arrive prepackaged. Viewers are active participants in determining meaning. In order to "see" (that is, "to perceive"), I have to know something. At the most basic level this requires that I recognize what it is I am looking at, though mere recognition takes me but a short distance. Thus the ancient Roman scholar Pliny wrote: "The mind is the real instrument of sight and observation, the eyes act as a sort of vessel receiving and transmitting the visible portion of the consciousness."³ It is easily understood that seeing requires certain "skills" that are in part historically and culturally specific.

What is "there" for me to see involves me: my own knowledge, beliefs, investments, interests, desires, and pleasures. Having acquired consciousness, I never approach an image as a tabula rasa—"the innocent eye is a myth"⁴—I come always already knowing, believing, wanting, and so forth, to whatever degree. Further, I know that the image's maker, like me, approaches the wood panel or canvas with knowledge, belief, investment, interest, and desire. Still further, artists historically most often worked directly for someone or something else—a patron, and later, an art market—wherefrom other, and not always parallel, knowledges, interests, and so on emanated.

Thus, "every image embodies a way of seeing."⁵ Or better, each image embodies historically, socially, and culturally specific competing, and contradictory, ways of seeing. Precisely on that account, the "contents" of images are not simple substitutes for words, because they call upon so much more than words. Pictures call out not only to the mind but also to the body (consider the immediate physical impact of erotic images), to thought, and also to emotion, and so forth. The French novelist Emile Zola commented that artworks are "a corner of nature seen through a temperament."⁶ Zola's remark acknowledges that artists do not operate as mere conduits moving information from point A to point B like electrical lines. Instead, artists transform their material. But the value of Zola's insight is limited by the fact that he tacidy reduces art to the isolated psychology of the individual artist, without acknowledging that artistic consciousness itself is formed within the boundaries of history, society, and culture. Further, it is perhaps ironic that what we label "individuality"—however we may imagine and treasure it—is endlessly duplicated in any given society. For example, the limits to individuality are evident in newspaper personals ads; despite efforts to make each message appear unique, the net result is often a striking, perhaps depressing, sameness.

Limits of Engagement

In writing about art, I seek to engage some paintings in a metaphoric dialogic process in which their "speaking out" to me, their function of giving visibility to something, elicits from me a response, an engagement. In the process, I hope that my readers will become engaged in that process as well. My intent is to make visible certain possibilities of meanings relative to certain images. Recognizing that art, as representation, is by nature inherently always "interested," and not objective, in what it makes available for me to see or to be shown, I respond in kind. That is, I recognize, and explicitly acknowledge, my own interests. Still, the reader must remember that these interests are not coterminous with the "everything" of art—but neither are they trivial.

It is critical to emphasize that all this will be partial, incomplete, impermanent, and for that matter, maybe wrong—but not disinterested. What I seek to do is in fact all that can be done. "Artworks are not like broadcasting devices perpetually sending out the same signal or set of signals: The construal of meaning is dynamically constructive for both user and maker; it is a ceaseless production galvanized by objects in historically and socially specific circumstances."⁷ To talk about an image is not to decode it, and having once broken its code, to have done with it, the final meaning having been established and reduced to words. To talk about an image is, in the end, an attempt to relate oneself to it and to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Color Plates
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE Sights/Sites for Seeing
• PART TWO Object
• PART THREE Body
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Book and Author
• Index