Theory of the Art Object

Paul Crowther

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429559358
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Art Theory & Criticism

Meaning in the visual arts centers on how the physical work makes its content or presence visible. The art object is fundamental. Indeed, the different object forms of each visual medium allows our experience of space-time, and our relations to other people, to be aesthetically embodied in unique ways. Through these embodiments, visual art compensates for what is otherwise existentially lost, and becomes part of what makes life worth living. The present book shows this by discussing a range of visual art forms, namely pictorial representation, abstraction, sculpture and assemblage works, land art, architecture, photography, and varieties of digital art.

1 Pictorial Art and Presentness

What kind of thing is pictorial art?¹ In this chapter, we argue that its conceptual structure involves a three-dimensional illusion generated on a two-dimensional plane, on the basis of visual resemblance between the marked surface and the kind of thing pictured. However, there have been some influential alternative approaches that interpret pictorial references semiotically, through analogies derived from linguistic meaning. On these terms, the image is seen as a site for the production of meaning. This approach tends also to treat the picture mainly as a way of documenting the experiences of relevant kinds of producers and consumers, and, as a corollary, of marginalizing others – especially members of racial, sexual, and social minorities.

Now, pictures are, indeed, visual signs, but the semiotic approach tends to emphasize the sign factor, and underplay the visual dimension. This distracts from real understanding of the conceptual basis of pictorial art. The present chapter formulates this basis by developing deeper issues (rarely – if ever – considered in the philosophical literature) that are implicated in the basic definition. In Part I, the ground is cleared through a detailed critique of semiotic approaches. Part II commences the positive theory by clarifying the role of resemblance in pictorial meaning. In Part III, the internal structure of pictorial representation is addressed in terms of the relation between planarity and virtual three-dimensional content, and the different ways these link syntactically to form varieties of pictorial space. Examples are used to show how these intervene upon our finitude. In Part IV, this is explored in relation to a concept fundamental to the aesthetic effects of visual art, which has hardly been theorized. The concept in question is presentness, which centers on pictorial art’s immobilization of the passing moment. The concept is elucidated through more examples.

Part I

We commence with Bryson’s Vision and Painting – which is the most sustained semiotic approach to pictorial meaning. Bryson’s book is, in effect, a critique of Western painting itself. However, his theory turns out to be something of a fantasy in both historical and conceptual terms. The basis of the fantasy is a supposed ‘natural attitude’ that is exemplified by the history of Western painting. Bryson claims that:

Within the natural attitude, which is that of Pliny, Villani, Vasari, Berenson, and Francastel, the image is thought of as self-effacing in the representation or reduplication of things. The goal towards which it moves is the perfect replication of a reality found existing ‘out there’ already, and all its effort is consumed in the elimination of those obstacles which impede the reproduction of the prior reality: the intransigence of the physical medium; inadequacy of manual technique; the inertia of formulae that impede, through their rigidity, accuracy of registration. The history of the image, accordingly, is written in negative terms. Each ‘advance’ consists of the removal of a further obstacle between painting and the Essential Copy …²

Bryson’s theory, then, is that Western painting conceals its origin as the product of gesture and strives towards the realization of an ‘Essential Copy’ that reproduces some supposed exact moment of congruence between the painter’s perception and what is given to it visually. Painting arrests the flux of phenomena, and represents the visual field from a viewpoint outside – a viewpoint that strips away its transient features. It is this arrested vision that the viewer unites with, passively, in his or her perception of the work.

As far as I can tell. Bryson conflates two, separate here, questions, and is wrong about both. One is the question of how critics and historians have understood the history of Western painting, and the other is that of its basic empirical history. At the level of criticism and history, the account he criticizes is a ‘straw man’, i.e. a view that is so silly as to be a ‘sitting-duck’ for potential objections, that is not influential, anyway. In fact, it would require significant argument to show that it is systematically operative in any of the thinkers he mentions, and, even if it were, the problem is that no one else seems to share the fantasy.

Surely, when it comes to understanding the development of Western painting, one would have thought that the accounts that should be analyzed in detail are those of the great art historians such as Riegl, Warburg, Wolfflin, and Panofsky. As it is, Bryson only mentions Warburg and Panofsky in single passing references, and Riegl and Wolfflin, not at all.

