On Vid Simoniti’s Artist Remake the World: A Contemporary Art Manifesto

Vid Simonit’s book Artists Remake the World (2023) is a rare instance of a sophisticated, well-informed, and artistically sensitive philosopher addressing issues internal to the practice of contemporary art. His topic is what he calls the exhibition-based works of capitalist democracies of this century. His project arises from a few experiences of exhilaration and artistic power, whose effect, he says, is to ‘unhinge’ us from our ordinary ways of thinking; and experiences of disappointment, where the artwork seems to aim at some accomplishment that could be done as well or better in the non-artistic realms of politics or social work. He notes that the contemporary artworld “is awash with ever-evolving approaches to political theory and practice--from critical race theory to ecofeminism, from Occupy to climate justice, from utilitarianism to accelerationism” (p. 3), and so his concern is with the relationship between contemporary art and politics, focused into a question: ‘What can art contribute to politics?’ (p. 9) The answer to this question requires consideration of actual, specific cases, and reflection upon the achievements. This short book, then, consists of seven chapters, most of which are devoted to consideration of a specific kind of contemporary art, that is, one that addresses a particular topic of some political urgency. Simoniti’s procedure is to confront particular works with the aspirations animating them, and to ask whether they the work under consideration fulfills its ambition, and further whether that ambition is something worth fulfilling with an artwork. He offers a sketch of an account of why and how contemporary artworks with political ambitions succeed, and this, I take it, is what he means by subtitling the book ‘A Contemporary Art Manifesto’: the account of successful works is not simply analytic, but rather is offered as something to which contemporary artists should rightly aim for their works insofar as such works embody political ambition.

     Simoniti begins with a sketch of the chief characteristic of contemporary art, which he takes to be its experimental character stemming from the Duchampian dogma that ‘anything can be a work of art’, and so, he claims, contemporary artworks are not ‘medium-based’ in the sense of drawing upon a history of authorized, meaning-bearing materials, but rather can have as their embodiment anything whatsoever.  In recent decades, with the rise in prestige of the so-called biennial, many works take the form of an inquiry rather than of a commodity. He then discusses the emergence of political aims in recent art, Simoniti devotes  successive chapters to five kinds of contemporary art, where some distinctive non-artistic concern characterizes the artistic kind: (a) a new kind of realistic art wherein the work documents some recent historical incident or social concern; (b) artworks that aim to be useful with regard to some social or political issue, and which are primarily made or enacted outside the gallery; (c) artworks that aim to exhibit and articulate some social identity, especially with regard to sexual orientation or ethnic group (Simoniti appropriates the philosopher Nelson Goodman’s term ‘worldmaking’ to describe the characteristic poetics of these works); (d) artworks that aim to address contemporary viewers’ immersion in the internet; and (e) artworks expressive of concern with the climate crisis or the current high rate of extinction of plant and animal species. For each kind he considers instances of its failures and success. At the most general level, such artworks fail through what one might call their literalism, where the artwork offers nothing for perception, imagination, and reflection that might not be given in, and perhaps more richly or effectively given in, some relevantly similar non-artistic work or project. So for realistic art, the group Forensic Architecture’s ‘77sqm_9:26min’ (2017) consists of a three-channel video installation and a long wall text that show the results of the group’s investigation of the racist murder of a young German man of Turkish heritage in 2006.

The problem with such works, Simoniti suggests, is that it “borrows so many aspects from a non-art field that the artworks become indistinguishable from an achievement in the target field [of investigative journalism].” (p. 38) This point is equally telling against works that aim for socio-political usefulness. Works that attempt to articulate some group identity fail when they are nothing more than ‘wall label politicking’, where “the work’s meaning is accessible only through the curator-speak on the wall, which in vaguely theoretical language (the use of the verb ‘think’ without a preposition is one favourite) declares what issues the artwork is meaning to be addressing”. (p. 90) Accordingly, “[t]here is nothing there for the viewer to mentally play with; all the viewer can do is acknowledge the intended meaning.” (p. 92) And so on for the other two types of art: failed post-internet art merely recapitulates the typical experiences of bursts of rapid-fire attention-grabbing data and images, and failed arts of climate change or concern for species offer nothing that would not be otherwise available in non-artistic projects.

     So how might contemporary gallery-based artworks of the five kinds succeed as art? And how does their success contribute to some political aim? For each of the kinds Simoniti gives one or two examples of works that succeed in offering something more or other than their imagined non-artistic counterparts. Most of these works were hitherto unfamiliar to me, but Simoniti does discuss one of Wangechi Mutu’s well-known sculptures,  ‘The Backoff Dance’ (2021),

as a successful instance of social identity worldmaking, as well as Hito Steyerl’s video installation ‘Factory of the Sun’, that I wrote about at some length a decade ago (Rapko (2016)).

In contrast to the inferior works, the successful works first of all induce in the viewer ‘aesthetic experience’, which Simoniti characterizes in what he calls a traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense. Simoniti’s discussion of aesthetic experience is episodic and brief, but he points to three aspects with regard to the contemporary artworks under consideration. Aesthetic experience arises (i) when the viewer is given the opportunity “to become engrossed in the internal structure of the work” (p. 143;); (ii) when the viewer is given something “to mentally play with”, (p. 92) and (iii) a kind of pleasure arises from ‘the free play of the mind’ that “is simply the joy of the thought process which the artwork provides us with” (p. 93; Simoniti explicitly acknowledges his evident indebtedness to Kant for this characterization). For the second feature Simoniti appropriates Donna Haraway ‘staying with the trouble’, but, inspired by the philosopher Cora Diamond, replaces ‘trouble’ with ‘difficulty’: the successful works are said to ‘stay with the difficulty’ in that they address out-of-the-ordinary, complex, obscure, or even seemingly paradoxical phenomena and issues without schematizing or simplifying them into unproblematic everyday conceptions or judging them through simple moral dichotomies (acceptance/rejection; good/bad; good/evil). In the exhibition of Mutu’s work at a gallery in London in 2014, “the audience were also asked to eat chocolates in the shape of these mermaid-like creatures, and post the images on Instagram”. Simoniti oddly thinks that this induces us, the viewers, to play an ambiguous role “where objectification of Black women’s bodies is part of a path towards success and self-promotion” (pp. 101-2). Simoniti also thinks that Steyerl’s dispiriting (see my review) piece reminds us that “the line between self-realisation and exploitation is blurred in the online economy”, an artistic effect induced by Steyerl’s use of “an open interpretative structure” of complex allegory, where “the artistry consists of creating just enough symbolic correspondence so that we can begin to unveil within their images a metaphor for the ecstasies, violence and economic extraction in the new, digital political landscape”(p. 114).

     How does this provide the materials for answering Simoniti’s guiding concern with contemporary gallery-based art’s contribution to politics? Simoniti’s aesthetic conception of such art, together with his rejection of the various manners of literalism in the unsuccessful work, indicate that for him successful works cannot plausibly be thought to induce any immediate political effects of any sort. If I understand him rightly, he sees two sorts of typical contributions. First, he repeatedly insists that such works induce attention to the incidents and issues addressed and an awareness of their typically overlooked, ‘difficult’ aspects. Second, such works with their political content do take the form of an inquiry, but one which (unlike literalist works) incorporate imagination and exploration of kinds of attention, perception, and general sensibility that are alternatives to what prevails in the world. With regard to the successful works addressing climate change and species extinction, he writes that “[t]he artwork creates a blueprint for a different manifest world, and therein, lies their contribution to politics.” (p. 152) The successful contemporary artwork with a political aim helps create the possibility of and perhaps desire for a different way of living.

     What can one make of Simoniti’s intellectually sophisticated, artistically sensitive, and finely written attempt to articulate criteria for success in contemporary gallery-based works with political ambition? I have great sympathy for Simoniti’s views, both his sense of what questions one might ask of such works, and in the general outline of his positive views on aesthetic experience and the ‘blueprint’ character of successful works. And although I cannot really follow his lead on the alleged aesthetic effects of chocolate mermaids, Instagram posting, or the  salutary character of Steyerl’s piece, I do not doubt that something like his account would work for other pieces by contemporary artists, including some of my favorites such as William Kentridge, Cai Guo-Qiang, Adrián Villar Rojas, and Giuseppe Penone.

A first response would be to note that in his conception of successful works, Simoniti actually outlines the perennial character of the arts, not just recent works. Recognizing this might partially relieve Simoniti’s account of the threat of arbitrariness; these are not just Simoniti’s idiosyncratic responses to some very recent works, but rather responses massively shaped by the whole history of human artmaking and reflection.

References and Works Consulted:

Cora Diamond, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’, in Philosophy and Animal Life (2008)

Nelson Goodman, Ways of World Making (1978)

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2016)

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (1790)

John Rapko, ‘Review: Hito Steyerl’s ‘Factory of the Sun’ (2016), in academia.edu (https://www.academia.edu/26039426/Review_Hito_Steyerls_Factory_of_the_Sun)

Vid Simoniti, Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Art Manifesto (2023)

In a Nutshell: My Path in Teaching the Arts

Today I received an e-mail out of the blue from a art curator hitherto unknown to me, and asking me about my ‘path’ in teaching the arts. I wrote this response:

Dear X,

     Thanks for your inquiry about my life in the arts, which are by far my chief interests and great loves in human culture, and in particular the teaching. Specifically, you ask about what drew me to the “path from philosophy and rhetoric at Berkeley through graduate studies, then into teaching art history and ethics at multiple Bay Area colleges.” I had never really thought about it in those terms, and so I’ve had to reflect a bit on how to answer. Memory and self-reflection are not my strong points, and my daily focus is just on whatever it is I’m writing, regularly punctuated with thoughts on whatever striking poem, painting, song, movie, or dance I’ve encountered recently. But I’d like to try to answer your question in a way that might be interesting and illuminating to you.

     Already in childhood certain works of visual art exerted a strange and powerful force. By around the age of 10 I had collected images of the bull-leaping fresco at Knossos in ancient Crete, Paul Klee’s ‘The Twittering Machine, and Picasso’s ‘Night-Fishing at Antibes’. In retrospect I can say that what attracted me to these in particular was the sense of motion rendered graceful and benign through suffusion in color. At the age of 15 I discovered Ornette Coleman, Bach, Robert Johnson, and Messiaen, where the role played by color in the visual arts was played by rhythm, harmony, and/or polyphony in music. At 16 I became devoted to William Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ and ‘Auguries of Innocence, Rimbaud, and the earlier Cantos of Ezra Pound. The spell of color and rhythm in painting and poetry somehow obscurely communicated with Pound’s dictum ‘dichten = condensare’, that is, ‘poeticizing is condensing’. At 17 I discovered the films of Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu, exhibiting what Paul Schrader called ‘the transcendental style’ and which seemed to exemplify Pound’s dictum, and Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. My central artistic loves were in place. A second kind of valuable experience was learning to appreciate the initially rebarbative in the arts. By my mid-20s I was finding Pound objectionable to the point of unreadability, and in response my adolescent dislike of Walt Whitman was transformed into a great love for the author of Leaves of Grass. In my early 20s an extensive trip to Europe left me with a great dislike of Nicholas Poussin, but when a few years later I heard the philosopher Richard Wollheim say that his favorite painter was Poussin, a few years of diligently viewing the Poussins at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City made me see the light. To have passed from initial dislike and incomprehension to loving appreciation is one of the greatest experiences in the arts.

     At the same time (late adolescence) I began reading philosophy, first Nietzsche, then Wittgenstein, and then others, especially Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. I briefly went to college as an English major, but quickly dropped out as it seemed to be interfering with my education. When I returned after some years working as a carpenter and cabinet-maker, I switched to philosophy, as I felt that that was the royal, if not the shortest, road to what was most fundamental in life and thought: philosophy was radical. I was very fortunate to have had wonderful teachers in high school, especially Roberta Tom, who gave me upon graduation her bilingual addition of Aristotle’s Poetics; in college I first had the astonishing Jim Friedman, as dynamic as he was difficult, for Wittgenstein, and then at Berkeley in Wittgenstein and Heidegger my wonderful mentor Hans Sluga, who is one of my role models to this day. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, what you call my path had opened: to teach the arts and the philosophy of the arts as modelled by Friedman and Sluga. At some point in the late 1980s I read Herbert Fingarette’s Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, and then Confucius’s Analects. This provided me with Confucius’s aspiration of working ceaselessly to help one’s students. Many years later I read Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, where she describes teaching as trying to help your students gain access to beauty. So the manner of walking the path became clear: work ceaselessly in teaching so that others might experience the beauty and radicality of the arts, and perhaps induce something of the experience of learning to love what was initially uninteresting or unappealing.

     While the path is fixed, my particular trajectory in teaching and its various institutions is just contingencies and accidents: I finished my undergraduate degree in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, then immediately entered graduate studies at Berkeley in Rhetoric. I chose Rhetoric because Sluga had warned me that I was interested in too many things to do well in academic philosophy. I started writing art criticism for publication in 1990, which led me to teach art theory at the San Francisco Art Institute starting in 1995. Over time I found myself teaching more and more art history, first on contemporary art and avant-garde art at SFAI, then Modern European art, then the Classical art of Greece and Rome, and finally surveys of the entire world’s art from the Paleolithic to the present. I developed a class on Ancient Ethics at SFAI so that I might teach Greek tragedy, the Bible, the thoughts of the Buddha, and Confucius’s Analects. I was run out of SFAI in 2008 after I publicly objected to them exhibiting animal snuff films as art, and with great relief I began teaching art history and ethics elsewhere, primarily the College of Marin, the California College of the Arts, and St. Mary’s College. I gave two public lecture series at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá in 2009 and 2015, which formed the basis of two short books in Spanish. In 2020 I retired from teaching to devote myself to publishing in philosophy of the arts. My aim in these ongoing publications is identical to my aim in teaching, except that with the writings my hope is that they may be of some interest and use to a few people in the future, those who wonder what humanity had achieved in the arts in its first forty thousand years.

     I hope this is of some interest to you.

Best wishes,

John Rapko

On Philippe Descola’s Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration--Part 1a: Summary of the Project

     The anthropology of art has produced some of the most stimulating and interesting writing of the past 35 years on the arts known to me, in particular the essays and last book of Alfred Gell in the 1990s, and the more recent two books by Carlo Severi. In 2021 the anthropologist and anthropological theorist Philippe Descola published a magisterial account of the world’s art, which last year was published in English as Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration. This recent book is itself the development of a set of claims argued in his earlier masterwork of 2005, published in English in 2013 as Beyond Nature and Culture. In this and in a follow-up post I’ll try to give an initial presentation and critical assessment of Descola’s work as a major contribution to the study of the world’s visual art. This framing goes against the grain of Descola’s explicit statements, where he claims to be considering what he calls ‘figuration’ or visual imagery as given or embodied in two- and three-dimensional surfaces and objects. At the end of my consideration I’ll offer some reasons for thinking that Descola’s topic is best understood as primarily visual art and not primarily embodied visual imagery; but even if my counter-frame proves inapt, still everything that he does discuss undoubtedly contributes to our understanding of visual art.

     I’ll begin with the briefest possible sketch of the central philosophical-anthropological claims of both books insofar as they provide the motivation and philosophical framing for the more recent book. One can generate a structure of possible general ways in which human beings make sense of the world, others, and themselves by starting from the thought of an individual or collective subject attempting to identify some indeterminate ‘other’ (thing, plant, animal, person, world) (Descola (2025), p. 26). The human subject attempts to identify and make sense through setting up a web of similarities and differences between and among different kinds of others in two dimensions, physicality and interiority, which all human beings keep distinct. This generates a grid of four conceptual possibilities: humans and ‘others’ have (a) similar interiorities and similar physicalities; (b) similar interiorities and dissimilar physicalities; (c) dissimilar interiorities and similar physicalities; and (d) dissimilar interiorities and dissimilar physicalities. Since these are the four conceptual possibilities of determining the nature of things generally, Descola calls them the four ‘ontologies’ (Descola (2013), p. 122 and throughout his work). He then identifies each possibility with familiar terms from anthropology and philosophy: (a) is ‘animism’ wherein humans and other beings (especially plants and animals) have similar interiorities though manifestly different bodies; (b) is ‘totemism’ where humans and (some) animals have both similar interiorities and (some) similar physicalities by virtue of both being derived from “an eponymous animal or plant”; (c) is the naturalism characteristic of the modern West where humans and others both have physical bodies, but only humans have a non-physical interiority; and (d) is ‘analogism’ wherein in each kind, both self and other, is dissimilar from every other in both body and interiority, and so sense is made by constructing a web of analogies between and among beings. For any human collective, one of these four ontologies predominates, but collectives are not typically ontologically monolithic, both because of partial or marginal use of other ontologies available through cultural contact, and even because each ontology draws upon conceptual possibility in principle available to anyone; and a collectivity might, depending upon circumstances and the problems it faces, mobilize resources from one of the non-dominant ontologies (Descola (2025), p. 201). As a piece of general anthropological theory Descola introduces the term ‘schema’ to indicate the abstract structures “that organize understanding and practical action” (Descola (2013), p. 102) and that are embodied in human psychology, practices, and institutions. Some schemas may well be human universals, but that “it is above all acquired schemas that are at the center of attention of those interested in the diversity of customs around the world” (ibid) and “constitute one of the principal means of constructing shared cultural meanings” (p. 103). There are a number of different forms of such schemas, including identifications (“by means of which I can establish differences and resemblances between myself and other existing entities by inferring analogies and contrasts between the appearance, behavior, and properties that I ascribe to myself and those that I ascribe to them” (p. 112)), relations that arise between entities once identifications are established (pp.112-13), ways in which entities are organized temporally and/or spatially, mediations whereby a conventional device (such as sacrifice, money, or writing) and its usage sets up relations, kinds of explicit categorizations within taxonomies, and our topic, “various systems of figuration, understood as the action by means of which beings and things are represented in two or three dimensions, using a material medium” (p. 114).

     Bringing together the parts of Descola’s philosophical anthropology generates the research project resulting in Forms of the Visible: Descola hypothesizes that figuration as a general schematizing practice will primarily exhibit across human societies one or another of the four ontologies. As indicated in the first paragraph above, Descola characterizes figuration as “the act through which real or imaginary objects are represented in two or three dimensions using some sort of material medium” (Descola (2024, a book of interviews wherein Descola characterizes his career as an anthropologist and how he arrived at his distinctive concerns and claims), p. 126). Figuration is a universal impulse (Descola (2025), p. 5) to act in certain ways and with certain recurrent mechanisms (p. xiv). The product of figuration always (i) makes visible something otherwise invisible and (ii) substitutes (under some description) for that which is invisible or absent. As human action, figuration is not equivalent to some class of the world’s artifacts, in particular works of art, but rather constitutes a unified topic by virtue of (i) the kinds of acts from which (ii) embodied images arise, and which (iii) are perceived and received in certain ways. For Descola figuration is the production of images (pp. 5 and 7), and he equates images with Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of ‘icons’ as a kind of sign characterized as bearing relations of resemblance. On Peirce’s massively influential account, there are two other kinds of signs, one of which he terms ‘symbols’, where the sign bears some conventional relation to its referent, and ‘indices’, where the sign refers by virtue of some causal connection or as of a result of spatial contiguity or temporal closeness (so smoke qua index refers to fire). Accordingly he often refers to the products of figuration as ‘iconic artifacts’, as opposed to seemingly aniconic artifacts such as some kinds of decoration or works of abstract art. However, in light of the image’s two functions of making visible the invisible and substituting for something invisible, the notion of an aniconic artifact dissolves under Descola’s analysis into what are “in reality complex signs that function simultaneously as indices--they are receptacles, parts of a whole, the trace of an action, thus quasi-persons--and as icons--they make visible a fundamental property of the object whose place they are taking: its existence.” (p. 12) So in the term ‘iconic artifact’ the term ‘iconic’ is explicative and not something picking out one type of artifactual image.

     Drawing from a large and cross-disciplinary range of philosophy, anthropology, art history, and semiotics, Descola claims that iconic artifacts should be analyzed in what he calls three registers (p. 475): the ontological, the formal, and the pragmatic. The first two registers are straightforward: the ontological concerns what kinds of objects and relations are prominent in the social world under consideration (one world might have maize and snakes that communicate with gods, another might have celebrities and violent storms caused by global warming); and the formal concerns the structural features of iconic imagery generally (some implied point of view, and some spatial and temporal ordering of the contents of imagery). The pragmatic concerns not just the characteristic uses of a kind of imagery, but especially (here Descola follows a number of recent thinkers, particularly Alfred Gell in Art and Agency) the sense that an iconic is itself a quasi-agent that does things in the world and/or as an index renders visible the agency of its maker or intended recipient. So Descola’s primary project, one that occupies most of the book’s 600 pages, is to analyze successively the iconic artifacts distinctive of each of the four ontologies (again: animist, totemic, analogist, naturalist). A further and especially interesting aspect of the project is to consider at length in two chapters kinds of iconic artifacts that bear characteristics of two or more of the different ontologies. His first example of such hybrid imagery are the works of the Tsimshian, a group on the far northern western shore of Canada, and whose works juxtapose totemic and animist elements. His second example is contemporary visual art, wherein many artists work with multiple ontologies.

     As I have reached my customary length for a blog post, I’ll stop here with the presentation of the skeleton of Descola’s book. In the next post (Part 1b) I’ll sketch his fascinating accounts of the four ontologies and the two hybrid modes.

References and Works Consulted:

Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

--The Composition of Worlds: Interviews with Pierre Charbonnier (2024)

--Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration (2025)

Vincent Descombes, The Barometer of Modern Reason (1993)

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (1998)

Charles Sanders Peirce, On Signs (1991)

Resonance as a Kind of Artistic Meaning--An Outline of a Theory

In my recent work in the philosophy of art one of my major concerns has been to provide an account of the varieties of artistic meaning, particularly those that are prominent in the visual arts. My major model of such an account is the conceptual scheme set out by Richard Wollheim in his Painting as an Art. Wollheim claims that an artist paints so as “to produce content or meaning”, and further in such a way as to produce a pleasurable experience for a viewer (Wollheim (1987), p. 44). The book analyzes a variety of kinds of artistic meaning, first of all representation and expression at considerable length, and also metaphor, historical meaning (where the artist makes the painting’s historical character part of its content), and textual meaning (where the artist makes some bit of text, say, a philosophical claim or an ideological statement, part of its content), and Wollheim left open what if any further kinds of artistic meaning occur in painting. In his recently published lectures from a manuscript left unfinished at his death Wollheim gave an analysis of the concept of organization in artistic pictures. In two recent posts I gave an account of Wollheim’s novel conception of pictorial organization, and asked whether one might reasonably take organization to be a further kind of artistic meaning. I suggested that it should be so credited, as organization plainly contributes massively to the total meaning of an artwork, but I also noted a tension between treating pictorial organization as a kind of meaning, and Wollheim’s explicit though theoretically unstressed equation of meaning with content. One wonders: is content not what organization organizes? In light of this and other problems that arise in treating artistic meaning as content, I have preferred to treat Michael Podro’s conception of artistic meaning as ‘sustaining recognition’ (see Podro (1999) and the relevant sections of my manuscript posted on my blog in the past year or so).

     Here I’ll propose a conception of a further kind of artistic meaning that I call ‘resonance’. The thought that resonance is a kind of artistic meaning first occurred to me in thinking about the peculiar power of the artist Gema Alava’s piece ‘Trust Me’, a performative work wherein Alava leads someone blindfolded, typically a member of the artworld such as an artist or critic through a museum exhibition and describes the works therein.

In some obscure way that piece seemed to call up my earliest experiences in the visual arts, as I had by the age of 10 acquired a copy of the so-called ‘Bull Leaping’ fresco at the Minoan palace in Knossos,

and a small statue of a man bought in Japan at an Ainu village near Asahikawa.

Likewise evoked was David Lewis-Williams’s remark about preparing to visit the Paleolithic paintings in the cave at Lascaux. Since the closure of the cave to the public in 1963 researchers are allowed only twenty-minute visits. Lewis-Williams asked a researcher what he had been able to see in the twenty midnights, and he replied ‘Nothing’. Lewis-Williams asked why, and the researcher replied ‘because I was crying the whole time’. My suggestion is that at least part of the intensity of response to these artworks arises from the recognition of the resonance they embody and evoke.

     What then is resonance as a kind of artistic meaning? I follow Wollheim’s methodology as exhibited in Painting as an Art by starting with the thought that an account of a kind of artistic meaning has two major aspects: the identification of human species-wide capacities and associated phenomena in ordinary, non-artistic contexts; and then the exhibition of the ways in which artists recruited these phenomena in artworks in the service of making their works richly meaningful. In order to help locate the relevant non-artistic phenomena, I’ll start with a characterization of artistic resonance: Artistic resonance is (a) a kind of artistic meaning wherein (b) the ‘invitation to participate’ that is partly constitutive of artworks is (c) ‘thematized’ (again in the sense analyzed by Wollheim) so as to become part of the total meaning of the artwork. I’ll return to the explication of the key (and philosophically novel) characteristic (b) after first laying out the relevant non-artistic basis. In their recent book The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley have spoken of a recent ‘resonance zeitgeist’ wherein scholars across academic fields in the humanities and social sciences have introduced the concept of resonance (Beaver and Stanley, pp. 32-8) in the service of explaining some phenomena targeted by their research. So in the sociology of message framing, the researcher seeks to understand why one way of framing some political message fails to induce political activism, while another way ‘resonates’ in the sense that people find themselves moved and energized and so induced to become politically active (pp. 33-6). In the study of rituals chants are said to be “sources of harmony . . . and are similar to vibrating tuning forks that beg others to join them in resonance (p. 36, quoting Robert St. Clair (1999), p. 80). Beavers and Stanley themselves consider resonance to be a linguistic phenomenon, and in their book-length account they treat resonance as part of a conceptual complex together with ‘attunement’ and ‘harmony’; very briefly, they argue that resonance-attunement-harmony is a sociolinguistic phenomenon that is basic to all language use, one that arises from the fact that language is always a social phenomenon and, as with human action generally, what is meant in any instance is always much more than what explicitly signaled (p. 62). Human beings, in the course of their socialization and everyday interactions, ‘attune’ themselves to the presuppositions and implications of their fellows’ actions and speech (p. 80), and under the shifting circumstances of human life come to ‘harmonize’ themselves with their social environments (p. 119).

     There is a great deal to be learned from Beavers’s and Stanley’s important book, but the relevant non-artistic conception of resonance is given, I think, in the most prominent of academic writings of the sociologist and social theorist Hartmut Rosa in his big book Resonance (briefly discussed by Beavers and Stanley (pp. 36-7), an account which is summarized and elaborated in two short more recent books, Democracy Needs Religion and Time and World. For Rosa the concept of resonance has both descriptive and normative employments. In its descriptive use it is part of philosophical anthropology and of what Rosa calls a ‘relational ontology’  that takes its inspiration from the philosopher Charles Taylor, and it characterizes basic situations wherein human beings experience themselves as (i) affected by something (whether natural, organic, or human) (ii) to which they form a connection, and (iii) and in light of which they experience themselves as transformed into a new state. The most general characteristic of resonance i-iii is (iv) its unpredictability for initial orientation to Rosa’s conception, see his most succinct formulation in Rosa (2024), pp. 45-53). In its normative employment resonance is counterposed to alienation as the two great kinds of human beings’ relation to their worlds. In resonant relations the world (again in the broadest and most capacious sense) the world is experienced as responsive yet uncontrolled by the person to whom it is related, and as if ‘having a voice’; by contrast in alienated relations the world is unresponsive, controlled or dominated, and mute. I treat both of Rosa’s uses, that is, resonance both in its descriptive sense and its normative sense, as providing the pre-artistic background, available to all human beings and so something artists’ can rely upon as part of their audience’s cognitive and emotional resources, out of which artist’s draw artistic resonance.

    Again, following Wollheim, I’ll consider artistic resonance as a kind of artistic meaning wherein the artist thematizes some basic and initially inert feature of the artwork as it emerges in the process of artistic creation. The two basic features, I suggest, are the constitutive character of what Ellen Dissanayake has called ‘making special’ (which in recent years she calls ‘artifying’), and the element of the artwork that the English art writer Adrian Stokes has called the ‘incantatory’ character of artworks. Making special/artifying involves the artist “embellishing, exaggerating, patterning, juxtaposing, shaping, and transforming” utilitarian and ordinary materials and artifacts so as to draw attention to them and make them expressive and memorable (Dissanayake, p. 53). With regard to the incantatory aspect of artworks, Stokes writes that “in every instance of art we receive a persuasive invitation . . . to participate more closely. . . the learned response to that invitation is the aesthetic way of looking at an object.” (Stokes, p. 269) In the incantatory aspect the audience tends to experience itself as enveloped by the work of art, to experience itself as transformed by it, and as if identified with it. The incantatory aspect is a structural feature of all artworks, though one that is particularly evident in “dance, song, rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, [which] lend themselves to, or create, an incantatory process, a unitary involvement, an elation if you will.” (p. 272) Stokes goes on to add that there is another dimension of artworks wherein we do not identify with the work, but experience it as something set over against ourselves. Putting this together with the incantatory aspect gives something close to Rosa’s conception of resonance as transformative and voiced.

     The reader will notice that on this account artistic resonance does not seem to be so much a distinctive kind of artistic meaning, but rather just a way of stating the peculiar attractiveness of artworks generally. This does not seem to me to be an objection: just as some of Wollheim’s kinds of artistic meaning--representation, expression, metaphor--might be thought to be parts of the meaning of all artworks, so artistic resonance seems a kind of feature of artworks generally, but one which is put to use by the artist to create and enrich her works with further meaning. On the Wollheimian schema, artistic resonance qua kind of artistic meaning thematizes artistic resonance as a constitutive feature of artworks. With artistic resonance, the artwork itself takes on an enchanted and ‘voiced’ quality. To see how this works, one needs to consider a wide range of cases across the arts, which is part of my multi-volume project, and of which I have given an initial instance in the analysis of Alava’s piece in my book Retorno de la Obscuridad. A further benefit of treating resonance as a distinctive kind of artistic meaning that was not recognized by Wollheim is that it provides an appealing alternative account to a range of artworks that Wollheim himself struggled with. For example, in his famous early lecture ‘Minimal Art’, Wollheim treated Duchamp’s urinal as a piece that isolated the terminal moment of the artistic process, that is, the moment when the artist says ‘This is finished’, and presented that moment, and nothing but that moment. One problem with that account is that does not seem to provide materials for explaining why Duchamp’s piece has seemed so ‘fertile’, that is, why it has provided orientation for novel kinds of art-making. Similarly, in Wollheim’s graduate lectures at UC Berkeley that I attended in the Fall of 1986, Wollheim declared that Barnett Newman’s paintings were not examples of artistic painting at all, because they failed to exercise the perceptual capacities (in particular what he called ‘seeing-in’) whose employment was the pre-condition for paintings to acquire meaning at all.

But if one were to treat these problematic instances instead as novel ways of inducing the sense of artistic resonance, one could have a least a handhold for explicating the distinctive artistic power of these works. I’ll try to treat these works in this manner in a re-written and greatly expanded English version of my book.

     I do not expect anyone to find this sketch of artistic resonance convincing as it stands, but hopefully the filled-out account in my upcoming book on the philosophy of artistic meaning will be more convincing, and that this sketch will at least prove stimulating.

References and Works Consulted:

David Beaver and Jason Stanley, The Politics of Language (2025)

Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (1992) [made special as presupposition of address/noticing]

--Art and Intimacy (2012)

David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (2002)

Terence McDonnell, Christopher Bail, and Iddo Tavory, ‘A Theory of Resonance’, in Sociological Theory (2017)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1999)

John Rapko, Retorno a la Oscuridad (2023)

Hartmut Rosa, Resonance (2019)

--Democracy Needs Religion (2024)

--Time and World (2025)

Robert St. Clair, ‘Cultural Wisdom, Communication Theory, and the Metaphor of Resonance’, in Intercultural Communication Studies 8 (1999)

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007)

Adrian Stokes, The Invitation in Art (1965), in The Collected Books of Adrian Stokes, Volume 3 (1978)

Richard Wollheim, ‘Minimal Art’, in On Art and the Mind (1973)

The Philosophy of Artistic Meaning--A Précis

     The aim of the following book is to give a philosophical account of artistic meaning. Such an account is largely analytical in the sense that it cites instances artistic meaningfulness and states what they are, how they arise, and what characteristic effects they have. But such a philosophical account, as I understand it, also has reconstructive, stipulative, and even polemical aspects. These further aspects stem from the controversial nature and characteristics of artistic meaning-- controversial, that is, in light of prominent kinds of attitudes in modern and recent philosophical thinking towards the phenomena and issues invoked in the terms ‘artistic’ and ‘meaning’. Any philosophical discussion of the term ‘artistic’ brings in train at the very least a history of over two hundred years of thinking about what if anything is distinctive of artworks as opposed on the one hand to beautiful natural objects and phenomena, and other the other everyday and/or non-artistic artifacts. This philosophical thinking circles around a small number of questions: Are there necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a work of art, or is arthood exhibited by artifacts that exhibit some large part of a distinctive profile of characteristics? Is the term ‘art’ only strictly appropriate for modern artifacts produced with the aim of being experienced in special settings, or does the term also include at least some of the products of modern industries that aim for mass consumption? Or is it rather that the term ‘art’ names a human universal? Or to the contrary, does the term ‘art’ pick out nothing in human life, in that it is only used as a way for Western elites to ratify their own tastes and aversions? In marked contrast the term ‘artistic meaning’ is little discussed in philosophy. Many accounts of the concept of art include consideration of the value of art generally as well as the kinds of particular values that are characteristic of especially successful artworks. To so much as get the phenomenon of meaning into focus requires a great deal of effort, if for no other reason than, as I once heard the philosopher Hans Sluga say, the word ‘meaning’ means many things. I take it that most people who think that there is a class of artifacts rightly called ‘artistic’ would agree that among those artifacts are Bach’s Goldberg Variations, William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’, and Pablo Picasso’s ‘Three Dancers’, but there is no consensus on what those works ‘mean’, and if they do bear some meaning (s) whether such are rightly referred to as distinctively artistic. A further problem arises from the predominance of what one might call the linguistic conceptions of meaning: meaning is something uniquely expressed in language and consists in what a term refers to, or what a sentence states. If there is such a phenomenon as artistic meaning of, say, the Goldberg Variations, no one would think that it could be stated in a finite series of sentences. Can there be a philosophical account of something so controversial and/or obscure?

     This book starts with the claim, or better the assumption, that the world’s artworks--the indeterminately vast number of artistic paintings, songs, plays, and also pots, blankets, and shields--possess artistic meanings to varying degrees and in countless complex ways. I do not think that there is any short argument, and probably not any long argument, for this assumption. I treat this assumption as a piece of philosophical anthropology in the sense that it arises from survey of and reflection upon the characteristic phenomena of human life--the life-cycle, the nature of human embodiment, perception, imagination, and cognition, the common nature and infinite cultural varieties of human beings, and their education and socialization into practices and institutions--together with the reflective attempt to understand these. After introducing a few typical artworks--a painting,

 a poem,

a dance

--I ask the first guiding question: How are such artifacts so much as generally intelligible, that is, how is it that they can be experienced, enjoyed, understood, and appreciated outside of their initial audience? The very framing of the question of course controversially presupposes that such artifacts can be and are understood outside their proximal audience. I shall try to explicate how the general intelligibility of artworks arises from the ways that their artistic meanings, and the artworks’ making, presentation, and reception, necessarily draw upon general features of human sensibility, what once and could still be called a common human nature. I investigate five such classes of features, those involved human embodiment or corporeality, gesture, perception, tool-making and the making and use of artifacts, and language, and so call these the five great reservoirs of artistic meaning. I then investigate the mechanisms through which human beings draw from these reservoirs in the creation of artistic meanings. The basic form of such mechanisms is most readily seen in metaphor, which involves projecting some kind of frame or content that is treated as relatively well understood or intelligible onto something that is relatively poorly understood or intelligible.

     Finally I consider the great classes of kinds of artistic meaning. The first three, representation, expression, and metaphor proper, have been much discussed in philosophy and so I very largely just draw upon existing accounts. I’ll also treat a relatively little explored concept, that of resonance, which I take to be what is involved in the universal address of artworks to perceive and participate in them, among the kinds of artistic meaningfulness; on that point the book, lacking philosophical precedents, will be forced to originality. I’ll conclude by returning to the instances of artworks introduced at the beginning in order to show that one use to which the account of artistic meaning may be put is to increase and intensify our understanding of actually existing artworks.

     In providing an initial and partially stipulative general account of artistic meaning, the book is meant to provide a foundation for a further series of books treating specific kinds of art, in particular visual art, contemporary art, the performative arts of theater and dance, and poetry.

What is Pictorial Organization?--On Richard Wollheim’s Late Conception, Part 2

In my previous post I gave in barest outline a summary of the just-published materials presenting Richard Wollheim’s conception of pictorial organization in artistic painting. Again, Wollheim argues that pictorial organization comes in three ‘grades’, that arising from painters’ attempts to include whatever they wish the painting to show; that arising from an interest in ‘good’ organization and that instantiates values internal to organization such as order, balance, and symmetry; and that arising from  “when the painter successfully arranges his painting so as to advance some further end: that is to say, some end the understanding of which does not require us to refer back to the nature of organization itself” (Wollheim (2025), p. 62). In the analyses he provides he is particularly concerned to show that the third and highest grade of organization conflicts in important cases with the second grade (Jacob van Ruisdael and Monet), and also how the third grade occurs when the painter respects the the second grade (Poussin). Now, Wollheim’s conception of pictorial organization is not free-standing, but unsurprisingly presupposes for its intelligibility his more general views on artistic meaning in painting. Here I’ll try to sketch those conceptually more basic views, as well as provide some art-historical background, or what I strongly suspect is part of the art-historical material that inspired Wollheim, namely, the art historian Meyer Schapiro’s theoretical account of coherence in art and his famous analyses of artistic organization in the Romanesque relief sculptures at Souillac and Moissac.

1. In the past year I posted partial accounts of Wollheim’s conception of artistic meaning as part of my first draft of a book on the philosophy of the visual arts, although there I adopted an approach more inspired by the philosopher Michael Podro. Wollheim’s fullest statement of his views is of course in Painting as an Art (1987), based upon his Mellon Lectures of 1984. As presented there, Wollheim’s conception of artistic meaning comprises three claims: (a) Meaning in painting is psychological (and not linguistic), and the meaning of a painting “rests upon the experience induced in an adequately sensitive, adequately informed, spectator by looking at the surface of the painting as the intentions of the artist led him to mark it” (p. 22); (b) Artistic meaning arises from a process that Wollheim calls ‘thematization’, wherein the artist “abstracts some hitherto unconsidered, hence unintentional, aspect of what he is doing or what he is working on, and makes the thought of this feature contribute to guiding his future activity” (p. 20), and primary instances of what is initially unconsidered in the process of painting are marks, surfaces, edges, and images, and the end towards which the process of thematization ends is “the acquisition of content or meaning” (p. 22); There are two broad and indeterminately large classes of artistic meaning, both of which derive from the creative process whereby the work is made. Primary meaning consists of familiar kinds of artistic meaningfulness such as representation and expression, and also such mechanisms as metaphor, textual meaning introduced through invocations of linguistic meaning, and historical meaning introduced through invocations of historically prior artworks. Secondary meaning is a difficult conception that Wollheim characterizes as a special kind of meaning which does not as it were directly contribute to the meaning of the whole artworks, but which rather proximally manifests or expresses what the primary meaning means to the artist (Wollheim’s major attempt to illustrate secondary meaning is a chapter largely on Ingres that is beyond my abilities to present both in summary and as plausible). In a slightly later essay on Nelson Goodman’s account of artistic meaning, Wollheim asserts that artistic meaning is not ‘teleological’, that is, it is not restricted to whatever is involved in the artwork that facilitates the work’s use to fulfill some non-artistic (such as religious or political) aim; but rather artistic meaning is semantic, and that artistic meaning follows four principles: (i) the Principle of Integrity, “that each work of art has its one and only meaning; (ii) the Principle of Intentionalism, “that meaning derives from the fulfilled intentions of the artist; (iii) the Principle of Experience, “that the intentions of the artist are fulfilled in the appropriate experiences of the spectator”; and (iv) the Principle of Historicity, “that all works of art possess intrinsically a history of production” (Wollheim (2025), pp. 304-06).

     How might we understand Wollheim’s account of pictorial organization within his basic conception of artistic meaning? On the one hand, his discussions and analyses of art say very little about pictorial organization, which seems a striking lacuna in a philosophy oriented towards understanding the distinctive kinds of non-‘teleological’ and distinctively artistic meaning. On the face of it one could simply include pictorial organization among the kinds of primary meaning, and indeed Wollheim did say that his discussion of primary meaning in Painting as an Art did not aim at an exhaustive account. And one might imagine aspects of pictorial organization in a given artwork as being put to use in creating secondary meaning. On the other hand, treating pictorial organization as a kind of primary artistic meaning seems to violate Wollheim’s later stricture that artistic meaning is semantic, if one treats semantic meaning as something that admits of expression in the statements and propositions of language. My inclination is to bypass the issue as superficial, because the claim that artistic meaning is semantic in the later essay is only meant to mark it off as something distinct from the teleological.

2. Meyer Schapiro as a (Likely) Major Source of Wollheim’s Conception of Pictorial Organization:

     At several points in his writings Wollheim expressed admiration for the work of the art historian Meyer Schapiro, in particular for his essay ‘On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content’ of 1966. One senses an atmosphere of Schapiro’s essay throughout Wollheim’s discussion of pictorial organization. In that essay Schapiro reflects upon typical terms of praise of works of art: that they are perfect, that they form and exhibit a coherence of the various heterogeneous elements that comprise them, that they exhibit an admirable unity of form and content. Schapiro begins by noting two features of such judgments of quality: first, that “[t]hey are never fully confirmed, but are sometimes invalidated by a single new observation”; second, that “there are great works in which these qualities are lacking” (Schapiro (1994), p. 33).

     The first feature indicates that the nature of such judgments of quality is and can only ever be a hypothesis (pp. 37 and 42), and is so because the perception of a work of art is always incomplete: “in an object as complex as a novel, a building, a picture, a sonata, our impression of the whole is a resultant or summation . . . [but] We cannot hold in view more than a few parts or aspects, as we are directed by a past experience, an expectation and habit of seeing, which is highly selective even in close scrutiny of an object intended for the fullest, most attentive perception.” (p. 37) So “[t]o see the work as it is one must be able to shift one’s attitude in passing from part to part, from one aspect to another, and to enrich the whole progressively in successive perceptions.” (p. 48) Once one registers the necessarily hypothetical character of central judgments of quality in art stemming from the unavoidable incompleteness of perception of works of art and their multi-faceted and multi-dimensional character, ‘critical seeing’, which Schapiro seems also to characterize as the kind of scrutiny “intended for the fullest, most attentive perception” (p. 37), accordingly “is explorative and dwells on details as well as on the large aspects that we call the whole”.  The love of detail is everywhere exhibited in Wollheim’s accounts of particular pictures, not just in the lectures on pictorial organization but also throughout the accounts of paintings in Painting as an Art and even in his critical writings on recent art figures such as Nicolas de Staël, Frank Auerbach, Wayne Thiebaud, and Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (all hopefully available soon in the forthcoming NYRB collection of Wollheim’s art criticism edited by his son Bruno Wollheim). And one notices how in every case when Wollheim discusses the highest grade of pictorial organization in Jacob van Ruisdael he dwells on the ways in which the painter provides details in order compensate for and induce reflection upon the great asymmetries of Ruisdael’s works.

     With regard to the second feature of judgments of quality, that qualities such as perfection and coherence are not indispensable in great works of art, Schapiro notes with regard to Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling that “one might entertain the thought that in the greatest works of all such incompleteness and inconsistency [in the scale of the figures] are evidences of the living process of the most serious and daring art which is rarely realized fully according to a fixed plan, but undergoes the contingencies of a prolonged effort” (pp. 35-7). Referring to his own famous analyses of the Romanesque relief at Souillac, notes how the work was long judged by observers to be incomplete because it seemed incoherent, at least when understood “with the expected traditional mode of hierarchic composition”.