In this respect, it is instructive to bear in mind Wolfflin’s remarks – based on the most intense formal and historical analysis.

It is a mistake for art history to work with the clumsy notion of the imitation of nature, as though it were merely a homogenous process of increasing perfection … The imitative content, the subject matter, may be as different in itself as possible, the decisive point remains that the conception in each case is based on a different visual schema – a schema which, however, is far more deeply rooted than in mere questions of the progress of imitation.³

The schemata that Wolfflin refers to here are categories of both representation and beholding. In their former aspect, this means they are creative features determined by the character of representational media rather than perceptual correspondence. Wolfflin’s approach, indeed, shows generally how difficult the notion of correspondence is, in the context of visual art.

In terms of the course of Western painting understood in more empirical historical terms, Bryson’s account is simply false. Far from having any interest in making painting correspond to a pre-given reality, the whole impetus of painting (arising from the academies that dominated the European artworld from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century) is to transform the visual world through Idealization. This means that, in concealing its origins in the brushstroke, painting is trying to perfect appearance – by removing blemishes and enhancing proportions, and the like. The task of painting is to change how the world appears, not to strive for correspondence with the perceptually given.

This ‘improving’ function is the very reason why painting achieved such high cultural status in the Renaissance and beyond. Sir Joshua Reynolds identifies what is at issue in the following summary of the painter’s task.

His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object. This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the Artist calls the Ideal beauty, is the great leading principle by which works of genius are conducted.⁴

In these remarks, Reynolds is not simply expressing his own opinion, he is summarizing a concept of painting that was dominant until the rise of Modernism. There simply was no conception of the Essential Copy as a guiding principle in any of the main centers of European painting. And even when, in the nineteenth-century, John Ruskin advocated a truth to nature (in both his theory and practice) the justification for this is to express the greatness of God’s creation, rather than copying the given.

The only correct thing about Bryson’s overall position, is its recognition of the fact that mimesis represents its subject-matter in a static way. But he then confuses the complex issues involved in this. He introduces a hierarchical distinction between paintings of the ‘Glance’ such as Chinese pictures, which do not disguise their origins as products of gesture, and art of the ‘Gaze’, which ‘breaks with the real time of durational practice’.⁵ The implication is that Western painting is less authentic than Chinese precisely because it suppresses its own gestural origins. Reality, and the painter’s presence before it are dynamic, ever-changing things, which, in effect, the finished character of Western painting is in denial about. To put it another way, Western painting conceals its status as a signifying practice based on sites of meaning-production, by pretending to correspond to a privileged moment of perception.

However, the ‘finish’ of painting is by no means an inauthentic striving to recover some exact moment of correspondence between perception and its object. Painters would have to be extremely stupid to think in such terms because, as Bryson rightly emphasizes, reality is so manifestly in flux. But this is exactly the point. In addition to the Idealization of appearance described earlier, there is another factor at issue. Western painting takes on its finished character not to recapture a perceptual moment, but for the opposite reason – to go beyond perception by presenting what it does not allow, temporally.

In fact, this is one of the key aspects of drawing’s and painting’s intrinsic fascination (and is a topic I will return to later on in this chapter). Drawing and painting create a symbolic visual eternalization of the moment – a seeming suspension of finitude. Bryson fantasizes a real moment of perception as the goal of painting whereas its real goal, is a redemptive fantasy moment that goes beyond perception.

Let us now consider a more recent theory of signification proposed by Isabelle Graw. In an essay included in Thinking through Painting: reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas Graw argues for an ‘expanded’ notion of painting ‘once it has merged with other procedures – from the ready-made and linguistic proposition to the insights of institutional critique’.⁶ She takes this to be especially appropriate for dealing with painting’s position amongst networks of other signifying practices.