But “a more attentive reading [that is, Schapiro’s own!] has disclosed a sustained relatedness in the forms, with many surprising accords of the supposedly disconnected and incomplete parts.” (p. 41) I can’t here attempt to summarize Schapiro’s brilliant, lengthy analysis (see Schapiro (1977), pp. 102-30), except to note that Schapiro was driven to introduce and conceptualize a kind of artistic organization unknown by the main lines of European thinking on ‘composition’ (for which generally see Puttfarken (2000), and with regard to landscape in particular see Barrell (1972)), a kind he called ‘discoordinate’, understood as “a grouping or division such that corresponding sets of elements include parts, relations or properties which negate that correspondence. A simple example of a discoordinate design is a vertical figure in a horizontal rectangle or a horizontal figure in a vertical rectangle” (Schapiro (1977), p. 104). Without too much strain one might also understand Wollheim’s accounts of Jacob van Ruisdael’s use of detail--the crucially important small thing within the empty space next to the full and attention-catching space--as refined instances of non-hierarchical and seemingly self-subverting or self-contradicting discoordinate organization.

     My invocation and brief summary of Schapiro’s great essay is in no way meant to diminish the originality and brilliance of Wollheim’s discussions of pictorial organization; rather it is my hope that it will aid in the understanding of Wollheim’s thought and relieve something of its appearance of idiosyncrasy. Likewise my summary of Wollheim’s account of artistic meaning is meant to show how his work on pictorial organization is part of a much broader intellectual project, one which issued in the greatest twentieth-century philosophical account of an artistic medium known to me.

References and Works Consulted:

John Barrell, The idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (1972)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400-1800 (2000)

Meyer Schapiro, ‘On Perfection, Coherence, and the Unity of Form and Content’, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (1994)

--‘The Sculptures of Souillac’ (1939), in Romanesque Art: Selected Papers (1977)

Richard Wollheim, ‘The Art Lesson’, in On Art and the Mind (1974)

--Art and Its Objects (2nd edition, 1980)

--Painting as an Art (1987)

--The Mind and Its Depths (1993)

--‘Pictorial Form and Pictorial Organization’, ‘On the Question ‘Why is Painting an Art?’’, and ‘The Core of Aesthetics’, in Uncollected Writings: Writings on Art (2025)

What is Pictorial Organization? Richard Wollheim’s Late Thoughts on Artistic Painting--Part 1: Summary

At a dinner party I attended on New Year’s Eve, the question arose: What good things happened in 2025? The response was muted, unsurprisingly given the year of political reaction of a ferocity unknown in our lifetimes, as well as the terminal diagnoses and deaths of long-time friends that drain so much of the color from the lives of those of us over the age of 65. The long deafening silence was punctuated with mutters of ‘nothing big, maybe some small things’. One great small thing was the publication of the philosopher Richard Wollheim’s hitherto scattered writings on art, that is, those that were not included in his four books of the philosophy of art that treated the general philosophy of art, the artistic practice of painting, and two volumes of essays addressing various issues, especially in representation, expression, and style. Oxford University Press promises two further volumes of uncollected writings, on political philosophy (just published) and philosophy of mind, with a further promised volume from the NYRB Press of Wollheim’s occasional writings on art edited by Wollheim’s son Bruno Wollheim. Though I’ve had xeroxes of most of this uncollected material for the past twenty years, re-reading the pieces consecutively in the new volume has re-vivified and intensified my sense of Wollheim as the greatest philosopher of art of the second half of the twentieth-century. The volume does contain a couple of dozen or so pages of previously unpublished material embedded within three ‘Lectures’ entitled ‘Pictorial Form and Pictorial Organization’ and that comprise the sole instance of Wollheim’s developed conception of the nature of pictorial organization in artistic pictures. At $140 the volume is a pearl of great price, though one perhaps out of reach of some of my friends. The price is high, but the intellectual interest of Wollheim on pictorial organization is vastly greater, and so for my friends in this blog post I’ll try first to summarize Wollheim’s late thoughts, and in the next post contextualize and reflect upon this important contribution to the philosophy of art.

     The three sections (Wollheim calls them ‘lectures’) comprising ‘Pictorial Form and Pictorial Organization’ take up over fifty pages. Almost all of the first lecture, and much of the third lecture, were previously published in two lectures and an essay from 1995 to 2002 (the editors have helpfully included the material that Wollheim deleted from the earlier publications). The second lecture consists of the new material, and which, together with a few pages from the first and third lectures, gives Wollheim’s positive and hitherto unavailable account. The rest of the material is largely given over to an analysis of and criticism of varieties of formalism. The second lecture is evidently incomplete, with blanks indicating places where specific references were to be included, and minor inconsistencies. The ordering of the lectures is also uncertain, as the end of the third lecture seems to be in part an introduction and transition to the second. Here I’ll set aside Wollheim’s account of meaning in artistic painting, which is stated summarily in an included piece entitled ‘On the Question ‘Why is Painting an Art?’’(1984)  and developed at great length in his Painting as an Art (1987), and also pass over the criticisms of formalism, so as to present concisely Wollheim’s positive conception of pictorial organization in artistic painting. In barest outline, Wollheim argues as follows: 1. (Artistic) Paintings are organized artifacts, made with some degree of organization in mind, and made in such a way that a viewer is likewise aware to some degree of the organization (p.4). 2. Pictorial organization is scalar, that is, it is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but rather is always a matter of more or less, and/or better or worse organization (p. 59). 3. There are three grades of pictorial organization: (a) that which arises from the painter wishing to find a place for everything she wishes to include in the painting; (b) that which exhibits values that “can only be elucidated by reference to organization itself”, such as the values of “order, harmony, symmetry, proportion, balance, [and/or] tension of opposites” (p. 24, and similarly at p. 61); (c) that which arises from the painter’s attempt to realize “some end internal to what the artist hopes to achieve in, or through, his painting” (p. 25).

     Wollheim stresses that some paintings are “brilliantly organized” (ibid) at the third grade without exhibiting any of the second kind of organization, which he calls ‘good’ organization; to demonstrate this near the end of the first lecture turns to Jacob van Ruisdael’s ‘[Landscape with the Ruins of] The Castle of Egmont’ (1650-55):

At first glance one sees both that the painting is organized, and also that the painting appears ‘lopsided’, with everything of immediate interest rendered on the left half of the canvas. Consequently we the viewers “seem driven either to re-evaluiate the painting or to use our eyes to see what might justify the grave asymmetry”. We then notice that on the right-hand side is “a small jewelled scene consisting of a timbered cottage, sheep, a shepherd, flowers, and a pool whose surface is patterned with dark mysterious reflections”. We, like Ruisdael, will come to “accept the revelation that small things can be as interesting as big things, and that uninteresting things can be as poignant as interesting things” (p. 26). It is this revelation, and the sense that we have found this for ourselves, that justifies and rewards the violation of ‘good’ organization. Artistic organization is after an experience of revelation beyond what the easy virtues of symmetry and harmony can convey. Thus understanding pictorial organization in artistic painting requires some sense of what the painter aims to achieve. Pictorial organization is nothing that can be conveyed or understood through merely formal accounts that abstract from or set aside the painter’s aims.

     The second lecture aims to show how three great artistic painters, Jacob van Ruisdael, Claude Monet, and Nicholas Poussin organized some of their central paintings. He devotes by far the most attention to Ruisdael, so I’ll restrict my summary to the great 17th-century Dutch landscape painter. Since pictorial organization in the third degree cannot be determined without some sense of a painter’s aims, and for Wollheim the artistic painter’s aims are most reliably given through and understood in terms of the painter’s style and the central works exhibiting that style, Wollheim begins with the specification of the range and nature of Ruisdael’s stylistic achievement. Ruisdael was a prolific artist who produced highly accomplished works already in his late teens, and Wollheim considers Ruisdael’s mature style already in place by around 1650, that is, when Ruisdael was around the age of 22. Ruisdael’s core works were his large, horizontal landscapes full of vegetation (and so the core does not include Ruisdael’s seascapes and winter scenes) that convey a sense of richness and grandeur (pp. 30-1). Wollheim cites several examples of these core works, including the ‘Three Great Trees in a Mountainous Landscape with a River’ (late 1660s):

Pondering Ruisdael’s core works, Wollheim sees two principles at work that govern their pictorial organization. The microstructure is governed by a principle of ‘juxtaposition’, an “additive way of putting a painting  together”, whereby Ruisdael “leave[s] the constituent elements more or less as they are, lying side by side, unadjusted” and then introduces micro-details, ‘spots’ of elements (trees, flowers, small cottages, lines of flax) that produce of the effect of balancing the element (p. 33). For Wollheim a masterpiece signally exhibiting the principle of juxtaposition is ‘A Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Church’ (c. 1665):

The second principle, one which governs the macrostructure of Ruisdael’s core paintings, is that of ‘multiple entry’, an organization that can be seen at its simplest and most direct in ‘The Great Oak’ (1652):

     Wollheim goes on to analyze five other works by Ruisdael to show how the principle of multiple entry works in more complex examples, and then to show how Ruisdael combines the application of the two principles. Then he asks: What was Ruisdael attempting with his (non-verbal) formulation and application of the two principles? Wollheim suggests that “a central concern of Ruisdael’s was to construct his paintings [in such a way] that the eye would have real difficulty in encompassing them all at once’, and that this was ultimately in the service of “his desire to convey the overwhelming splendour and diversity of the divinely created world” (p. 42). Wollheim goes on to consider much more briefly a few works by Monet and Poussin.

     If Wollheim is right, then it follows that the theoretical and interpretive aim to understand pictorial organization in artistic paintings cannot be realized through the identification of structural or compositional elements and their interrelations in abstraction from a prior consideration of what the painter is aiming to achieve. So most of the talk in the 20th century of composition, form, and pictorial structure is doomed to failure, or at least cannot be thought to achieve its aim unless it covertly presupposes a prior determination of the relevant artist’s aims and style. Not for the first time, I find myself compelled to agree with Wollheim, so in the second part I’ll try to provide some context from art history (especially the work of Meyer Schapiro) and from Wollheim’s own account of artistic meaning relieve the seeming arbitrariness of the sketch here of his views given here.

References and Works Consulted:

Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1988)

John Barrell, The idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (1972)

Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Monet (1983)

Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400-1800 (2000)

Meyer Schapiro, ‘On Perfection, Coherence, and the Unity of Form and Content’, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (1994)

--‘The Sculptures of Souillac’ (1939) and ‘The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac I & II’ (1931), in Romanesque Art: Selected Papers (1977)

Seymour Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape (2005)

Virginia Spate, The Colour of Time: Claude Monet (1992)

E. John Walford, Jacob van Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape (1991)

Richard Wollheim, ‘The Art Lesson’, in On Art and the Mind (1974)

--Art and Its Objects (2nd edition, 1980)

--Painting as an Art (1987)

--The Mind and Its Depths (1993)

--'On the Question ‘Why is Painting an Art?’’ and ‘Pictorial Form and Pictorial Organization’, in Uncollected Writings: Writings on Art (2025)

On Gilles Deleuze’s On Painting, Part 3: A Letter from a Friendly Critic on Artistic Painting, Diagrams, and Meaning

In my previous three posts I have summarized approximately three-quarters of Gilles Deleuze’s recently published seminar of 1981 On Painting. I have omitted the very interesting historical material on painting from Ancient Egypt through Cézanne, Kandinsky and Klee with the thought that on these topics Deleuze draws heavily from art historians and accordingly his thinking there is not especially distinctive (although undoubtedly fascinating and worth considering). I have framed my summary as an account of the creative process of artistic painting, although Deleuze does not at any point use the phrase ‘creative process’, nor does he give any consideration to the concept of art. Speaking of the creative process at least does seem to me to capture and illuminate Deleuze’s conceptions. Whether the term ‘artistic painting’ is appropriate seems to me much less certain. Along with the painters just mentioned he also considers Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt, and he gives the impression that the creative process he describes is extraordinarily strenuous and rarely successful, and that only a few are up to its rigors. So it might better capture his thought to say that he is describing the creative process of ‘great art’ or ‘art that matters’, and not artistic painting generally, which must include a great deal of mediocre and/or minor works. Perhaps Deleuze’s concern is something like that of John Berger’s in his early book Permanent Red, where he differentiates those who are ‘defeated by the difficulties’ and those who ‘struggle’; Deleuze is only interested in the latter, and primarily when they overcome the difficulties.

     Before putting some questions to Deleuze’s account of painting, we ought to recall how unusual a philosopher Deleuze is. He writes in What is Philosophy? that the concern with truth and falsity is not primary in philosophy, but rather that “it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure” (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 82). Philosophy is the creation of concepts, where, as A. W. Moore puts it, by ‘concept’ “Deleuze means ‘[a set] of singularities that each extend into the neighbourhood of one of the other singularities,’ or ‘a set of singularities . . . [that lead] on from one another’ (Deleuze (1997), p. 146). A concept, on this construal, is an articulated area on what Deleuze calls ‘the plane of immanence’, that is the virtual plane on which all singularities and all other events, in their virtual aspect, are located (Deleuze & Guattari, Ch. 2 passim; cf. Deleuze (1997), p. 147).” In the seminar Deleuze explicitly states that his primary concerns are to create the concepts of diagram and painting, so any criticism must take into account his idiosyncratic conceptions of a concept and the point of creating concepts, that is, as joyful and affirmative responses to a sense of interesting, remarkable, and important events. He urges his listeners to ignore what they’re not interested in, and to take what seems useful to them and put it to their own uses. In his ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’ from the early 1970’s, he indicates that he approves of a bit of what the harsh did: “This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything . . . is reading with love.” (Deleuze (1997), pp. 8-9)

     I know of only three intelligent and serious critical accounts of Deleuze (I do not doubt that there are many more), and only one of these comes close to Deleuze’s conception of reading with love: First, the French philosopher Vincent Descombes follows Deleuze’s thought carefully in his early book Nietzsche and Philosophy, where Deleuze tries to distinguish a ‘reactive’ thinking that affirms itself through initially opposing something else, from an ‘active’ thinking that first of all affirms itself in its difference from others. Descombes claims that despite Deleuze’s sustained analytic efforts, ‘opposition’ and ‘difference’ collapse into an identity, and necessarily because they both constitutively involve evaluation, and “how is it possible to talk of an incomparable being (a singular or sovereign being) in the philosophy of values, i.e. of comparison? To evaluate means to compare: this is worth more than that.”  (Descombes, p. 265) In a lengthy, multi-chapter discussion of Deleuze’s conception of the subject, self-consciousness, and meaning, the German philosopher Manfred Frank diagnoses Deleuze’s thought as based upon one-sided misconstruals of representation, thought, and self-awareness that render him incapable of characterizing the ways in which ‘the subject’ (that is, human beings as conscious, oriented in space and time, and possessing some degree of self-understanding) can and does relate itself to itself across time and recognize itself in its expressions. (Frank (1989), Lectures 21-25, esp. p. 384) The English philosopher Paul Crowther comes closest to ‘reading with love’ in his critical analysis of Deleuze’s monograph of Francis Bacon. Crowther claims that Deleuze rightly and insightfully recognizes the central features of modern art—the tendencies to render non-traditional subjects, to emphasize the materiality of the artwork and the planarity of the virtual space in a picture, etc.--, but crucially fails to recognize how individual style is at the core of what and how one appreciates artistic painting. (Crowther, ch. 1, especially pp. 41 and 44), and this is bound to other misconstruals, in particular the failure to appreciate the existential dimension of painting (p. 41), the failure to bring into focus the viewer’s concern with how figurative elements arise (p. 42), and an oddly crude and mechanistic conception of aesthetic rhythm in pictorial arts (p. 52). Crowther concludes that one should ‘explode’ Deleuze, which means that one ought to take up his central insights but put them in a philosophical framework that treats individual style as central to artistic meaning in painting. That’s reading as tough love.

     My critical questions in a review are at best a stage-setting for a future reading with love, as I shall not attempt here to do anything with Deleuze’s thought. Although there are points on every page meriting reflection, I’ll limit my questions to three basic areas in On Painting where questions immediately arise: the concept of art, the concept of the diagram, and the character of meaning in artistic painting.

      On Art: As I have noted Deleuze’s very largely avoids the term ‘art’, though he solely discusses painters that most of us would think of as paradigms of artistic painting, from Michelangelo through Cézanne, Klee, and Kandinsky to Francis Bacon. Deleuze seems content to think of these great painters as interesting and thought-provoking, but why are they? A ready answer would be to say that they are among the supreme instances of artistic painters. But then one would want to know, not just what distinguishes them from mediocre artistic painters, but what distinguishes artistic painters from non-artistic ones. I cannot see that Deleuze offers any explicit thought whatsoever to the question. The painters Deleuze discusses are presumably those he finds especially interesting. If I were to attempt something analogous, I would certainly include discussions of Mu Qi, Fan Kuan, Asmat (New Guinea) shields, and Papunya (Australia) body painting.

 I imagine Deleuze responding with, ‘Fantastic! Go right ahead and let’s see what you make of them!’; but this would seem to me to miss part of the point, which includes considering something of the range and variations among human artistic paintings, in order to gain some further specificity to the concept of artistic painting; lacking such consideration, Deleuze’s account lacks a dimension of philosophical anthropology (Deleuze would very likely dismiss this objection). But even more importantly, the lack of such broader consideration means that at no point does Deleuze test his concepts with questions like “Did Mu Qi have a diagram? If so, what was it?”. Such testing would illuminate both the nature of the concepts and the limits of their application.

     On the Concept of a Diagram: I have repeatedly indicated some puzzlement at and frustration with Deleuze’s concept of a diagram. A book from a dozen years ago, The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary, indicates that the term originates with Guattari in the 1970s and that Deleuze used it in markedly different senses in various books. In his monograph on Francis Bacon Deleuze writes that the diagram “is thus the operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and color-patches . . . the diagram is the operative set of traits and color-patches, of lines and zones” (Deleuze (2003), p. 82), a specification that seems consistent with much of what he says in On Painting. Recalling that Deleuze insists in the seminar that the diagram is individual and dated, a comparison of the concept of the diagram with the concept of individual style suggests itself. Part of what seems distinctive then of the concept of the diagram is the diagram’s impersonality, and the ways in which it seems directly connected to a kind of quasi-logical ‘space’ of possibilities of artistic rendering in painting, that is, of ways of rendering the relationships among planes and surface, the emergence of figure from background, and the distinctive kinds of color and color-relationships characteristic of an individual painter. The concept of individual style, by contrast, includes the characteristic subjects rendered (e.g. Cézanne’s apples),

as well as psychological dimensions: something of the way in which the psychology of the painter expresses or betrays itself in painting, as well as developmental phases of pre-stylistic, stylistic, extra-stylistic, and late stylistic works. Here I would be inclined to agree with Crowther that Deleuze’s inability to take account of these aspects of individual style impoverishes his account.

On Meaning in Artistic Painting: ‘Meaning’ is not a term that figures explicitly in Deleuze’s account. Nonetheless, as with the term ‘creative process’ as a synonym for Deleuze’s conception of the passage from the pre-pictorial through the catastrophe and the creation of a diagram, and the resultant pictorial fact, the term ‘artistic meaning’ does seem to cover what Deleuze considers the achievement embodied in a work of artistic painting. One of his many brilliant discussions in On Painting (more fully given in the monograph on Bacon) is his account of the seeming contortions of Francis Bacon’s figures as responses to the basic demand of modern painting as articulated by Paul Klee: ‘to make the invisible visible’.

I can see nothing blocking anyone from learning from and reading with love Deleuze’s remarkable analyses of (what I call) artistic meaning.

     Despite the its many obscurities and puzzling features, Deleuze’s On Painting, together with the monograph on Francis Bacon, seems to me second only to Richard Wollheim’s Painting as an Art as the greatest philosophical contribution to the understanding of artistic painting of the past 50 years.

 References and Works Consulted:

John Berger, Permanent Red (1960)

Paul Crowther, The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style (2012)

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983)

--The Logic of Sense (1990)

--Difference and Repetition (1994)

--‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’ and ‘On Philosophy’, in Negotiations (1997)

---Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003)

--On Painting (2025)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1994)

Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (1980)

Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1973)

Manfred Frank, What is Neo-Structuralism? (1989)

A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (2014)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

Eugene B. Young with Gary Genosko and Janell Watson, The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary (2013)

On Gilles Deleuze’s On Painting, Part Two: Modulation at the Core of Artistic Painting

     I continue with my critical review of Deleuze’s recently published seminar entitled On Painting. In my previous two posts I first sketched Deleuze’s account of the creative process of artistic painting, which (a) crucially involves the painter’s creation of an individualized and dated ‘diagram’ (an obscure and complex notion, as I have stressed), and the application of this diagram to the problems of painting; and (b) in the second post Deleuze’s explication of the concept of the diagram through what he calls its characteristics, its tendencies, and its positions. These two summaries only take us through the first half of the seminar, and accordingly in this post I’ll attempt to finish summarizing the text and begin the process of critical reflection upon Deleuze’s account of artistic painting. As in my previous posts, I’ll not attempt to capture the philosophical intensity or exuberantly experimental radicalism of Deleuze’s expressive speech; nor shall I so much as mention a number of interesting discussions that strike me as peripheral to the main line of thinking. The two guiding questions here are: What does Deleuze mean by the term ‘modulation’, the concept of which he introduces as constitutive of the activity of artistic painting? and What is Deleuze’s basic conception of painting?

    Near the end of the fourth session Deleuze adds a further key feature to his characterization of the diagram: “the diagram is a modulator” (p. 136). What is modulation? I find this the most obscure of all the central discussions in the seminars, but let’s see how it goes: Deleuze says that it’s “hard to develop a concept for it”, but he initially opposes it to ‘articulation’, which he associates with codes consisting of units organized by binary oppositions (his example here phonemes in language, particularly as conceptualized by the linguist Roman Jakobson (p. 135). He also treats articulation as part of the ‘digital’, as “ “digital” is the binary choice determining the unit”, and opposes this to ‘analog’ (p. 122), and to what he calls ‘analogical language’ generally: “Analogical language is about modulation. Digital, or coded, language is about articulation.” (p. 136) So “painting is indeed an analogical language” and “when you say “to paint,” you are saying “to modulate.”” (ibid) Deleuze makes two stabs at positively characterizing modulation. First, “modulation refers to the values of a nonarticulated voice”. Second, and much more centrally for Deleuze, modulation occurs “on the basis of something else”, namely “a carrier or medium according to a signal” (ibid). With regard to painting, “[t]he signal is the model” or ‘the motif’, but also “the surface of the canvas”, and that what is modulated is light and/or color (a couple of dozen pages later Deleuze will seemingly deny this; see below). So Deleuze’s central characterization of modulation in the relevant sense is “that to paint is to modulate light or color—light and color—depending on the flat surface and (these aren’t exclusive) depending on the motif or the model that plays the role of signal.” (p. 137) The result of modulation in artistic painting is “[t]he figure on my [sic] canvas”, such as “Pollock’s line with no figure, or Kandinsky’s abstract figure, or Cézanne or Van Gogh’s figural figure” (ibid).

     As he approaches his final characterization of artistic painting as constitutively involving modulation, Deleuze adds a further, and puzzlingly equivocal, feature. “To paint”, he says, “is to modulate to plan, on the plane, that is, on a surface, the canvas.” (p. 158) He elaborates this claim by recurring to a passage his most central contemporaneous philosophical source, the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. In his major (and quite difficult) philosophical treatise Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, Simondon attacks the so-called hylomorphic model of explanation, that is (crudely put), the kind of explanation of phenomena initiated and developed by Aristotle wherein the explanandum is analyzed into (a) some matter that has some combined with (or embodied or been shaped by) (b) some form; on this account things generally, any thing whatsoever, is an instance of formed material as well as materialized form. Simondon argues that the schema of giving-form-to-some-matter fails to capture “the technical operation of form-taking”, and that any such operation can only be understood as further involving the energies or forces within an entire “energetic system” or “energetic regime”. (Simondon, p. 29) One paradigmatic example that seems well-suited to hylomorphic explanation is brick-making: clay (the material) is pushed into a mold (the form), and a brick is produced. Simondon counters that first of all the clay must be “in a state of complete internal resonance” wherein “what occurs at one point reverberates within all the others” in order that the clay has the requisite plasticity. Moreover the operation requires the worker who pushes the clay into the mold. Accordingly, the mold is not a form, but rather “a condition of enclosure, limit, halted expansion, and direction of mediation” that is part of “a system state that requires this realization of energetic conditions, topological conditions, and material conditions” (p. 29) Properly understood, the mold is not a paradigmatic instance of form in the operation of form-taking, but rather is a kind of modulation. More precisely, molding and modulating are extreme cases on either end of a dimension of form-taking. Molding is a kind of modulating wherein the form-giving dimension is fixed; modulating, as in some cases in electronics where the matter is electrons and the form is an electrical field, is a molding where at each moment there is also an unmolding (that is, of the immediately prior electrical state), and so the modulator is a ‘continuous temporal mold’. Between the conceptual extremes of molding and modelling there are intermediate kinds, such as a rolling mill that operates continuous (like a modulator) but produces elements with definitive profiles (like a mold); Simondon calls these intermediate types ‘models’. So the seemingly distinct conceptual types of ‘mold’ and ‘modulator’ are actually part of a continuum ‘mold-model-modulator’, with the place in the continuum determined by the relative fixity of the form-giving element and of result of the operation of form-taking (pp. 30-1).

     Deleuze summarizes Simondon’s account and exclaims “Wonderful! That’s exactly what we needed!” (Deleuze (2025), p. 147), and then gives the definition of painting cited at the beginning of the previous paragraph. Yet puzzling and, as suggested previously, equivocally, he explicitly avoids deciding whether the term ‘modulation’ in painting refers only to the extreme end of the continuum, or whether the term covers the full spectrum of conceptual possibilities from molding to modulating (p. 159). To arrive at a definition of the concept of (artistic) painting, one final point is needed. Earlier (p. 137) Deleuze has said that to paint is to modulate light and/or color on the basis of some signal. What is the signal in artistic painting? Deleuze asserts: “The signal is space. A painter paints nothing but space—and maybe time as well, space-time. A painter paints nothing but space-time.” (p. 160) And so he gives his full definition of artistic painting: “to paint is to modulate light or color—or light and color—based on a signal-space. . . It produces. . . this resemblance to the thing that is more profound than the thing itself, this nonsimilar resemblance, produced through different means. The act of modulation is composed precisely of these different means. Modulating light or color based on a signal-space will give us the thing in its presence.” (p. 160; I have elided Deleuze’s references to what he calls ‘the Figure’. Earlier he has contrasted ‘the Figure’ with what is produced in Abstraction and Expressionism, but it seems to me that here and in other places ‘the Figure’ is synonymous with what he has called the ‘pictorial fact’ and/or ‘presence’—a full account of Deleuze’s thought on painting would need to take this into account, in particular his much more central characterization of it in his monograph on Francis Bacon).

     All that remains for Deleuze are two historical problems: “What are the major signal-spaces of painting?” and “How does modulation work based on these signal-spaces?” Deleuze’s answers to these questions are heavily dependent upon and close to the accounts given in the early 20th century by the art historians Aloïs Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin, and the phenomenologist Henri Maldiney. He considers in turn the arts of Ancient Egyptian, Classical Greece, the Byzantines, the fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-centuries, mostly in Italy, and finally the modern painting of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and especially Cézanne. As noted earlier, these accounts focus on the relative relations involved between hand and eye, as well as the relations among the planes of the surface support, pictorial background, and pictorial foreground. I find these accounts fascinating, although familiar and not especially distinctive of Deleuze’s astounding manner. So I’ll break off the summary here.

     Returning to and elaborating the schema of the creative process of artistic painting that I proposed in the first post, we can now present Deleuze’s full schema as the following: attack upon clichés  catastrophe  creation and application of a diagram  modulation of light and/or space  creation of pictorial fact or presence = the artistic painting. In my final post, I’ll ask and reflect upon a few of the critical questions that immediately arise: Does this schema make sense? Is this schema afflicted by philosophical problems that, according to commentators such as Manfred Frank and Vincent Descombes, also afflict Deleuze’s general philosophy? How does Deleuze’s schema compare with what I called in my first post the common-sense understanding of the creative process?

References and Works Consulted:

Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003)

--On Painting (2025)

Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in Language in Literature (1987)

Henri Maldiney, Regard Parole Espace (1973)

Alois Riegl, Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (2004)

Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020)

Heinrich Wölfflin, The Principles of Art History (1950)

Deleuze’s On Painting, Part 1b: What is a diagram?

I’ll continue summarizing Gilles Deleuze’s newly published seminar On Painting. Anyone who has read more than a few pages by Deleuze knows that his work is unusually resistant to summary, as it includes a unique mixture of sustained philosophical analysis, highly idiosyncratic technical terminology, brief treatments of a range of unusual figures from Lewis Carroll to Baron Sacher-Masoch, an immense tolerance for obscurity, and a style that is equal parts plain-spoken and paradoxical. And a reader of the previous post might well have already thrown up her hands in exasperation at Deleuze’s manner of proceeding through seemingly arbitrary and unmotivated stipulation of characteristics or marks of his concepts. I have a good deal of sympathy for the exasperated reader, but contact with Deleuze’s evident philosophical power and rich inventiveness seem to me to greatly reward the effort of following him. One passage in the book helps explain, though perhaps not justify, Deleuze’s methods. At one point he is discussing the anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s famous paper of cetacean communication, and says: “He [Bateson] starts by going over very basic things, because that’s the American style. They aren’t familiar with our European-style process. They start with extremely simple terms, whereas we make deductions . . . they [the ‘Americans’] invent so many concepts; they invent a lot more concepts than we do because, for us, the invention of concepts is a very deductive process. . . [our process] is deduction occurring in confinement. For us, we do philosophy on an easel, in the end. Our easel is the history of philosophy” (pp. 129-30). One way of putting Deleuze’s point might be that the ‘Americans’, like Aristotle, begin by surveying the phenomena, so as in part to delimit the range of the topic. So if we ‘Americans’ wish to discuss artistic painting, we would consider (as I do in my work) a range that includes Giotto, Titian, Mu Qi, Jackson Pollock, and Cai Guo-Qiang. But Deleuze does not think that there are any limits to the phenomena discussed. There are only events, and further events, and so there is always something self-deceiving, self-limiting, and self-impoverishing about surveying the phenomena and then imagining that one has circumscribed something actual. So instead, one ‘creates a concept’ that one thinks addresses something interesting, important, and worth thinking about, and the relevant evidential basis is whatever grips one. For Deleuze in philosophy that’s especially the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll, Bergson, and Antonin Artaud; in artistic painting its painters discussed in the seminar. Deleuze is pleased if you just make of it what you will.

     In my previous post I attempted to summarize the first fifty pages as presenting a novel conception and characterization of the creative process constitutive of artistic painting. On Deleuze’s account the painter begins by confronting an indeterminate range of clichés, attacks those clichés and so produces a ‘catastrophe, and then creates and deploys something he calls a ‘diagram’, out of which emerges what he calls pictorial facts. Although Deleuze does not use the term ‘creative process’, he seems to endorse at least something like my reconstruction in saying “I don’t think of a painting as a spatial reality; I really look at it temporally via the synthesis of time proper to painting: the before, the diagram, and the after.” (p. 82) He gives the concept of a diagram a surprisingly strong emphasis (while acknowledging that he’s not sure what a diagram is, and further whether the term ‘diagram’ is the right word for what he’s trying to get at (!) (p. 70)).

     In his most sustained discussion of the distinctively pictorial diagram, he stipulates what he calls its five characteristics (pp. 70-82), its two ‘tendencies’ (pp. 84-5), and its three ‘positions’ (pp. 88-91). (Again, I’ll present Deleuze’s thoughts with minimal explication and return to them in the fourth part of this review for some analysis and reflection). The five characteristics are a mixed bag of qualities, function, and effects, and go like this (pp. 70-82): 1. The diagram presents a necessary intersection between two fundamentally linked ideas, ‘chaos’ and ‘germ’, both of which he had introduced earlier in the seminar. Roughly, ‘chaos’ is the effect of the attack on clichés, and ‘germ’ indicates that something emerges from the chaos; and, crucially, the painter establishes “a necessary relationship” (p. 70) between the two. 2. The diagram is “fundamentally manual” in that “[o]nly an unfettered hand can trace it” (p. 71). Surprisingly (to me), Deleuze does not go on to explicate this characteristic in relation to painting-qua-artifact, but rather immediately introduces the thought that painting involves a necessary relationship between the (unfettered) hand and the eye, and indeed one wherein “a hand [is] freed from all submission to the eye.” (p. 72) 3. A diagram is a “manual stroke-patch” that is “not yet line and color” but from which “pictorial lines and pictorial colors” emerge (p. 78). Deleuze asserts that pictorial lines are visual and made up of strokes, and puzzlingly adds that the strokes and the kind of lines they involve have “no visual reality” because the stroke involves a kind of line “that at no moment bears a constant direction” (p. 79). 4. The diagram functions “to get rid of any resemblance”, unmaking it “for the sake of a deeper resemblance” (ibid). Alternatively put, this deeper resemblance is a ‘presence’ or ‘presence-image’ (p. 80). Deleuze briefly explicates this point with reference to the Christian idea of an icon as something does not ‘resemble’ the divine person but rather presents a (non-resembling) image of the divine. Yet another way of putting this point is that the diagram “establishes a possibility of fact”, which if produced is a “pictorial fact, that is, the set of lines and colors”, something that simultaneously produces a new way of seeing, which Deleuze calls the ‘third eye’ (p. 82; earlier on p. 50 he also called this the ‘pictorial eye’). 5. The diagram must be ‘in place’. Deleuze contrasts being ‘in place’ with “just be[ing] in the painter’s head, and so seems to be indicating the point often made against R. G. Collingwood’s claim that a picture can be (ideally) complete in the mind of the painter before or aside from its actually being painted. But, again perhaps surprisingly, Deleuze’s emphasis is not on the material or spatial character of the painting, but rather that it has arisen in the right way, that is, in a temporal process constitutively involving the diagram. As he puts it: “I don’t think of a painting as a spatial reality. I really look at it temporally via the synthesis of time proper to painting: the before, the diagram, and the after.” (p. 82)

     The two ‘tendencies’ (or ‘risks’ (ibid)) are characterized as kinds of failure, where something uninteresting or unachieved results from the (use of) the diagram. One tendency is that “the diagram takes over” which (somehow) allows nothing to emerge, resulting in a “pure chaos” (p. 83), variously characterized as everything being scrambled (p. 82), everything is blurred (p. 83), when the various planes making up the picture “fall on top of each other” (p. 84), or “the colors mix together, and this mixture is nothing but greyness” (ibid). The second tendency for failure involves the minimization of the diagram’s potential, which tends to result in the resultant picture being maximally tied to a (pre-existing) ‘pictorial order’. When this happens, the diagram loses its productive potentials and forces, and becomes “a sort of code” (p. 85).

     In discussing the three ‘positions’ of the diagram, Deleuze seems, at least initially, to restrict himself to modern painting, which for him seems to range from the post-Impressionists Gauguin and Van Gogh (or perhaps starting earlier with Turner) to the present, which for him prominently includes the practitioners of art informel, the abstract painters discussed and favored by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, and above all Francis Bacon. The distinctively modern artistic painting that matters is one that “confront[s] chaos up close in order to extract from it . . . a possible modern order” (p. 88). The first position is abstract painting, at least in the hands of Kandinsky, who minimizes chaos within the painting in the service of heralding “the spiritual life to come” (ibid):

The second position is Expressionism, whose “formula would be: let’s keep adding to chaos precisely this particle almost exceeding its limit in order for something to emerge from it” (ibid). Expressionism’s additions to chaos are in the service of increasing the likelihood that some rhythm might emerge from it:

The third position is ‘Figure’ (or ‘figural’, but not figuration), by which Deleuze understands the painter’s attempt to ‘measure’ chaos by “imposing a kind of limitation to its dimensions” (p. 90). This position includes most of the modern artists discussed here, including Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne.

     In the next post I’ll consider Deleuze’s use of art history to flesh out the diagram’s three positions, especially as it involves the different and historically varying hand-eye relations.

References and Works Consulted:

R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938)

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1990)

--Difference and Repetition (1994)

--‘On Philosophy’, in Negotiations, 1972-1990 (1997)

---Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003)

--On Painting (2025)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1994)

Michael Fried, ‘Three American Painters’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998)

Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (1965)

Painting is a Concept to be Constructed, Part 1a—On Gilles Deleuze’s On Painting

In the spring of 1981 the philosopher Gilles Deleuze offered a seminar on the philosophy of painting. The seminar was recorded, and an English translation has just been published in book form under the title On Painting. No one familiar with Deleuze’s work, possibly one of the greatest, and certainly one of the oddest, philosophical contributions of the second half of the twentieth-century, will be surprised to see that the seminar exhibits Deleuze’s characteristic philosophical power and astounding originality, as well as his characteristic idiosyncratic terminology, untimely judgments, and frequently baffling assertions. Immediately after giving the seminar Deleuze wrote and published a monograph on the painter Francis Bacon that has been available in English for over twenty years, with little impact in English-language philosophies of aesthetics, art, and painting, aside from a sustained treatment by the philosopher Paul Crowther. The translation of the seminar is certainly welcome for providing elaborations of a number of points that might be thought overly condensed in the Bacon monograph; but it seems to me that the seminar is the greater work in providing a more elaborated account of the structures and meanings distinctive of painting as an art form, and is additionally interesting in providing an extended and especially vivid example of what Deleuze always took to be the characteristic activity of philosophy, what he called ‘the creation of concepts’. In the following four-part critical review I’ll attempt to capture something of Deleuze’s philosophical power and of his construction of the concept of painting. In this first part I’ll briefly sketch Deleuze’s central philosophical concerns and methods, and then summarize the material of the seminars. The second part will provide some consideration of Deleuze’s philosophical and art-historical sources and the particular ways in which he utilizes them. In the third part I’ll consider and evaluate Crowther’s critical appropriation of Deleuze’s book on Bacon insofar as it is also relevant to the concerns of On Painting, and then reflect on the relative merits and insights of Deleuze’s work in relation to the greatest work in the philosophy of painting from the same period, Richard Wollheim’s Painting as an Art.

     Deleuze’s philosophy might be likened to the continent of Australia: born of and connected to the world’s great migrations of plants, animals, and human beings, though sufficiently isolated that it produces an extraordinarily rich range of unique items, some (like the platypus) challenging conventional classifications. One way of gaining an initial overview of his thought suggests that his aim is fundamentally ethical, which for Deleuze means “not to be unworthy of what happens to us” (Deleuze (1990), p. 149; for this overview I am heavily indebted to Moore, chapter 21). What happens to us are ‘events’, the very way in which things change and where what had been actual becomes virtual and part of what was virtual becomes actual, and so to infinity in ever novel combinations. The pursuit of this aim in philosophy revolves around two poles, one negative and one positive. The negative pole is initially and most fully given in the fundamental chapter ‘The Image of Thought’ in Difference and Repetition, a chapter that Deleuze himself came to characterize as “the most necessary and the most concrete” part of the book and “which serves to introduce subsequent books up to and including the research undertaken with [Félix] Guattari [which presumably includes his last book What is Philosophy?]”. What blocks or impedes the encounter with events is ‘the dogmatic image of thought’, “a cluster of paradigms and assumptions concerning the nature of thought that have dominated the history of philosophy” (Moore, p. 568). As summarized by Moore (p. 571; for Deleuze’s own longer and more technical summary, see Deleuze (1994), p. 167), the dogmatic image of thought assumes that thought is representational, that it aims at providing true representations of how things are, that suitably pursued it tends to provide representations, and that thought aims to provide solutions to problems by asking and answering questions. Deleuze does not deny that in limited ways the various assumptions can be part of ethical and philosophical thinking, but he vigorously denies that they provide the paradigm for revealing the ultimate character of reality (Moore, p. 569). The positive pole of philosophical activity, its only real activity properly understood, is the creation of concepts (this will include, as we shall see, the concept of painting and especially a key aspect of painting, the concept of a diagram). Deleuze gives his fullest elaboration of how he understands concepts generally in What is Philosophy?, where (I set aside his technical vocabulary of ‘planes’ or ‘planes of immanence’’) he states that concepts are historical (p. 17), always related to other concepts (p. 18), contain ordered constituents (p.19), are characterized by their consistency, both internal and in relation to other concepts (p.22). A concept “speaks the event” (p. 21) and is itself an event (p. 35). Let this suffice as the barest introduction to Deleuze’s immensely complex thought.

     With the evidently great interest in Deleuze’s lines of thinking, but also their difficulty and obscurity, I have lost a couple of nights’ sleep in deciding how to summarize the book. I’ll begin with a sketch of a common-sense approach to painting, some features of which Deleuze might accept in a highly qualified way, but would mostly reject as instances of the dogmatic image of thought; that is, as with the orientations towards representation and truth in the dogmatic image of philosophy, it is not that Deleuze denies any aspect of the common-sense view, but rather that he does not think it characterizes what is fundamentally going on in painting, which, again, must involve describing, expressing, and/or encountering painting as an event. The common-sense view goes something like this: ‘Painting is an art form. All art forms contain multiple traditions which historically emerge, effloresce, decay, interact, and/or vanish, and all artistic painting takes place within traditions, including paintings that presumptively break with the traditions from which they emerge. In artistic painting the painter paradigmatically aims to produce a maximally meaningful painting. Artistic paintings are the products of a process wherein the painter with her eyes open deposits pigment onto a surface and monitors the meanings (representation, expression, composition, symbolism, resonance) that emerge. Painting is a spatial art in two senses: the painting is a material object that exists unmoving and unchanging in space; and, more importantly, the depositing of pigment on a surface creates virtual spatial relations of orientation, foreground and background, center and periphery, and perceived spatial relations among items depicted.’ Deleuze, by great contrast, proceeds like this: he accepts that painting is an art form, but wonders whether philosophy has anything to offer painting. Instead, the guiding question is whether and what painting has to offer philosophy that is unique to painting as an art form. His answer will be a highly original conception of the creative process that is quite different from and considerably richer in content than the common-sense version.

    Highly reconstructed and highly simplified, Deleuze’s answer is this: the creative process (a term that Deleuze does not use) in artistic painting fundamentally involves a passage from pre-pictorial aspects of the world to (the creation of) pictorial facts. The painter indeed initiates this passage by depositing pigment on a surface, but the surface is properly grasped not as some bare, non-meaningful thing, but rather as something that is already richly meaningful, but in a malign way: the surface is the bearer of countless clichés. In depositing paint, and indeed even prior to painting, the painter confronts the monumental task of struggling against these clichés (pp. 21-2). The failure to confront clichés in painting results in just more painted clichés. Since Deleuze concerns himself with what is distinctive of painting, he thinks that the relevant clichés are particularly those that pull the painting toward narrative and/or figurative references (p. 45). These and other clichés inhere so tenaciously in the mind of the painter and on the as yet unmarked surface that the effect of attacking them results in what Deleuze calls ‘the catastrophe’ (“like that found in a furnace or a storm” (p. 22)) The painter’s production of and encounter with the catastrophe ensures that the resultant painting has some relation to the pre-pictorial condition of support and world, and is one condition of the emergence of something distinctively pictorial.