The basis of her theory is Peirce’s notion of indexicality. This is used mainly to indicate signs that have a causal or other direct physical relation with that which they are signs of. (Smoke, for example, is an indexical sign of fire.) Graw thinks that thinking about the indexical is especially appropriate to painting, insofar as it is grounded in agency. She suggests that:

While all artworks have to function as an index of the one who brought them into existence in order for value to be attributed to them, painting seems to go further by suggesting that it is a quasi-person. Or to put this slightly differently; painting is particularly well equipped to satisfy the longing for substance in value. It indeed seems to demonstrate how value is founded in something concrete – the living labor of the artist.⁷

By adopting and modifying Peirce’s indexicality, she claims to achieve a proper understanding of the closeness of the bond between the painter and what is painted. As she puts it ‘in painting, this bond between product and person is especially unbreakable, as its signs refer to the producer consistently and not only selectively, like in film.’⁸

Unfortunately, in her analysis Graw mistakenly assumes that signs of production are a mode of sign production. They are not. In the present example, indexical signs are produced as a side-effect of labor made meaningful through another, more specific sign-producing activity that goes beyond signification as such, by creating material images. In painting practiced as an art, very few painters ever want their work just to be testimony that it was physically produced by him or her. It is not the fact of labor having been expended that is important, but the character of what is produced – the artistic whole, of which labor is one aspect. Graw imagines that her approach somehow emphasizes the bond between painter and what is painted. It does not. Because, if painting reduces to simply the action that it embodies without necessary reference to what is painted, then the relation between the painter and what he or she makes is made contingent. All that is required is that someone makes a painting, and then someone else puts it to use in some artistic context.

Even if the artist who uses the painting is the one who created it, there is another paradox. Ironically, whilst Graw is using a labor theory of value for painting, by emphasizing its indexicality alone, she turns it into alienated labor – where the producer does not see himself or herself expressed and realized in the character of what is produced, but knows only the act of production itself.

Graw also says that:

The recourse to a semiotic approach presents the additional advantage of allowing for a media-unspecific understanding of painting. Because as soon as I understand painting as a form of sign production, I can also pursue the presence of non-painterly signs in nonpainterly practices or consider expanded forms of painting that go beyond painting and have burst open the narrow confines of the canvas long ago.⁹

However, a ‘media-unspecific’ understanding of painting is not an understanding of painting at all. It is an understanding only of abstract labor. But, one would have thought that – given the breadth of contexts in which painting has now been used, or the senses in which it has now been ‘expanded’ – there must be something quite remarkable about the specifics of painting as a medium and activity which enables it to be used in this way. Treating it semiotically as indexical signification evades this question. It is an approach that, in effect, reduces painting to just one brand used in contemporary art-marketing networks.

Having criticized semiotic approaches to pictorial art, we now turn to a positive theory of meaning for such works – one that emphasizes the relation between vision and space.

Part II

As noted earlier, a picture is a notional plane surface marked in such a way as to suggest, optically, the appearance of some recognizable kind of three-dimensional item or state of affairs (other than that of the picture’s own material being). The picture refers, in other words, by resembling enough of its referent’s visual properties (vis-à-vis shape, volume, mass, and texture) for the audience to recognize it as a likeness of such and such a kind of three-dimensional object.¹⁰

Resemblance alone, of course, is not enough. There are natural phenomena such as shapes in clouds that involve fortuitous resemblance. In order to be interpreted as a picture, the likeness must be in a format that allows its content to be interpreted as something created with the intention of securing reference on the lines just described. This usually involves the plane surface having specific physical characteristics, e.g. being made of paper, or canvas, or board, and the like, or presented on a computer screen, with framing devices to distinguish the image from the surrounding non-pictorial material (even if these devices involve no more than the physical edge of the pictorial surface).

The only serious alternative to this theory of picturing (over and above semiotic approaches) is the radical conventionalism of Nelson Goodman, which holds that resemblance does not have to be involved in pictorial reference.^11...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of Plates
• Introduction: Material Ontology, Vision, and Space
• 1. Pictorial Art and Presentness
• 2. Abstract Art and Transperceptual Space
• 3. In and Through Space: Sculpture, Assemblage, and Installation Art
• 4. Land Art: Reciprocities of Site and Formation
• 5. Embodiment and Architectural Cognition
• 6. The Aesthetic Space of Photography
• 7. Digital Objects, Aesthetic Phenomena
• Bibliography
• Index