     In order that the catastrophe not be merely chaos in the creative process out of which nothing emerge the painter must construct something Deleuze (picking up a term from the painter Francis Bacon, and more distantly the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and Ludwig Wittgenstein) calls ‘the diagram’. This is an especially difficult and obscure conception, but evidently one crucial to Deleuze’s project and to which he devotes the end of the first session and much of the succeeding three meetings. Deleuze says that ‘the diagram’ is a ‘dual notion’: it “functions as a kind of cleanup zone that creates catastrophe on the painting, that is, erasing all the previous clichés, even if they are only virtual” (p. 24; alternatively put, “[i]t will act as a kind of zone for blurring and erasing” (p. 31), and consequently the act of painting “will involve a series of subtractions and deletions” (p. 35)) ; and, positively, it ‘causes’ what emerges from the catastrophe—“rhythm, color, whatever you’d like”—to become comprehensible (p. 25). Each artistic painter creates her own diagram (p. 25), the diagram is accordingly ‘dated’ (p. 27), and it is what creates the painter’s individual style (ibid). Perhaps the references to Peirce and Wittgenstein encourage Deleuze to think of the diagram as a quasi-logical element: it has “a kind of logic” (p. 25) and it is “a possibility of [pictorial?] fact” (p. 31).

     Since artistic painting does not fundamentally create narrative or figurative references, what does such painting depict? Deleuze’s fundamental answer, and the conceptual claim that determines the course of his thought for most of the seminar’s meetings, is that painting presents not forms, but forces (p. 48). “Without force in a painting”, Deleuze asserts, “there is no painting . . . Painting itself is . . . capturing a force” (p. 49). With this claim about forces in painting, in the middle of the second session Deleuze completes the core and minimal characterization of the creative process constitutive of artistic painting: Confrontation with Cliché —> Creation of a Diagram <—> Depositing Pigment on a Surface —> Capturing/Making Comprehensible Forces. Obviously, this schema stands in need of massive explication, and the remaining six-and-a-half sessions can be understood as such explication, which starts, as we shall see in the next post, with the claim that the diagram is fundamentally manual (as opposed to optical). Deleuze will then go on to relate the basic conceptual possibilities of the diagram and the ways of capturing forces to various art historical movements (Mannerism, Expressionism, etc.) and various art historical periods (Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, Byzantine, etc.). I’ll attempt next to summarize Deleuze’s complex and rich explication of the basic schema in the next post.

References and Works Consulted:

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1990)

--Difference and Repetition (1994)

--‘On Philosophy’, in Negotiations, 1972-1990 (1997)

---Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003)

--On Painting (2025)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1994)

A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (2014)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft Part #18: Masks as a Performative Visual Art Form:

Now for my final post of the first draft of my book in the philosophy of meaning in the visual arts, I consider masks, a kind of visual art whose primary uses are in performance. Later drafts and the book will of course include accounts of the central visual art forms of drawing, painting, and sculpture; but since I am well past my initial goal of a 50,000 word draft, and because I have previously written and published many tens of thousands of words on those central art forms, I don’t think it necessary to include those central accounts in a first draft. Masks and masking do not admit of a short treatment, both because of the vast range of examples and the variety of their primary uses, and also because their primary uses are in performance—rituals, dances, mortuary practices, festivals, etc.—and so any account of the artistic meaning of a particular mask must include an account of its characteristic uses in the performance for which it was made and intended. I will not attempt here even the briefest survey of masking (for an outstanding such survey, see Gary Edson’s Masks and Masking: Faces of Tradition and Belief Worldwide (2005)), and will limit myself to summarizing the most penetrating account of masks in English, A. David Napier’s Masks, Transformation, and Paradox (1986), and then consider a few of the artistic uses of masks ‘at full stretch’, in particular in Nōh Theater and in the transformation masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly Kwakiutl).

     The ur-act of masking is (a) the creation of a rigid artifact (a mask) marked with one or more of the canonical features of the human face (eyes, nose, mouth) and (b) placement and securing of the mask onto the head so as to obscure the face of the person wearing it. Typically, though far from universally, the mask is painted and/or decorated non-naturalistically, that is, in ways that do not imitate the color and tone of the face, but rather with patches of bright color that provide striking contrasts and instant recognizability from a considerable distance and/or when the mask moves in ritual, dramatic performance, or dance. The mask is further typically identifiable as some known type—a member of a social class or of a particular social group, an animal, or a special being such as a particular god, demon, or witch.  The rigidity of the mask affords a steady contrast with the characteristic expressive mobility of the canonical human face it obscures. So the ur-act of masking, with the performative use of the mask, carries immediately the quality of Ellen Dissanayake’s ‘making-special’ discussed earlier in the book as part of the proto-behavior of the arts generally. As Johannes Huizinga put it in Homo Ludens, “The sight of the masked figure, as a purely aesthetic experience, carries us beyond “ordinary life” into a world where something other than daylight reigns; it carries us back to the world of the savage, the child and the poet, which is the world of play . . .” (quoted in Edson, p. 5) Because the mask obscures the face of its wearer and offers another extra-ordinary identity, the mask in use immediately induces a sense of transformation, from ordinary being to extra-ordinary, with the further possibility of changing masks so as to enact and exhibit the transformation of one special being into another. In the transformation A  B (e.g. person to masked being) the question of reality attaches to both items: Is the A really (already) a B? Is the transformation ‘real’ or merely apparent, temporary or permanent? Is B what is really real, and A a mere appearance? Is A what is really real from one point of view, and B from another point of view? And so forth. Napier summarizes this fundamental semantic dimension of masking with the thought that masking carries “a metaphysics of ambivalence” (Napier, p. xxv) that includes also the categories of change, appearance, and ambiguity. Mircea Eliade had long ago noticed that masking cultures are overwhelming polytheistic, whereas in the great monotheisms masking is usually an abomination or at least non-serious, as monotheists usually consider the identity of a person fixed by birth, and so the sorts of identity-shifting transformations induced in masking can play no ontological role. By contrast, as Napier notes, there is an elective affinity between masking and polytheism, as the latter has a constitutive plurality, and so potentially conflicting, of sources of authority; with multiple gods “the pantheon has institutionalized uncertainty itself in recognizing more than one possible standard” (p. 25). Further, anthropologists have noted that masking is particularly prominent in totemistic societies, as the animal mask provides an evidently appropriate means of expressing relations among humans and their totem animals.

     Is masking then a visual art form in the sense I have introduced and explicated here? I somewhat reluctantly conclude that, because of the constitutively performative nature of masking (note characteristic (b) in the fundamental characterization of the ur-act of masks), the answer is no, and that masks are more rightly and illuminatingly treated as a part of the visual staging of performative arts (I hope to treat the performative arts at length in the fourth volume of my series on the philosophy of meaning in the arts, with the second and third volumes addressing contemporary art and poetry respectively). Let us consider a great historical range of examples of masking. There are a number of paleolithic figures, both cave paintings and sculptures, which display human bodies and animal heads. It is not possible to determine whether these are theriomorphs proper—composite beings, whether transformed humans or divine figures—or masked humans. The earliest known masks are those from approximately 11,000 BCE found in Israel/Palestine.

The circumstances of the use of these masks are necessarily conjectural, though an exceptionally interesting and imaginative proposal comes from the art historian Hans Belting, who begins from the thought that there survive in that region from a somewhat later period fragile plaster humanoid statues and plastered human skulls with cowries for eyes.

There is an attested practice of removing the skulls of the dead and burying them. Anthropological parallels suggest that these were the skulls of particularly important people whose continued presence after death was ritually maintained. So during a period of the skull’s de-fleshing burial, substitutes in the form of statues were displayed, which were then ritually buried with the installment of the de-fleshed and plastered skulls. Masks then might have played some role of impersonating the dead in ritual performances. The uncertainty of the interpretation matches the paucity of the evidence, but the interpretation is at least plausible and loosely supported by the vast anthropological evidence of masks in mortuary practices and rituals. As Belting notes, “[i]n the cult of the dead, images were at first accessories to performances—masks, makeup, costumes, and disguises” (Belting, p. 89) whose fundamental significance he describes very much in the terms used by Napier: “The mask was an epochal invention and one that gives the paradox of the image—its making visible an absence—its most definitive expression. . . with its single surface, the mask accomplishes both concealment and exposure, like the image, it draws its vitality from an absence, which it replaces with a substitute presence . . . The image, by placing the final seal on the real body, becomes the medium of its new presence, a presence that time and mortality cannot touch.” (p. 93)

     Masks are prominent in the world’s theatrical traditions, and are especially valued in the Japanese Nōh theater, which continues to the present and which was given a set of authoritative guidelines, strictures, and aims in the treatises of its great founding figure Zeami in the late 14th-early 15th centuries. In her book on masking in Nōh and Balinese masked dance-drama, Margaret Coldiron treats the mask in performance as a tangible, embodied expression of a spiritual power inherent in artistic creation.

On the specific metaphoricity of the mask in performance she quotes Mark Nearman on the shifting sense of the Japanese ideogram for ‘mask’: “In Zeami’s time, it was read men, as an abbreviation of kamen, ‘substitute or provisional face’. This character was now read omote in Nô circles to emphasise the notion that the object represented an actual face and was to be treated as such by the actor.” (Nearman, p. 43, quoted in Coldiron, p. 143) The prototypical artistic uses of the mask involve the actor’s tilting of the head, as explicated by Eric Rath: “An actor’s use of a mask can suggest psychological nuances to a role. By tilting the mask slightly upward, “brightening” it, the actor allows more light to strike the mask’s features, making the mask appear to laugh or smile. Tilting the mask downward “clouds” it, causing the mask to appear to cry or brood. The ambivalence of the mask’s features at such moments hint at a range of emotions left to the members of the audience to decipher.” (Rath, p. 13)

     Similarly, the artistic uses of the Kwakwaka’wakw transformation masks in performance (and so as part of performative arts, not primarily the visual arts as explored in this book) gain their power and significance as props used in enacting mythic tales and transformation; as Audrey Hawthorn puts it in the standard study Kwakiutl Art, “[c]arefully carved and balanced on hinges, the mask was intricately strung. At the climatic [sic] moment of the dance, the dancing, the music, and the beat of the batons all changed tempo, speeding up just before the transformation and then halting while it occurred. When certain strings were pulled by the dance, the external shell of the mask split, usually into four sections, sometimes into two. These pieces of the external covering continued to separate until the inner character was revealed, suspended in their center.” (Hawthorn, p. 238) In many cases what was revealed in the transformation was the mask of a human face, perhaps representing a totemic ancestor, behind a totem animal’s head, as in this eagle-man transformation mask:

Examples of such performative masking could be easily multiplied by considering the great masking traditions of West Africa, or the artistic tradition of Ancient Greek tragedy. One simple summarizing point would be that with regard to artworks and their art forms, and perhaps with artifacts generally, their meaning cannot be explicated, nor their classifications secured, without considering their characteristic uses. With this modest thought I conclude the first draft of the book, the second draft of which shall surely continue with the consideration of the paradigmatic visual arts of drawing, painting, and sculpture.

References and Works Consulted:

Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (2014)

Margaret Coldiron, Trance and Transformation of the Actor in Japanese Noh and Balinese Masked Dance-Drama (2004)

Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (1992)

Gary Edson, Masks and Masking: Faces of Tradition and Belief Worldwide (2005)

Judith E. Filitz, ‘Of Masks and Men: Thoughts on Masks from Different Perspectives’, in The Physicality of the Other: Masks from the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean (2018), ed. Berlejung and Filitz

Audrey Hawthorn, Kwakiutl Art (1988)

Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938)

A. David Napier, Masks, Transformation, and Paradox (1986)

Mark Nearman, ‘Behind the Mask of Nô’, in Nô/Kyôgen Masks and Performance (1984), ed. Rebecca Teele

Eric C. Rath, The Ethos of Noh Actors and Their Art (2004)

Zeami, On the Art of Nō Drama: the Major Treatises of Zeami (1984)

The World in an Eye, First Draft Part 17: Ceramics as an Art Form

I turn now to the consideration of ceramics as an art form. This is a vast topic, with countless examples of ceramic art starting as early as the perhaps accidentally fired figures from the Paleolithic site of Dolní Vestonice (in the current Czech Republic):

 and with an astonishingly early artistic pottery tradition beginning in the late Paleolithic approximately 14,000 years ago and lasting over 10,000 years in Japan.

As with my previous consideration of textiles, I’ll proceed by first summarizing Gottfried Semper’s placement of ceramics among the art forms; then, restricting myself to ceramic pottery, consider the basic actions and elementary kinds of meaningfulness of pots; then consider an example of artistic pottery at full stretch, a bowl by the Tiwa-Hopi potter Nampeyo.

     As stated in my previous post, Semper approached the question of the broadest categories of visual art through the characteristics of the materials used, which he divided into four classes: the pliable; the soft and malleable; the stick-shaped; and the strong, densely aggregated. Associated with each of these material qualities were super-classes of art forms: textiles; ceramics; tectonics; and stereotomy (masonry) respectively (Semper, 109-10). So ‘ceramics’ includes any art form whose primary materials are soft and malleable, and so pre-eminently clay. Because clay is ‘fired’, that is, hardened through sustained exposure to extremely high temperatures, the worked clay must not just be malleable, but also maximally homogenous, so as to reduce cracking and keep shrinkage uniform. Clay can be shaped into forms ranging from simple rectangular bricks to elaborate figurines, though here I limit the discussion to ceramic pottery as an art form, one which is not a human universal but which is attested across a great range of cultures on all inhabited continents.

     The ur-act of pottery is forming a vessel with clay, most typically through laying coils of clay in a circular pattern one atop another until the desired height of the vessel is reached. The resultant shape is the ‘ur-pot’, which inclines towards one of two paradigmatic forms; as Philip Rawson put it, “[t]he ‘ur-pot’, or primal form, is a lump of clay with a hole in it, pinched out into a rudimentary container. From this shape the first two directions of development are towards the ‘jar’ and the ‘open basin’” (Rawson, p. 93). Alternatively, with the introduction of the potter’s wheel, the placement and pressure of the potter’s hands gives the clay the desired height, width, and shape. In artistic traditions the ur-pot is subsequently decorated with further clay elements and/or colors. One way that is very broadly attested geographically and historically is to decorate the pot so that it embodies a corporeal metaphor: pot-is-head and/or pot-is-human body (or human-like body in the case of divine beings).

Another broad stream of decoration is quasi-geometric, where the pot is sub-divided by bands and patterned decoration is introduced, whose repetitions introduce a rhythmic quality of repetitions of varying units; again as Rawson puts it, an “aspect of all ornaments is their value as rhythmical element, punctuating and structuring the external or internal space of the pot in terms of metre or rhythm, often in bands.” (p. 170) A final basic division in the artistic elaboration of pots is between those kinds of decoration that do not exploit the physical features of the pot (its shape, its roundness, its orientation, its size, its structural divisions into base, body, neck, lip, etc.) and those that do. The former kinds of decoration are most typically pictures painted or printed onto the pots, and whose artistic values if any are largely indifferent to their physical support. The latter kinds of decoration, that is, those that do recruit features of the pots into the artistic values and meanings of the ceramic artwork, are characteristic of most of the world’s greatest ceramic traditions, including the aforementioned Jomon, as well as the Susa ware of ancient Iran and the Minoan pots of the late 3rd millennium to mid-2nd millennium.

     As explicated early in the book, the recruitment of aspects and conceptions of an artwork’s materiality is a basic kind of artistic meaning-making exhibited across art forms, and can be readily conceptualized as one, though only one, of the ways in which the fundamental self-referentiality in artistic meaning arises. For example, as Rawson again notes, in Susa ware the conical shape of a beaker may supply a basic motif for variations in its graphic decoration (p. 151).

Similarly, Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort in her classic Arrest and Movement describes the typical patterns of Susa ware as consisting of elements--“the horizontal bands, the circles (interrupted and unbroken), radii, vertical strokes and triangles”--, and which elements, together with the patterns they form, “were suggested by and in turn were meant to articulate the actual vase form, the elements of its structure, the character of its plastic movement.” (Groenewegen-Frankfort, p. 146) Similarly, in taking up and developing the stylistic analysis of Minoan pottery given Friedrich Matz, she notes that in early Crete the physical form of the pot, together with motifs suggested by its production on the wheel, were recruited into the art form’s basic kinds of meaningfulness: “the Cretans emphasized both centre and circumference and thus produced a circular and dynamic pattern, a whirling movement in the design.” (p. 191)

And the much earlier Jomon flame-style pots similarly recruit the process of making as aggregating coils into their decoration.

    In order to show artistic meaning at full stretch in ceramics, I turn to two pots from the Hopi-Tiwa ceramicist Nampeyo (c.1860-1942), who Is widely viewed as among the most skilled and accomplished of Native American potters.

The two pots are seed jars, whose distinctive characteristics are a squat, wide, symmetrical vessel with a single large hole centered in the top. The major variation within  the form is whether and what sort of neck is given, that is, whether the hole opens with a slight rise from the major upper contour, and so seems cut into the top, or whether with a more salient rise a more complex outside curve is created by having a longer rise of a convex neck form. Whether or not the pots have salient necks, Nampeyo arranges two major paired motifs symmetrically around the hole. The immediate effect of this is to introduce a canonical viewpoint directly above the pot wherein the radiating symmetry is most salient.  And so from the canonical viewpoint the lower part of the pot is unperceived as it curves rapidly downward under the occluding furthest width of the pot. To single-point vision the minimally necked pots are like the decorated undersides of upside-down bowls that hover a short distance over the ground.  By slight contrast, the pots with necks relieve something of the horizontality and squatness of the minimally-necked ones, and so introduce a secondary viewpoint, or rather viewing area, from 3/4s side-on, so that something of the particular proportions and complex curvature thereby introduced can be appreciated. In all cases the decorations seem very much applied to a solid monochromatic ground, usually brownish-yellow. Maintaining a sense of the continuity of the ground seems a central imperative for Nampeyo, as she avoids any sense of the small-scale figure/ground reversals so common in the world’s ceramic and textile decoration. And here seed jars also lack much sense of somatic resonance, that is, the metaphorization of the pot as part and/or all of the human body.  Instead she conceptualizes the pot more as an instance of a decorative art on the way to becoming a pictorial art.

     To see the particular artistic meaningfulness of the individual pots, consider Nampeyo’s varying treatment of the eagle motif in two of the pots with short necks. Both show four heraldic ‘tailfeather’ motifs radiating symmetrically from the centered hole, with symmetrically opposed curvilinear ‘claw’ elements between each tail-feather. In both cases the claws come close to, but do not touch, any other decorative element, so the sense of the yellow ground as continuous underneath them is maintained; likewise, Nampeyo never encloses the ground color within a figure. The particularities of the tail-feathers in particular differ: in the upper space one has a fretted swastika, the other a complex polygon whose angularity suggests an origin in textile decoration. A mesh of cross-hatchings surround both these sub-motifs. The variations between the two pots, and indeed the variations across Nampeyo’s oeuvre, can be seen as the result of a seemingly impossible task that she has given herself: to seek for pot after pot different solutions that admit rich decorative patterns, but where the sense of visual coherence of the of the pot is secured through maintaining strong continuity of surface—and so the avoidance of corporal metaphorization, figure/ground reversal, and the sense of strong enclosure of the decorative elements. Like a number of other roughly contemporaneous modernist artists (Monet, Picasso, et alia), in many cases the primary locus of artistic meaningfulness is not the individual artwork, but rather the series of works (compare, for example, Nampeyo’s serialization of problem-solving with Picasso’s in Femmes d’Alger, a series based upon a painting by Delacrois.

The assumption that artistic meaning is given as it were in individual artworks taken one at a time is perhaps a largely unexamined prejudice that might block access to a broad range of the world’s arts, especially those usually included among the technical or industrial arts (in Semper’s sense), or the ‘crafts’ in the modern period.

     For the final post of the first draft of my book, I turn to the world’s greatest visual art form that is primarily performative, namely masking.

References and Works Consulted:

E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order (1984)

Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort, Arrest and Movement: An Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Ancient Near East (1951)

Tatsuo Kobayashi, Jomon Reflections: Forager Life and Culture in the Prehistoric Japanese Archipelago (2004)

Philip Rawson, Ceramics (1984)

Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics (2004)

Inspired by Bruegel: A Note on the Possibility of a Realist Political Art

Early today (7/25/25) I gave a short introduction on my Zoom reading group to Edward Snow’s book Inside Bruegel, a profoundly illuminating monograph on a single painting by Bruegel (1525?-1569), Children’s Games (1560). I was struck by the relevance of the painting and Snow’s book to thinking about the possibilities of political art in the contemporary world, and thought it might be interesting to the .7 people reading my blog. So here it is, not vastly different from the way I delivered it:

     I first learned of Edward Snow’s book about 25 years ago by repeatedly noticing it among the books reserved for T. J. Clark’s and Whitney Davis’s graduate seminars in art history at UC Berkeley. I read it, and it struck me then as one of the two greatest pieces of art history by a living person (the other was a lecture by Leo Steinberg (now deceased) on Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo that I heard in the mid-1980s. One way of thinking about Bruegel’s achievement generally and of Snow’s interpretation in particular is that the painting Children’s Games is a supreme instance of a Realist artwork, one that further offers a model for contemporary political art. The topic of political art is, so it seems to me, in everybody’s thoughts right now. In the cultural worlds of the internet and social media the latest ephemeral topic is an episode of the animated comedy South Park which apparently offers an outstandingly savage, satirical comic take on the current President of the United States. This episode is near the top of my current ‘to be viewed and re-viewed’ list, only trailing Diary of a Country Priest, The French Connection II, and The Birds. I can’t help but wonder in advance, though: in such circumstances I always recall the remark of Peter Cook about the greatness of Berlin cabarets’ comedy in the early 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent World War II. If satire doesn’t work, why might Realism?

     Let’s briefly consider Realism first. I take the beginning of wisdom on Realist art to be a short essay from 1921 by the young Roman Jakobson. There Jakobson distinguishes five different types of Realis, (with further sub-types): (i) deforming given artistic norms as an approximation to reality; (ii) the conservative tendency to remain within the limits of a given tradition; (iii) condensing narrative by means of images based on contiguity with the narrative and its agents; (iv) including (seemingly) inessential details; and (v) maintaining consistent motivation and realization of poetic devices within an artwork. These different senses of the term ‘Realism’ may in practice overlap, but still one plainly one gets very different conceptions of Realism if one treats one after another as the central sense. A bit later Wallace Stevens poeticized the different senses of Realism:

          From oriole to crow, note the decline

          In music. Crow is realist. But, then,

          Oriole, also, may be realist.

     In what sense is Bruegel’s work Realist? Bertolt Brecht considered Bruegel a central instance of a Realist artist whose work was in the service of political art. In a formulation from the late 1930s, Brecht cited Bruegel as a model of how one teaches people to see, not just ‘differently’, but in a ‘correct’ way, one “appropriate to the thing”. The world’s exploiters and the exploited see things differently, and “We Communists see things differently from the exploiters and their subservient spirits. But our seeing things differently is focused on things. Things are at stake, not eyes. If we want to teach people that things should be seen differently, then we must teach this with reference to things.” Bruegel in some sense ‘reproduces’ the colors and lines of things with paint and pencils, “but that’s not all he reproduces. The feelings he generates derive from his relationship to the objects which he reproduces, and that is why these are specific feelings, which can change the relationship which the viewer of his pictures has to the objects represented.” (Brecht (2003), p. 241) A couple of years later Brecht notes that Bruegel’s paintings are full of “pictorial contrasts”—old against new, terror against beauty and gaiety, and fundamentally the tragic and the comic. Bruegel “deals in contradictions” that he does not resolve, he “manages to balance his contrasts . . . [but] never merges them into one another, nor does he practice the separation of comic and tragic; his tragedy contains a comic element and his comedy a tragic one”. (Brecht (2003), p. 157) Following the suggestions of Jakobson and Brecht, one might say that a Realist art is one that invokes generalizations, categories, ideologies, norms, etc., and suspends them in amidst contrasts and specificities. Is this political? I don’t know, but if so it is not of a piece with either an art that imagines it rouses the people around a slogan, nor with satiric or ironic ones constructed on the stable and unquestioned ideological framework. It is rather one that puts its political faith in the world-transforming power of suspension of certainties and rather dwelling with particularities.

     Snow’s book, with its astonishing and ever-fertile analyses of particularities, is one that must be read and re-read, experienced and re-experienced for oneself, and does not readily admit of summary. Snow himself notes this at the book’s conclusion. He notes that though “[t]he impulse to generalize seems impossible to suppress”, in Bruegel’s painting “the proliferation of meaning defies any settled statement”. (Snow, p. 159) He concludes with the thought that “some works exist to defy generalization”, and quotes the social theorist Roberto Unger on ‘the secret of art’, which is “Depth without abstraction, achieved through detail pursued to the point of obsession”. (Unger (1984), quoted by Snow at p. 160)

References:

Bertolt Brecht, ‘On non-representational Painting’ (1939), in Brecht on Art and Politics (2003), ed. Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles

--‘Alienation Effects in the Narrative Pictures of the Elder Brueghel’ (early 1940s?), in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (1964), ed. John Willett

Roman Jakobson, ‘On Realism in Art’ (1921), in Language in Literature (1987)

Edward Snow, Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children’s Games (1997)

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1981)

Roberto Unger, Passion: An Essay in Personality (1984)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 16: Back to Semper! And Textiles as Art Forms

In my previous post I discussed, or rather attempted to discuss, bodily modification generally and tattooing in particular as art forms. Tattooing as an art form showed itself to be a topic of great philosophical difficulty, and I cannot claim to have done more than to have made a start at clarification and explication. I turn now to textiles as an art form, with a preliminary discussion of the central ideas of the great 19th century art theoretician and practicing architect Gottfried Semper, whose central ideas are a major and hitherto unmentioned inspiration for the account of artistic meaning I’m trying to develop in this book. In light of the prominent role that textiles play in his basic artistic conception, I have delayed until now to introduce his thought. After introducing and summarizing Semper’s views, I’ll turn to the focal topic of textiles as an art form with a presentation of the criminally neglected views of the architect Christopher Alexander on the kinds of artistic meaning distinctive of one of humanity’s great art forms, the Anatolian kilims, the flatwoven rugs of central Turkey spectacularly discussed in Alexander’s book A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art.

     Gottfried Semper was a prominent mid-19th century German architect who presented his views first in two major publications of the early 1850s, ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’ and ‘Science, Industry, and Art’, and then somewhat modified and with massive documentation in the enormous book Style (Der Stil in den teknischen and tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Ästhetik) in the early 1860s. His views were highly influential in the later 19th century,  but seem to have been largely ignored (so it seems to me) in the 20th century after suffering severe criticisms from the art historian Aloïs Riegl and the art critic Lionello Venturi. More recently, the writings of E. H. Gombrich, Michael Podro, Wolfgang Herrmann, and Harry Francis Mallgrave have corrected Riegl’s and Venturi’s plainly inaccurate criticisms. I myself was moved to read Semper after reading Podro’s account in his book The Critical Historians of Art, to which I am heavily indebted for my understanding of Semper and his importance. Semper’s most general thought about the arts is that they presuppose “a certain temper of carnival”, and that “the carnival half-light is the true atmosphere of art” (quoted in Podro, p. 49). He distinguishes the fine arts of painting and sculpture; the industrial or technical arts, ones that use simple techniques (binding, knot-tying, etc.) to transform bits of nature into bits of culture; and the tectonic arts relating to building. In their historical dimension the various arts exhibit something of a Heraclitean flux, wherein formlessness acquires form in historically emergent kinds of art, which in turn decay and perhaps pass away. Underlying the flux are what he calls ‘Urmotiven’ [primordial motifs]. Semper’s terminology is loose: in his first statement ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’, Semper seems to treat the term ‘elements’ as synonymous with ‘urmotiven’; and he also later speaks of ‘Urformen’ conditioned by primordial ideas (Semper (1989), p. 136). Perhaps the clearest example of what Semper means by ‘urmotiven’ is his initial treatment of the four ‘elements’ of architecture: the hearth, the roof, the enclosure, and the mound (p. 102). An element (or urmotif) is a prototypical artifactual, physical form that arises from and gains intelligibility in relation to basic human purposes; the hearth supplies warmth and gathers people, and the roof, enclosure, and mound protect the hearth from natural elements and hostile human beings. The history of an art form is given by (a) the uses of certain kinds of materials, and in particular in light of the material’s basic qualities (e.g. the softness and plasticity of clay) as (b) they arise and/or are adapted to particular natural, historical, and social conditions. The attentive reader will have noted the closeness of Semper’s conception to the accounts I offered of the great resources of artistic meaningfulness earlier in this book draft.

     My particular interest here is in Semper’s account of artistic meaningfulness, (again) especially as reconstructed by Podro. Semper writes that “the Urmotiv penetrates [a particular work] as the underlying keynote of its composition”, though not necessarily or even typically through the literal repetition of the motif; not all buildings have, say, hearths, but the motif of the hearth is sustained by its connections with the purposes of the building, and through various substitutions of, say, radiator for hearth. Semper’s frequent and striking example of such substitutional continuity is the architectural wall: he posits that the ‘original’ or primordial wall was a hanging textile, and so that with the future masonry walls stone has substituted for fabric, and he supports this claim by noting continuities of decorative elements from textiles to walls. And on this account the blank wall can be treated as an artifact that not only substitutes stone for fabric and stacking for weaving, but hides its origin in cloth. It does not seem to be Semper’s considered view that this kind of substitution necessarily and automatically occurs, but rather that across a great range of earlier artifacts which involve such substitutions there is a kind of artistic acknowledgement of the relevant Urmotiven, and the putting of such Urmotiven to use in creating artistic meaning in the later work.

     Semper’s specific account of textiles as an art form goes something like this: Textiles are the primeval art, for as noted already they are used to form the walls that enclose and protect the hearth. Along with covering, protecting, and enclosing, textiles involve the fundamental artisanal actions of stringing things together and bind things. For Semper there are four basic categories of raw materials, where it is a material’s qualities, not just its sheer physicality, that determines category membership. The four such categories: the pliable (textiles); that which is soft and malleable (ceramics); the stick-shaped (tectonics/carpentry); and the strong, densely aggregated (stereotomy, that is, masonry and stone construction generally).

     So far Semper, whose interest, especially in the massive Style book, is in surveying the artistic histories of textiles, ceramics, tectonics, and stone construction. Semper does not offer any extended accounts of particular artworks, and instead gives chronologically ordered descriptions of period styles of the four categories. For a sense of textiles as an art form at full stretch, I turn to Christopher Alexander’s account of Central Anatolian kilims. Alexander’s account arises from his many years of acquiring and thousands of hours of looking at his own collection, which includes items roughly from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. One a simple classification, the major genre of textiles has rugs as a sub-genre, which is in turn sub-divided into piled rugs and unpiled, flatwoven rugs or kilims. Alexander characterizes the art form of rugs as “an art of pure design made of tiny knots” (Alexander, p. 11). He gives an immensely evocative characterization of the highest achievements of the art form of Central Anatolian kilims, although I find it also immensely difficult to summarize; I am uncertain whether the source of the difficulty is the intricacy of the account, or different emphases given in different sections, or perhaps that the account is not wholly consistent: First, a carpet, and so the successful kilim, presents ‘a picture of God’, where ‘God’ means “all seeing everlasting stuff” (p. 21). Alexander stresses that the kilims present a sense of wholeness, but that this wholeness varies from kilim to kilim in that it can be greater or lesser, deeper or more superficial, and more or less radiant. Second, the major artistic elements of the carpet are the intricate geometrical configurations created and the colors used. In an especially successful work the colors become radiant by virtue of the geometries. Third, the key element of the geometry is a ‘center’, a concept to which Alexander devotes the most effort in his explications. A center is “a psychic entity which is perceived as a whole, and which creates the feeling of a center, in the visual field” (p. 32) Alexander later notes the circularity in trying to characterize centers. One reason for this circularity is that centers are made of other, smaller centers. Alexander does not address the question whether there is a smallest center, a center-primitive not made of others; perhaps the smallest center is just the smallest geometrical bit of order that is or becomes artistic significant in the carpet as a whole. In a carpet there are typically many centers, which interlock (p. 34) in various ways; and in general the greater the density of centers, the greater the carpet (p. 36). Fourth, there is a key countervailing aspect to the geometrical organization by interlocking centers: in the greatest carpets there is no distinction in terms of artistic meaning between positive and negative space (p. 52) or figure and ground (p. 53). In such cases the ‘negative’ space, the empty space around a center, itself has a ‘good shape’ (p. 52) which undermines the tendency to see it as an artistically inert background to the figure. Fifth, in a really good carpet there are multiple levels of scale (p. 58f), and any really good center, that is, one that bears a deep artistic meaningfulness, exists or functions on many levels (p. 62). Sixth and finally, in rare instances the greatest of the carpets achieve the creation of ‘a being’, where the viewer senses “the emergence of a being” (p. 82) and “feels the presence of a being behind the form” (p. 127). This “emerging being, formed by centers, and out of centers, . . . is the goal of every carpet.” (p. 82) Alexander stresses the uniqueness of the being so created, and the rareness and wonderfulness of the carpets that embody such a being (p. 83).

     To see how these points are put to work in explicating artistic meaningfulness, consider Alexander’s analysis of what he considers to be among the very greatest of the kilims, the Seljuk prayer carpet from the 13th-14th centuries (pp. 126-29):

Alexander gives the ‘being’ in this carpet as an outline of the major forms:

The basic theme of this carpet, so Alexander asserts, is the ‘split Y-form’ that occurs throughout, at the top of the arches, in various motifs in the middle, and in the space between the posts.

The split Y is also varied throughout, rotated or reversed or transformed, and occurring at various scales from the micro-details to the large structures. So as a creation of geometrical order “the local symmetries of this carpet are arranged to produce an everlasting, syncopated series of half-rotations, half-reflections, which progress from one element to another, change scale, change position—and keep on moving across the carpet.” (p. 129) Alexander’s analysis breaks off there, and the viewer-reader is left with the image of the carpet, and so the evidence of the eyes, to see whether the expected radiance of color, picture of God, and/or created being emerges from this. One might wish for more analysis, but evidently Alexander’s aim is to state the carpets’ poetic, analyze the creation of geometric order, and let the image of the carpet evoke the radiant presences in the eyes and the mind of the viewer.

     In any case, such is the richest account known to me of the art form of textiles at full stretch. In my next post I’ll consider ceramics as an art form, and re-view my own account from a few years ago of a ceramic vessel by the Tiwa-Hopi artist Nampeyo.

 References and Works Consulted:

Christopher Alexander, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets (1993)

Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (1982)

Gottfried Semper, ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’ and ‘Science, Industry, and Art’, in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1989)

--Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics (2004)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 15: Bodily Modifications as Art Forms? With Remarks on Tattooing

I turn now to the consideration of individual art forms as structure- and content-providing aspects of artistic meaning in the visual arts. As noted before, I’ll consider in turn bodily modifications and decorations, especially tattooing, then textiles and ceramics, and finally (for the purposes of a first draft) masking. The second draft will continue with considerations of drawing, painting, and sculpture, but since I have in recent years written a great deal on these art forms (see, for example, my blog posts on Mu Qi’s Six Persimmons), I’ll save consideration of those topics for the later draft.

     I have found the philosophical consideration of tattooing as an art form to be of exceptional difficulty, in particular because of the seemingly endless complexity of the issues, the relative lack (in comparison with all the other art forms to be treated) of philosophical, art-historical, and art-critical thinking on the form, and the difficulty or impossibility of access to the vast range of works and its most accomplished instances (or even knowing what those might be). So here I’ll offer a two-fold consideration—top-down (philosophical) and bottom-up (evolutionary)—with philosophical remarks on the category of body modification and adornment, and with remarks on the emergence of the forms from everyday practices. Then I’ll summarize and reflect on the best documented instances of tattooing with a claim to artistic status, Polynesian tattooing, in particular the extensive documentation of the practice in the Marquesas Islands and its canonical anthropological account in the writings of Alfred Gell.

     In Reason in Art (1905), the philosopher George Santayana introduces the concept of art with the assertion that “any operation” that “humanizes and rationalizes objects is called art” (Santayana, p.9). An arrow replaces a footprint, or a well-planted orchard replaces a disordered room—the footprint and the room betray some agent’s habits, but the arrow and orchard are expressions of the material embodiments of the agent’s intentions, and so (instances of) art. Footprints and arrows are both based upon instincts, as the former are the products of habits, the latter the products of arts, that arise to satisfy the needs, interests, and desires arising from and motivated by instincts. As expressions of intention, arts have purposes, and so through practice develop characteristic methods of realizing those intentions. As historical and social, the methods are practiced as routines, and so the their routines carry with them a sense of rationality, even if the artist is not typically conscious of the art’s purposes: “Thus weaving is an art, although the weaver may not be at every moment conscious of its purpose, but may be carried along, like any other workman, by the routine of his art” (p. 10). Santayana immediately adds that because of their routine nature, arts “are no less automatic than instincts” (ibid). Santayana goes on to posit a typology of the arts: the oldest are the ‘spontaneous arts’, which arise from basic aspects of life and action (p. 31; one would wish from Santayana greater explication and examples); then the ‘useful arts’ such as ship-building  that involve devising elaborate instruments; and the fine arts of music, speech, prose, the plastic constructions of architecture and sculpture, and the plastic representations of drawing and painting. Later in Art as Experience (1934) John Dewey, with explicit reference to Santayana, partially takes up and transforms Santayana’s conceptualization in a way that carves out a place for the putative arts of adornment. Because of the unfamiliarity of the points, I give the full quotation: “When we view the arts from the standpoint of media and expression, the broad distinction that confronts us is between the arts that have the human organism, the mind-body, of the artist as their medium and those which depend to a much greater extent upon materials external to the body: automatic and shaping arts so-called. Dancing, singing, yarn-spinning—the prototype of the literary arts in connection with song—are examples of “automatic” arts, and so are bodily scarifications, tattooings, etc., and the cultivation of the body by the Greeks in games and gymnasia. Cultivation of voice, posture, and gesture that adds grace to social intercourse is another.” (Dewey, p.227) It’s not at all clear to me that Dewey’s conception of ‘automatic arts’ coincides with Santayana’s conception of ‘spontaneous arts’, since, if nothing else (and if I understand Santayana rightly), for Santayana automaticity is a feature of all arts in their routine practice. Still, Dewey treats it as unproblematic to consider tattooing and scarification as arts on the same  level with dance and song; all are organized expressive practices whose products necessarily have material embodiments. What distinguishes tattooing and scarification from other arts is just the character of their medium, that is, the human body itself. Unsurprisingly, neither Santayana nor Dewey anywhere (to my knowledge) develop this basic conceptual determination into an account of the (putative) artforms of tattooing and scarification, and so a fortiori offer nothing explicit on the distinctive kinds of artistic meaning they provide.

     The intellectual situation is similarly sparsely populated in what seems to me the most illuminating of bottom-up approaches, Ellen Dissanayake’s account of ‘making special’. I have discussed Dissanayake’s account earlier in this draft, so to recall and re-summarize: in her works in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the book Homo Aestheticus, Dissanayake posited a basic kind of human behavior, ‘making special’, wherein human beings alter what are otherwise ordinary features of their bodies, their environments, and their artifacts so as to make them more salient, more striking, more attractive, more puzzling, etc. The central manifestations of this behavior in human life are in play, in ritual, and in the arts. In Art and Intimacy (2000) she claims that making-special is rooted in the earliest human interactions between infants and their ‘mothers’ (that is, anyone caring for the infant), and is readily seen in the human universal of ‘motherese’, the caregivers’ sing-song language and exaggerated facial expressions. After the year 2000 she re-names this behavioral tendency ‘artification’ and repeatedly characterizes it with five features: formalization, repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, and manipulation of expectation (such as ‘peek-a-boo’). In a series of papers up to the present she analyzes the origins of various arts in light of artification, and further applies it to understanding the widespread early human phenomenon of ‘cupules’, making rounded depressions in rocks.

On her full account, then, making-special/artification arises phylogenetically in infant-mother interactions as an evolutionary adaptation to the lengthy immaturity of human infants, that is, their long period of caring required for their survival and maturation into minimally self-sufficient beings. This evolved feature is then ‘exapted’, that is, adapted to further needs, namely to addressing the pervasive anxiety arising in humans from their awareness of death and their precarious existence (Dissanayake repeatedly cites the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on this point), and to sustaining and re-invigorating humans social bonds in festivity, song, dance, communal religious ecstasies, etc. Dissanayake repeatedly stresses that her account of making-special/artification is not an account of the arts; this behavioral tendency manifests itself much more broadly than in the arts, as she is at pains to show. And she readily agrees that any account of the arts and of art forms will require further philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and historical material. So while one readily recognizes arts of bodily modification as expressions of artification, her methodological focus does not allow her to develop an account of any art form, including tattooing. 

     In my theoretical desperation to find an account of tattooing as an art form, and in the spirit of Aristotle’s methodological precept of collecting the opinions of the many and the wise, over the past few days I have asked a large selection of Berkeley California’s tattooed baristas for their opinions on the artistic status of their tattoos. One offered a sensible piece of philosophizing that perhaps in certain instances tattoos might constitute artworks, but that neither her tattoos nor her magnificent hair-stylings were artworks, only rather just kinds of adornment. Most others affirmed upon reflection that (a) their tattoos were artworks;  and further that (b) the identical images on a piece of paper would also be artworks; with the qualifications that (b’) the same images painted upon the skin would be the same artworks, but with an added resonance; and (b’’) the evident permanence of the tattooed images adds a further resonant dimension. The kinds of meaningfulness that accrued to the bodily images stems from their expressions as marks of personal identity, and the permanence of the tattoo adds as certain existential seriousness to the artwork.

     The few recent discussions of tattooing in Anglo-American philosophy are somewhat cruder versions of the baristas’ views. For example, the author of perhaps the most prominent relevant article, Eva Dadlez, offers little more than the bland assertion that “For a tattoo to be art, it needs to reflect on the body in some way or another.”  The one relevant sustained philosophical account known to me comes from the philosopher Stephen Davies book Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are (2020).

Davies argues for two claims: 1. Human beings are self-adorners, where ‘adornment’ (or ‘ornamentation’) means making something aesthetically special (‘beautiful or sublime’ (p. 21), typically without thereby changing the physical identity of what is adorned (p. 24); and 2. Adornments are for the most part not artworks, nor does their application change what they adorn into an artwork. The first claim strikes me as the less problematic of the two, in that the restriction of adornment to aesthetic enhancement, itself understood in terms of and restricted to the beautiful and the sublime, seems to narrow, given the extraordinary range of adornments trans-culturally and -historically; but of course as stated by Davies one would need explication of what he means by the terms ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’ to evaluate his views. In any case the term ‘adornment’ is capacious, as it includes tattoos, scarification, tooth-filing, neck-stretching, forehead flattening, foot-binding, body painting, hair-styling, and jewelry. The second claim, that adornments are not artworks, which as stated here seems to represent Davies’ ‘official’ view, is immediately heavily qualified in the text. On Davies account artworks are artifacts whose original or typical primary function is to be for aesthetic pleasure and contemplation, and for it to realize this function it must achieve some degree of aesthetic value (p.28). Also, artworks have a kind of aesthetic integrity, completeness, and wholeness that adornments typically lack; as he puts it, “artworks are appreciated for their individuality as complete, self-contained wholes and, as a result, are not regarded as adornments. They are made up of, not supplemented by, their aesthetic features.” (p. 31) However, if a putative adornment is integral to the meaning and/or fulfilled function of an artwork, then it’s not an adornment at all, but rather just part of an artwork. One immediately senses the need for an account (here missing) of artistic coherence and aesthetic wholeness. And then he immediately revokes the strictness of the distinction between artworks and adornments with the thought that “a society might invest so much attention and care in modes of aesthetic decoration that they take their places alongside music, painting, drama, and literature as among its art forms. Paper folding, quilt making, needlepoint, and flower arranging, as seriously practiced in some cultures, might be accepted as art forms, with their products recognized as works of art.” (p. 32) It would be cruel, but not obviously unfair, to characterize Davies ultimate view as ‘parts of artworks are not artworks except when they are’ and ‘adornments are not artworks except when they are’. With the qualifications Davies’s account, despite its initial seeming distinctiveness, turns out to be just a more elaborated version of Dadlez’s statement. I cannot see anything in these published accounts that rises to the philosophical level of Berkeley’s tattooed baristas, who at least offer some indications for thinking about kinds of artistic meaning that might be distinctive of tattooing practiced as an art form, meanings arising from the use of skin as a medium and from the evident permanence of the artistic tattoo.

     The beginning of wisdom on the topic of the possible status of tattooing as an art form may (or may not) be to turn to the most extensive extant analysis of the most fully described practices of tattooing, Alfred Gell’s in Wrapping in Images. I have written about Gell previously, and will not repeat any of that other than to recall Gell’s precept that the anthropology of art should be carried out under the attitude of ‘methodological philistinism’, whereby the putative artwork is solely treated as an index of social meanings related to the agencies of the patron, maker, artifact itself, and/or its audience; and that his work on Polynesian tattooing must have been carried out at roughly the same time (late 1980s-early 1990s) that he was working on what were to become his revolutionary essays on art, the essay on technology and enchantment and the essay on artworks as traps, and he does in the book unemphatically characterize tattooing as an art (at one point he refers to “tattooing, and its sister-art scarification” (p.18)).  I’ll treat his account in a way very much contrary to Gell’s intentions, that is, as if it were the beginnings of an account of tattooing as an art form. Gell formulates what he calls “the basic scheme of tattooing” (on the account I’ve proposed this would be ‘ur-tattooing’) as first of all “the making of indelible pigmented traces which are inside or underneath the skin” (p. 38). Tentatively following the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s conceptualization, Gell suggests that the human skin “in many ways” (and so its meaning-bearing uses in tattoos) is “the social person himself/herself” (p. 28); we would say that tattooing induces a basic-level metaphorization ‘skin = (social) person’. Again following Anzieu, Gell considers a number of basic functions of tattooing—as containing the interior person, as armoring the inner person, as manifesting and expressing individuality, etc.--, subtending which is the effect of producing” a paradoxical double skin” (arising from the nature of the tattooing process: “The tattooing-tool goes through the skin, the ink is absorbed into the interior of the body, and remains there, subsequently being inaccessible from the outside, but still visible, behind what seems like a transparent layer.” (p.38) Tattooing is “the creation of an extra layer by folding the skin over upon itself, making an inside of an outside and an outside of an inside” (p. 39; we shall soon see a very similar statement with regard to masking).

     Following up on Gell’s characterization, we might speculate that if tattooing is practiced as an art form (at least in certain places at certain places), the artistic meanings of tattoos will include this metaphorization of ur-tattooing, and build up meanings in innumerable ways. Gell’s book provides an extended account of the traditional tattooing style of the Marquesas Islands, “the most elaborate and extensive of any to be found in Polynesia” (p. 163), for consideration. Gell is primarily concerned to investigate the relations between tattooing and social, political, and gendered spheres among the Marquesans, from which I focus only on the symbolic aspects.

Gell notes “the extraordinary visual complexity of the design [in Marquesan tattooing] as a whole, and like Gombrich in The Sense of Order (discussed earlier in the post on decoration), considers this as part of the tattoos’ “apotropaic (hard-deflecting) purpose” (p. 189), aiming to protect the person from both physical harm in battle, and spiritual harm generally by supernatural forces. Motifs in tattooing are organized within zones (the face, the trunk, the back, the hands, etc.), often manifest a kind of visual ambiguity of constituting faces under one possible grouping (pp. 190 and 196), and serve one of the other of two functions: closure, that is protecting what’s underneath; and multiplicity, multiplying the person’s defenses (p. 190). So if Marquesan tattooing practices constitute an art form, we would expect to find aspects of complexity of design, choice of motifs, and uses of ambiguity among the meaning-bearing features of tattoo artworks. Is that enough?

     It seems to me that, on the basis of the conceptual material and descriptions introduced so far, we do not have sufficient material to substantiate the claim of tattooing generally, and Marquesan tattooing in particular, to the status of an art form. We lack a sense of the historicity of the practice, of evaluative criteria, and the body of rich descriptions and complex interpretations that characteristically accompany an art form. On the other hand, I cannot see any conceptual barriers to the thought that tattooing is, or might become, an art form. With that disappointing conclusion, in my next post I’ll turn next to the consideration of textiles and ceramics as art forms.

References and Works Consulted:

Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (1989)

E. M. Dadlez, ‘More Than Skin Deep with Eva Dadlez’, in Aesthetics For Birds (May 1, 2018)

Stephen Davies, Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are (2020)

Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (1992)

--Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000)

--'The artification hypothesis and its relevance to cognitive science, evolutionary aesthetics, and neuroaesthetics’, Cognitive Semiotics (2009)

--‘The Genesis and Development of ‘Making Special’: Is the Concept Relevant to Aesthetic Philosophy?’, in Rivista di Estetica (2013)

--‘Mark-Making as a Human Behavior’, in Darwin’s Bridge: Uniting the Sciences and Humanities (2016), ed. Carroll, McAdams, and Wilson

--‘Roots and Route of the Artifaction Hypothesis’, in Avant (2017)

--‘The Concept of Artifaction’, in Early Rock Art of the American West: The Geometric Enigma (2018), Dissanayake and Ekkehart Malotki

Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images (1993)

--‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’ and ‘Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps’, in The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (1999)

Matt Lodder, ‘A Medium, Not a Phenomenon: An Argument for an Art-Historical Approach to Western Tattooing’, in Tattooed Bodies: Theorizing Body Inscription Across Disciplines and Cultures (2022)

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896)

--Reason in Art: Volume Four of The Life of Reason (1905)

Karl von den Steinen, Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst, i. Tatauierung (1925)

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part #14: The Concept of an Artform

Now as a brief introduction to consideration of the world’s major forms of visual art, that is, ‘artforms’  (which I take to be bodily decoration and tattooing, textiles, pottery, masks, drawing, painting, and sculpture), I’ll first briefly consider the concept of an artform; and then introduce the notion of an original or basic action for the artform which, following Richard Wollheim’s coinage, I’ll call ‘ur-artform’, as in ‘ur-tattooing’, ‘ur-pottery, ‘ur-painting’, etc. As with every discussion in this book, my concern is to consider the concept and conceptions in light of their contribution to artistic meaningfulness, and so here as elsewhere the discussion is highly selective.

     In the past half millennium or so there have been a number of prominent cultural episodes in which the concept of an artform is foregrounded; one thinks of the debate between Leonardo and Michelangelo on the relative value and status of painting and sculpture, of Lessing on poetry and painting, and the drawn-out and inconclusive discussion of the question whether photography is or can be an artform. Hegel’s consideration in the 1820s of the artforms as differing manners of giving sensuous embodiment to the Absolute (very roughly, whatever counts as fully serious for any socio-historical period) towers among philosophical considerations, while in the twentieth-century the question of the nature and individualization of artforms is very little discussed in comparison to the prominent question of ‘What is art?’. In the first half of the century the monumental works of Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood scarcely discuss the individual arts, and what little discussion there is of middle-range concepts (that is, between the general concept of art and individual artworks) is largely confined to considerations of the modes of the tragic, the epic, and lyric, and the distinction between temporal and spatial arts. In the post-World War II period Thomas Munro gives a central and typical statement, artforms are defined and characterized in accordance with three criterial characteristics: distinctive kinds of processes of making, particular kinds and uses of a medium, and distinctive kinds of products (Munro, p. 433). He offers as an example of this conception of an artform with regard to sculpture: as an artform sculpture involves distinctive processes: carving, cutting, or hewing; distinctive media: wood, stone, metal; and distinctive products: statues, ornaments, etc. or figures. More strictly and abstractly defined, sculpture “is the art of planning and constructing three-dimensional forms, usually to be seen from the outside, having one or all of the following characteristics: (a) representing natural or imagined objects; (b) presenting a design of three-dimensional shapes; (c) suggesting general ideas, feelings, or other types of experience” (p. 455)

     To my knowledge the most sophisticated philosophical consideration of the concept of an artform, and one consistent with Munro’s conception, comes from the Dominic McIver Lopes in his book Beyond Art. McIver’s most general concerns there are, first and primarily, to elaborate and defend what he calls a ‘buck passing’ theory of the arts, wherein the concept of art in general plays little role, and whatever seemed of philosophical interest in the general concept is rather given in examining the different kinds of arts (painting, sculpture, etc.); and second and derivatively, to consider whether ‘hard cases’, i.e. novel instances of art in the twentieth-century, such as the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, are best thought of as sui generis and existing outside of any artform, or rather whether there are rightly thought of as the products of extended and/or mixed use of traditional media, and so also of artforms. As I intend to consider Lopes’s account at length in a subsequent book on the philosophy of contemporary art, here I restrict myself to a summary with comments on his conception of an artform. Lopes begins by distinguishing a theory of art from a theory of the arts, where the former considers generally what makes an artifact a work of art, and the latter what makes a certain activity (e.g. painting) an art; as he puts it, “A theory of the arts articulates what makes painting and dance arts and displays why philosophy and skateboarding are not arts” (Lopes, p. 14) Lopes does not use the term ‘artform’, but rather considers what ‘an art’ or ‘an art kind’ is; since I can see no substantive among between the terms, I’ll continue my use ‘artform’ in summarizing his views. Lopes’s chief constraints on a philosophically fruitful conception of an artform is that the relevant account be ‘viable’ and ‘informative’, where ‘viable’ means that the account offer plausible explications of potential counterexamples (pp. 16-18, and ‘informative’, in the sense mentioned above that it tells why certain activities are artforms and others not. Lopes specifies that an informative account solves Richard Wollheim’s ‘bricoleur problem’ (p. 108, as discussed in some of my earlier posts), that is, explains how some materials become artistic vehicles, and also “engineers the conceptual foundations of empirical art studies” and “correctly grounds art criticism” (p. 22). Lopes discussion is technical and intricate, but I think it can be summarized in the following way: 1. Artforms are ‘appreciative kinds’, which is “a kind whose nature connects to the value of its members” (p. 130), for example where the kind ‘seeing-eye dog’ fixes, or determines or guides judgment of what it is to be a good seeing-eye dog’.  2. Each artform is individuated partly by its ‘medium profile’, that is, the physical media that are used in making and constituting an artwork of that kind, together with the characteristic techniques with which the physical medium is worked (pp. 139-140). 3. Instances of artforms, that is, artworks in some or other medium, ‘involve’ or ‘exploit’ (Lopes uses both terms, seemingly interchangeably, at different points) their medium. 4. An artform is a ‘social practice’, “in the sense that engaging in the practice consists in conforming to some rules on condition that others who engage in the practice do so” (p. 148). Lopes calls this “a minimal conception of a practice”, and cites John Rawls’s early essay on rules as its source.

     I suggest that Lopes’s conception massively under-describes the concept of an artform, and this in two ways that I have stressed throughout the book. First, Lopes’s bare statements that artworks (that is, instances of art kinds or artforms) ‘involve’ or ‘exploit’ their constitutive media miss the phenomenon of artistic meaning, for it is, as Wollheim, Podro, and Maynard have shown, such ‘exploitation’ is in the service of creating artistic meaning, and, so I further suggest, the point of artforms is the creation and sustaining of artistic meaning. Artforms conceived non-teleologically in the manner of Rawls and Lopes have no particular point; they can be put to any heteronomous purposes. I agree with the point about heteronomy, but that does nothing to block the further point that the creation of artistic meaning is an internal good, and so a purpose of, all artistic practices and forms. Perhaps a proponent of Lopes’s view would reply that my counter is merely a posit of philosophical anthropology, to which I can only respond that this posit is of a piece with the entire conception of the book as a project of philosophical anthropology, and is meant to be consistent with the views of body, gesture, metaphor, meaning, etc., developed throughout the book.

     Taking up this first objection to Lopes’s conception, and introducing the second objection, I recall Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of a practice, which for him is “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partly definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” (MacIntyre 1981, p. 175) On MacIntyre’s conception and pace Rawls and Lopes, practices are not only social activities with interlocking roles, but also processes of reflection, inquiry, and self-correction and -extension, and so are necessarily historical phenomena; that is, their historicity—their developments and decays, their constitutive use of historical exemplars of achievement and anti-models of failure, their characteristic activity of making art out of previous art-- is internal to the practice. This is yet another way through which one might explicate and develop Gombrich’s and Wollheim’s insistence that all art is an historical phenomenon. Perhaps to a degree Lopes could accommodate these points by developing his conception of how artworks exploit media and adding the historical dimension to his conception, but he would also need to re-think the beginning point of ‘appreciative kinds’, wherein judgments of goodness (e.g. ‘that’s a good seeing-eye dog’) are conceived so to speak one at a time, atomistically and ahistorically.

     One final preliminary point, and one that follows from recognition of Lopes’s lack of an account of artistic meaning as internal to the practice of an artform: the conception of an artform must start from the fact of artistic meaning-making. To this end, I recur once again to a conception from Richard Wollheim, who, in his account of painting as an art, introduced the concept of ‘ur-painting’ (Wollheim pp.19-25), and in my accounts of particular artforms I’ll include as a conceptual component their ‘ur’ forms, so ‘ur-tattooing’, ‘ur-potting’, etc. Wollheim likens an ‘ur’ account to early modern accounts of how civil societies emerged out of the State of Nature. So the descriptions of the ‘ur’ acts are not meant to capture some actual historical instance, but rather to make vivid the process wherein a human agent practices the ur-art as a meaning-making activity. The ur-art begins (a) with a simple act, such as for painting a person depositing pigment onto a surface. The action is intentional under this description (Wollheim, p. 19; see also Anscombe pp. 9 and 43, and MacIntyre (1971), p. 201). The agent is reflective, and so (b) notices (i) that the deposit stands out from and against the surface upon which it is deposited, and (ii) stands in some relation to the edge of the surface. Then the agent then (c) abstracts something of mark, surface, and edge in the interest of developing visual interest in one or more of these features, an act that Wollheim calls ‘thematization’. The agent (d) makes further marks, guided by some thematized awareness of the relations among mark, surface, and edge. The process is teleological, that is, it is undertaken to achieve some end or purpose, the most general of which is creating meaning or content (Wollheim, p. 22). I understand Wollheim to be saying that we must assume something like the activity of ur-painting as (a)-(d) if we are to treat painting as an artform wherein painters create artistically meaningful artworks, and I follow Wollheim on this point.

     Now I can at last turn to the consideration of the great artforms of humanity, starting in my next post with a consideration of bodily decoration and tattooing.

References and Works Consulted:

Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (1957)

R. G. Collingwood, ‘Outlines of a Theory of Art’ (1925), in Essays in the Philosophy of Art (1969)

--The Principles of Art (1938)

Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic (1922)

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art (1820s)

Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Antecedents of Action’, in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971)

--After Virtue (1981)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Dominic McIver Lopes, Beyond Art (2014)

Thomas Munro, The Arts and Their Interrelations (1969)

Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)

John Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ (1955), in Collected Papers (1999)

Kendall Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, in Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (2008)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft Part #13: Mundane and Less Mundane Artifacts, Proto-Art, Quasi-Art, and Art

In what follows I turn to the next major section of the book, the concept of an artform and consideration of the world’s major visual artforms, which I take to be bodily decoration and tattooing, textiles, pottery, masks, architecture, drawing, painting, and sculpture. As a preliminary to reflection on artforms generally, I’ll here try to explicate further the concept of artistic meaning with examples from anthropology and the philosophy of design. To begin: Imagine a continuum of artifactual meaningfulness, marked at one by ordinary artifacts (including tools), such as kitchen spoons, cardboard boxes, and milk crates, and at the other end by indeterminately many artworks that exhibit and embody the devices of artistic meaningfulness ‘at full stretch’ (in Patrick Maynard’s terms), such as Rembrandt’s drawing of Hendrijke sleeping, Mu Qi’s Six Persimmons, or Michelangelo’s Moses. One might then think that at the bare end of mere artifacts one encounters works that lack not only artistic meaning, but also any aesthetic considerations whatsoever; mere artifacts are determined wholly in terms of their function—spoons are to lift liquids to one’s mouth, boxes must have sides and a bottom that are sufficiently sturdy to hold the items typically intended for storage, etc. Moving along the continuum towards artworks would then be a matter of adding aesthetic and/or artistic concerns to the artifacts, as a spoon decorated with spirals and garlands is more ‘artistic’ than an undecorated one. Then further along the continuum, when the spoon is decorated to such an extent that it is difficult or impossible for it to be used in eating, so its function drops away—the marks on the handle are a kind of low-relief sculpture, the bowl itself is decorated, etc.—and it becomes more something to be contemplated than used, the ‘spoon’ enters the zone of artworks.

     This seemingly irresistible manner of conceiving the passage along the continuum from artifact to artwork seems to me to embody, or at least to be threatened by, three major misunderstandings of artifacts and artworks. First, it suggests that there is a zero degree of aesthetics and artistic meaning in much of the world’s artifacts. But as the designer David Pye and the philosopher Barry Allen have urged, there is no instance of an artifact that is simply and rigidly determined by its function. As Pye put it, “the form of designed things is decided by choice or else by chance; but it is never actually entailed by anything whatever” (Pye (1978), p. 13), in particular not because of its function or typical use. That is, in the making of any artifact, whether tool or product, of there will always be a range of possibilities, with the choice determined by a range of factors, especially those of aesthetics (in the broadest sense, the attractiveness of its appearance) and economy (both of the materials and the effort of making). Second, anthropological and archeological investigations of the world’s artistic artifacts suggest not as it were a smoothly graduated continuum from bare artifacts to artworks at full stretch, but rather a kind of clustering of artifacts around three points on the continuum (which I’ll call  resonators, quasi-art, and proto-art, and discuss starting in the next paragraph). Thirdly, the misguided conception of the zero artistic degree of function-determined artifacts carries with it as its contrary the conception of artworks as lacking function, a conception that cannot, it seems to me, be taken seriously in light of the vast range of functional artworks; consider, among many thousands of possible examples, the 7th-century relief in Mamallapuram, usually referred to as ‘The Descent of the Ganges’ or ‘Arjuna’s Penance’, and which celebrates a military victory and evidently has further religious functions.

     So instead of positing at one end of the continuum the conception of a bare, non-artistic, wholly functional artifact—a conception that further is consonant with the hylomorphic conception of artifacts that I analyzed and rejected in earlier posts—I start with the conception of an artifact, any artifact at all, together with its ordinary uses. Such an artifact is always part of a much larger web of tools and products, and is situated at some determinate socio-historical period, and in such uses intervenes and modifies on-going ‘operations’; this conception is meant to be consonant with the conceptions of Gilbert Simondon and Tim Ingold discussed earlier. Correlatively, we can think of moving along the continuum towards artworks not as adding some meaning to a notionally pre-existent bare artifact, but rather as the relative degree of and density of mobilizations of the artifact’s environment (in the broadest possible sense, including the psychology of the maker, the social structures within which it is made, and its environmental and even cosmological dimensions). The basic thought is: elements and dimensions of artistic meaningfulness are mobilized by the mechanisms of meaning discussed earlier, and the artifact embodies artistic meaning to the extent that such mobilizations are marked, that is, perceptually encountered and recoverable for a suitably attuned viewer of the artifact.

    I’ll call the first cluster along the continuum ‘resonators’, following in part a term introduced by the anthropologist Philip Lemonnier, and briefly discussed by both Lemonnier and his fellow anthropologist Alfed Gell in an exchange starting in the early 1990s. The discussion began with an unpublished paper by Lemonnier on eel traps among the Ankave-Anga, a group of approximately 1,300 forest horticulturalists in the Gulf Province on the southern coast of Papua New Guinea (‘Ankave’ refers to the particular group and their language, ‘Anga’ (or ‘Angu’) to the larger group of which the Ankave are a part).

Lemonnier gave the initial description of the Ankave eel traps in an unpublished paper in the early 1990s, which was then used as in Gell’s influential essay of 1996, ‘Vogel’s Traps’, to characterize basic aspects of artworks, or at least artistic artifacts, that were typically overlooked in provincial Euro-American discussions of the nature of art. Lemonnier finally published on the eel traps in Mundane Objects, a book from 2012, wherein he largely agreed with Gell’s account, while forcefully rejecting Gell’s assertion that the traps embodied ancestral power. In order to motivate and partially explicate the term ‘resonator’, I’ll start with a sketch of Lemonnier’s later conceptual framework, and then consider his disagreement with Gell. Lemonnier devotes four chapters of his book to descriptions of artifacts that seem to have a special reference in particular cultures; along with the eel traps, he discusses the especially sturdy garden fences of the Baruya (new Guinea) people, Ankave drums, and the model race cars of Western youths. In possessing particular resonance and being the objects of special preparation and/or care, these artifacts are ‘less than mundane’, and share four anthropological characteristics: “(1) their making and using relate different domains of social life that are thus brought together in the actors’ mind in a unique way; (2) they are part of some kind of non-verbal communication; (3) that special communication concerns key values or key characteristics of particular social relations that are usually hidden, although they pervade everyday life; and (4) the very physicality of the artefacts is involved in that process [of making and using]” (Lemonnier (2012), p. 119). These resonant artifacts are ‘less mundane’ than their counterparts of mundane artifacts, ordinary eel traps or garden fences that are not involved in characteristic #2’s non-verbal and non-propositional communication. Lemonnier suggests that the difference between the mundane and the less mundane artifacts is that the latter ‘condense’ “social relations that their construction activates” (p. 151). With regard to the eel traps, the condensed social relations include the counterintuitive origin of eels (which arose when a woman gardener sliced the very long penis of an importunate man, leaving him with a penis of ordinary length, while the longer section made its way to the river and produced eels (p. 56); gender relations (besides the gendered slicing, men make the traps and women ritually trigger them (p. 49); and political markings of patrilineal lineages (traps are part of an end-of-mourning ceremony wherein male relations of the deceased and the deceased’s wife’s new husband, construct traps).

In his earlier discussion based upon Lemonnier’s initial account, Gell notes that Lemonnier had noticed that the eel traps that are constructed in the course of the ritual have cane binding hoops that are “far stronger, more numerous and more carefully made than would be needed to restrain a few eels, and, similarly, the trapdoor is much sturdier than strictly necessary.” Gell interprets this as indicated that the eel trap is “a symbolic artefact” that functions metonymically to “empower the eel” via representing the eel, and which further contains, embodies, and communicates ancestral power (Gell (1999), pp. 208-9). In his book Lemonnier twice forcefully rejects Gell’s claim that the traps embody ancestral power with the statement that the “mere sight of the trap and observation of its painstaking fabrication tells us something about the penis/eel, not about the trap, its origin, or its ancestrality” (Lemonnier (2012), p. 61, and also on p. 141). Oddly, Lemonnier neglects to mention in this context the point about the especially sturdy binding on the ritually-produced traps; the extra effort in making the less than mundane is to a degree visible and perceptible in the artifact. For our purposes, we can say that the eel traps under Lemonnier’s description are resonators, in the sense that they condense social relations in ways that their mundane counterparts don’t. If we insist on Gell’s point about the sturdier binding, we might then say that they are further along the continuum towards artworks than mere resonators, in that their meaning as images of ancestral power is marked and embodied by the stronger and denser binding.

     Between resonators and full-fledged artworks I introduce a cluster of artifacts termed ‘proto-art’ with the mysterious and much-discussed ‘Blombos Pebble’, a small, roughly rectangular and incised crayon of red ochre found at the Blombos Cave in South Africa, and securely dated to around 80K BP.

The pebble is the first-known artifact that seems to have been marked intentionally so as give it an ‘aesthetic’ appearance, that is, one that is designed to be attractive, fascinating, and attention-grabbing and -holding. Sides of the pebble are abraded, indicating that the pebble was rubbed to impart color and/or protection to something, most likely the human body for ornamentation or sunscreen, or possibly (who knows?)  to clothes or the walls of the cave. The design seems a startlingly clear illustration of Gombrich’s characterization of ornamentation as first of all ‘framing’ and ‘filling’: the long edges are paralleled by straight lines ‘top’ and ‘bottom’, then the surface is bisected with another horizontal; large crossing diagonals added to fill in the demarcated area, and finally countless lighter incisions are added, with several directions but mostly parallelling the upper right-to-lower left diagonals. Lacking any knowledge whatsoever of the language, beliefs, and practices of the maker and their audience, we cannot say anything determinate about what (if anything) the pebble and its markings ‘mean’. The archeologist Clive Gamble places it at time in the prehistory and history of humanity when the millions of years when the primary technologies and innovations were instruments that extended and enhanced the hands (such as scrapers, awls, and arrow heads) were starting to be matched by technologies of enclosures (nets, slings, cups, hearths, pots). It’s striking that the basic decorative elements of enclosures (‘framing’) and extensions (‘filling’) show up in an artifact for the first time (as far as we know). My suggestion is that the pebble is an instance of proto-art, rather than an artwork proper, stems from three considerations: (a) nothing about the artifact indicates the operation of the basic metaphorical mechanisms of meaning-giving; (b) nothing can be known about the history of artistic practice (if there was such) of which the pebble forms an instance; and (c) nothing can be known about the categories—artforms and genres—that it instantiates. So the distinction, as I conceive it, between proto-art and artworks is perhaps largely stipulative: proto-art is a conceptual type where instances, although subjected to artistic-type markings, lack meaning and/or practical history and/or genre; in other words, the Blombos pebble is (seemingly) not an instance of an artform.  As a corollary, we can imagine a category of ‘quasi-art’, where proto-art seems to look to, and partially to be modeled upon, actual artworks, but where features of meaning, relevant history, and genre are lacking.

     So the imaginative exercise of constructing a continuum of mundane artifacts—less than mundane artifacts/resonators—proto-art—artworks helps us clarify what will count as artworks, and motivates the interest in philosophical reflection upon the concept of artform. That will be the subject of my next post, the final one before considering the great artforms.

References and Works Consulted:

Barry Allen, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008)

Gregory Currie, ‘Aesthetic Explanation’, in Arts and Minds (2004)

Clive Gamble, Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory (2007)

Alfred Gell, ‘Vogel’s Nets: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps’, in The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams (1999)

E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979)

Pierre Lemonnier, ‘The eel and the Ankave-Anga: material and symbolic aspects of trapping’, unpublished (1992), referenced in Gell (1999), pp. 208 and 213, and published in Tropical Forests, People and Foods: Biocultural Interactions and Applications to Development (1993), ed. E.-M. Hladik et al.

--Mundane Objects: materiality and Non-verbal Communication (2012)

David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968)

--The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (1978)

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

Thomas Wynn, ‘Layers of Thinking in Tool Behavior’, in Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution (1993), ed. Gibson and Ingold

The World in an Eye, First Draft, Part 12e: The Hard Problem of Pleasure

I turn now to an issue in artistic meaning that is on everyone’s lips, but seemingly in nobody’s mind, in the sense that is very rarely given so much as a brief discussion; I mean the topic of pleasure in the visual arts as an aspect of the meaning of artworks. It strikes me as a near-universal in the contemporary world that, when one asks what someone thinks of an artwork, the initial response is somewhere on a spectrum marked at one end by ‘I loved it’, and the other ‘I hated it’. One step inwards from the end of the spectrum yields ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it’, and all of these responses admit of re-formulation in terms of the language pain-or-pleasure: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed it’; ‘I’m pleased that someone’s keeping the faith’; ‘I enjoyed how he handled the paint’; ‘I’d rather receive 50 lashes than have to look at it again’; etc. Further reflection and discussion typically abandon the topic of pleasure for interpretation, e.g. ‘What do you make of his use of unstretched canvas?’ A first question in canonical philosophy of art asks why tragedy on stage gives pleasure, whereas the depicted incidents and sights, if seen in real life, would give unrelieved pain. Aristotle’s brief answer, that tragedy effects a ‘catharsis’ (a purgation and/or clarification) through pity and fear, is sufficiently tantalizing and sufficiently obscure to have induced agreement and opposition, and irreducibly different lines of interpretation for over two thousand years; but surely the general thrust is that the distinctive pleasure of tragedy involves some recognition of the similarities and differences between the tragic character and ourselves, some sense of emotions entertained and experienced without the practical urgencies that would attend them in real life, and some sense of pleasure in seeing and re-seeing, and understanding and re-considering familiar stories. In modern philosophy perhaps most central question arises from Kant: what if any difference is their between, on the one hand, the idiosyncratic pleasures of everyday life (I particularly like chocolate ice cream, you rocky road) or the sensuous pleasures of food, drink, sex, etc., and, on the other,  the pleasures characteristic of artistic response, where, as Kant sternly put it, we ‘demand’ the agreement of others. What sort of pleasure, then, distinctively arises in the arts, and what role if any does such pleasure play in the creation and appreciation of artistic meaning?

     A survey of philosophical reflection on pleasure offers, it seems to me, little guidance for thinking about pleasure in the arts, as much of it occurs in the context of considerations of hedonism, very roughly, the doctrine that the good life for human beings (and perhaps animals) consists in regularly experiencing pleasure, at least of the right kinds and in the right kind of ways. And further, since there is a default assumption in much of Western philosophy of rationalism, that is (again roughly), the doctrine that the best sort of life is guided by the right sort of uses of reason, much of the relevant philosophical activity is devoted to distinguishing those sorts of pleasures that should be part of the good life from those that shouldn’t, and exploring the ways that the right kind of pleasures can be integrated into reasonable living (from an enormous literature, I would recommend from the bibliography below Roger Crisp for a brief history and contemporary re-statement of hedonism, and John Cottingham and Michael Rosen on rationalism).  So, among countless examples, Kant in his Anthropology distinguishes sensuous from intellectual pleasures, and Mill in On Liberty famously distinguishes higher and lower pleasures. If one then thinks that the pleasures of the arts must be intellectual and/or higher pleasures, one struggles to understand the pleasures of looking at a painting by Howard Hodgkin, not to mention the pleasures of the mosh pit.

     Despite the sense that in reflecting upon pleasure in art one pursues a line without merit, there are it seems to me two contributions to the topic that contribute to deepening our understanding of meaning in the arts, Richard Wollheim’s brief account of visual delight in painting practiced as an artform, and Mohan Matthen’s distinction between types of pleasures and his analysis of the role of learning in pleasure. First Wollheim: he begins the second chapter of Painting as an Art, ‘What the spectator sees’, with the claim that “the artist paints in order to produce a certain experience . . . : pleasure” (Wollheim (1987), p. 44). He then insists that the artist also paints to produce the experience of content or meaning. Wollheim devotes most of the following parts of the chapter to explicating representation and expression as basic kinds of pictorial meaning. At the end of the chapter he returns to pleasure, or what he there calls ‘visual delight’, and a bit surprisingly there says that has “little to say on this subject”, despite its evident importance. He dismisses the philosophical question ‘What is visual delight?’ and instead devotes barely two pages to the question ‘What is the source of visual delight?’. Wollheim’s answer is that, distinct from whatever pleasures arise from the recognition of the subject matter,  visual delight in artistic painting arises from contrasts of two sorts, which are available to the viewer in every sustained instance of pictorial perception. One kind arises from the viewer’s awareness that the depicted subject is not the same as the focal subject in ordinary perception, followed by the transfer of pleasure from depicted to actual subject, and vice versa. Wollheim cites Marcel Proust’s essay on Chardin: “If, looking at a Chardin, you can say to yourself: This is intimate, this is congenial, this is full of life like a kitchen, then you will be able to say to yourself, walking around a kitchen: This is strange, this is grand, this is beautiful like a Chardin.” (p. 98)

So the pleasure arises in the recognition of a subject matter, whether depicted or ordinary, and then transferring the recognition, together with the pleasure, to the other kind of subject matter.

A second kind is given in the conditions of viewing a depiction: there are indeterminately many relatively near and relatively distant views of the painting, and so a distinctive kind of visual delight in contrasting views internal to the action of pictorial perception. Wollheim registers perhaps a lack of certainty about this second kind, only “offering a hypothesis” that there is a kind of visual delight stemming from the materiality of the painting, namely in ‘detail’, which in this context means “detail relative to a more comprehensive, a more distanced view of the marked surface” (p. 100). It seems to me that the account both of these kinds of visual delight in artistic painting can be generalized to the visual arts as a whole, since both depend only on the viewer’s recognition of the materiality of the visual artifact and grasping it as an artwork that represents, expresses, symbolizes, evokes, etc. something in ‘reality’, an object, topic, or situation in ordinary life.

     But what of the more standard points about pleasure in the arts? Is Kant right in thinking that such pleasure is ‘disinterested’ and categorically distinct from the pleasures available from real objects or ideas? Mohan Matthen’s account of artistic pleasure seems to capture the truth in Kant’s claims with a psychology considerably more naturalistic and plausibly construed than Kant’s. Matthen begins with a piece of philosophical anthropology: human beings experience two kinds of pleasures: pleasures of restoration or relief when the human body and/or mind has left a state of normal, resting equilibrium for a different state that are physically or psychologically costly (such as pain, physical exertion, sexual arousal, or mental concentration), and then returns to the ordinary resting state; and ‘facilitating pleasures’ where one savors and enjoys some activity in that very activity. The simple example of eating when hungry exhibits both kinds of pleasures: eating relieves hunger, and so as a consequence gives one pleasure in relief, while one experience pleasure in savoring the food, enjoying the taste, textures, sight, and smell, reflecting on the growing and gathering of the ingredients, visualizing the process of cooking, comparing it with other instances of the dishes, etc. In the pleasures of relief one is passive, in facilitating pleasures active. Further, facilitating pleasures activate a learned nexus of preparatory mental and physical actions, with the current instance of facilitating pleasure itself becoming, at least potentially, part of the very nexus that is exercised in experiencing the pleasure. So facilitating pleasures are part of an open-ended learning process. It’s no surprise that Matthen thinks that aesthetic pleasure generally, and the kinds of pleasures we distinctively experience in the arts, are facilitating pleasures. Matthen adds a great deal of analytic detail to the account, but even this bare-bones statement is sufficient for my purpose here of showing the role of pleasure in the formation of artistic meaning. Richard Wollheim once remarked to me that “paintings have a way of teaching you how to look at them”. Matthen’s account suggests how one might interpret this mysterious remark, namely, that it is through a steady engagement with whatever pleasures a work initially offers that one is led to further pleasures, and there is no conceptual gulf between experiencing and expanding one’s facilitating pleasures in an artwork with coming to understand and appreciate the work. Pleasure in art is learning art, and the learning is self-reinforcing and admits of no terminus other than the limits of the viewer’s capacities for looking, inquiring, and reflecting. And Wollheim’s account leads us to expect that a major aspect of artistic meaningfulness will involve the ways that artworks invoke, expand upon, play with, and revoke the distinctions between fiction and reality, as well as the range of views potentially given in any visual artwork.

     This completes my initial survey of the great resources of artistic meaningfulness. In the next major section I shall consider the kinds of artistic meaningfulness in the great classes of artforms—bodily decoration and tattooing, pottery; masking, drawing, painting, and sculpture. I shall introduce the topic of the distinctiveness of artforms by considering an instance of proto-art, one brilliant discussed in the anthropological writings of Phillipe Lemonnier and Alfred Gell: the eel trap!

References and Works Consulted (mostly on pleasure):

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

--Poetics

Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum

John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life (1998)

Roger Crisp, Reasons and the Good (2006)

Epicurus, ‘Letter to Menoeceus’ and ‘Principal Doctrines’, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Book 10

Fred Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life (2004)

J. C. Gosling, Pleasure & Desire: The Case for Hedonism Reviewed (1969)

Gosling and Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (1982

Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study, vol. 1-3 (2007-2009)

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)

--Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Richard Kraut, What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (2007)

--The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised (2018)

Jerrold Levinson, ‘What is Aesthetic Pleasure?’ and ‘Pleasure and the Value of Works of Art’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (1996)

Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (1966)

--After Virtue (1981)

Herbert Marcuse, ‘On Hedonism’ (1938), in Negations (1968)

Mohan Matthen, ‘The Pleasure of Art’, in the Australasian Philosophical Review (2017)

--‘The Emergence of Tastes’, in The Geography of Taste (2024), Matthen et alia

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903)

Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984)

Marcel Proust, ‘Chardin’, in Marcel Proust on Art and Literature 1896-1919 (1958)

Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (1996)

Plato, Protagoras, Gorgias, Republic, Philebus

Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949)

--‘Pleasure’, in Dilemmas (1954)

Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction (1976)

Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics

Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)

The World in an Eye, First Draft Part #12d: Decoration

Having considered composition and representation as major aspects of the basic internal complexity of visual artworks, I turn to a sketch and some reflection on decoration, an aspect of visual art that is prominent cross-culturally and trans-historically, and which nonetheless is either neglected or given only passing discussion in the visual arts. However, as the great anthropologist of art Alfred Gell notes, a quick and dispassionate survey of the world’s art indicates that decorative art is, at least quantitatively, the most predominant of all visual art forms. Gell offers the irresistible suggestion that the relative neglect of decorative art is partly due to its lack of prestige in Western art, and partly due to the fact that across many sub-genres of decorative art it is a kind of art largely made by women. Later in the book I’ll treat decorative art primarily as an aspect of pottery, while here I’ll mostly restrict myself to a sketch and explication of the account given in E. H. Gombrich’s The Sense of Order, supplemented by some consideration of Richard Wollheim’s suggestion, itself building on Gombrich’s account, that rhythm is both a constitutive feature of and an artistic value produced through decoration.

     Gombrich begins the investigation of decorative art by positing a fundamental conceptual distinction between meaning and order in human life. The distinction is rooted in human organisms’ most basic needs and interests. In relating to itself and to its environment, the human beings ask themselves two types of questions: What? And Where? The answers to the ‘What?’ questions are objects that are important to the organism, while answers to the ‘Where?’ questions relate the organisms spatial and temporal orientation to its environment. The ‘meaning’ of anything is the ‘what’, any and all objects that relate to the organisms’ needs and interests; ‘order’ relates to orientation and the Meaning and order relate to organisms’ answers to the questions ‘what?’ and ‘where’ in relationship to its environment and the needs and interests of the organisms. Meaning concerns objects that are important to the organism;  order relates to temporal and spatial orientation and the associated frameworks within which the organism and its objects are placed and interrelated. For Gombrich (and very much in line with my earlier discussion of embodiment), the most conceptually basic form of orientation arises from the sense of balance, and with it the sense of up and down. Next in the conceptual line comes the temporal orientation of before and after, and the spatial orienting pairs of near and far, higher and lower, and adjoining and separate (Gombrich, pp. 1-2). A key point (Gombrich calls it a ‘fact’), and again one closely related to points already introduced here, is that “temporal and spatial orders converge in our experience”, as evidenced for example by the fact that “language speaks of patterns in time and of rhythms in space” (p. 10). Various such patterns and rhythms arise in their most primitive form throughout the process of living—the heartbeat and breathing--, and in basic forms of action and movement such as “swimming, crawling, flying, or running”, and in countless other human activities, from rocking a baby to drumming one’s fingers in irritation (p. 11). As these primitive somatic and organic rhythms are taken up into structured activities, such as a child bouncing a ball, a secondary articulation emerges, such as the child alternating hands or clapping her hands between bounces. This further articulation that enriches the primary activity Gombrich calls ‘graded complication’, and reflection on this “reveals its psychological kinship with ornamentation in the visual arts and in music” and manifests ‘the sense of order’ (p. 13).

     To see how these basic existential concerns for meaning and order, together with our sense of the rhythmic structuring of life, are articulated into complex hierarchical structures and ultimately into visual artworks, one can look to the ways in which motor skills are acquired and developed. Mastering a skill (such as typing, riding a bicycle, or playing the piano) requires first of all breaking down the practice of the skill into basic, as it were sub-meaningful actions  (learning the positions of ‘r’ and ‘t’ on a keyboard and alternately typing them; propelling the bicycle in a straight line by pedaling without turning; doing five-finger exercises), which once learned can then, together with many other such basic actions, be incorporated into complex, hierarchically structured exercises of skill (typing  the first draft of a book; riding Paris-Roubaix; playing the Mephisto Waltz). An additional point of great importance is that the structuring of complex, goal-directed tasks through repetition and varying of sub-meaningful actions “records and preserves the pleasure in control” within the accomplishment of tasks like plaiting baskets, weaving cloth, chipping stone, or carving wood, and so connects pleasure to the rise of the decorative arts, which in their typical instances globally manifest such repetition (p. 14).

     Gombrich introduces two more basic characteristics to complete the account of decoration. First, he notes, particularly with regard to the decoration of the human body, that “an order is superimposed on an existing order, respecting or sometimes contradicting the symmetries of the organic form . . . Such adornment always means modification of the original structure” (p. 65). Second, he returns to the concept of graded complication with the example of bouncing a ball. The primary activity of bouncing “corresponds to a composition of elements”, and the secondary clapping or switching hands “has the character of ‘decoration’ since it adjusts its hierarchies to the given realities of the game”. (p. 75) Graded complication is necessarily hierarchical, in that a secondary organization (bodily decoration; clapping) is superimposed upon a primary organization (the human body; bouncing a ball). The instauration of such hierarchical organization requires two conceptually distinct steps. Initially, there is a framing whereby the primary organization is acknowledged, treated as, and marked as a unit, and so there is simultaneously introduced a sense of what is within and what is outside of the primary organization. This framing is followed by filling wherein motifs are introduced and arranged in patterned ways to create a secondary order. Upon such ur-achievement of hierarchical organization further structures can be built from linking whereby multiple secondary organizations (that is, ornaments) are connected, whether by linking within the primary organization or linking across to other organized forms. (p. 75)

     There is a great deal more material in this large book, but what I take to be the basic points are all included in the preceding sketch. I’ll return to the book and more detailed material in considering instances and aspects of artistic meaning in tattoos and pots. Here I’ll conclude with a consideration of how the sense of the decorative can extend into the most sophisticated and refined kinds of artistic meaningfulness, as evidenced in Richard Wollheim’s account of decoration in Venetian painting. Wollheim wrote an appreciative though in parts quite critical review of Gombrich’s book on decoration shortly after its publication. Wollheim praised the book for its rooting decoration in the natural history of humanity (I think this largely refers to the points that I summarized above with regard to the senses of orientation and organic rhythms), but noted a fundamental problem with Gombrich’s account arising from the use of the conceptual binary of meaning and order, together with a problem about the character of pictorial perception inherited from Art and Illusion (I very briefly discussed this in my previous post, so I’ll leave it unexplicated here), that is: Gombrich’s account of the hierarchical orders of meaning and graded complication seems appropriate when the primary and secondary subjects of an artwork are as it were dissonant; one might reasonably think that the viewer shifts her attention back-and-forth between the two orders. But what of the cases, countless in the world’s art, where the two subjects are consonant, where the decoration articulates and contributes to the meaning of the primary subject? A decade later Wollheim tries to show how such a collaboration between subject and decoration works at the most refined and richest levels of artistic meaningfulness, what I have called following Patrick Maynard artistic meaning at full stretch. Wollheim starts by declaring the “fundamental decorative processes” to be “one, abstraction or simplification, which gives rise to the basic decorative units; two, repetition, or (better) near-repetition, which combines these units into strings, and then these strings into more complex strings; and, three, rhythm, and, sometimes, closure” (p. 57). I have not yet broached Wollheim’s first characterization about the origin of decorative elements through ‘abstraction or simplification’; I think it’s right with regard to an enormous range of the world’s decoration, but does not quite make sense of humanity’s earliest known decorations, including the markings on the so-called Blombos Pebble (c. 80K BP0) and the incised grids on the ostrich shells of the Diepkloof Rock Shelter (both from South Africa), to which I’ll return. In any case it is the third characteristic, rhythm, that is important for Wollheim’s account the Venetian sense of decoration. Wollheim’s explication is brief and highly condensed, but he says that rhythm “lifts decoration out of the field of mere pattern”, and introduces, at least in the Venetian case, a new kind of expressiveness that he calls ‘fragility’, which arises from interruptions or breaks with patterns that manifest “at once an approximation to, but ultimately a careful avoidance of, imbalance” (ibid). How might the expressiveness of decorative fragility enter into artistic meaning?

     Wollheim first considers a Venetian oeuvre wherein the works lack rhythm, the works of a Spanish painter whose adopted city was Venice, Mariano Fortuny y  Madrazo (1871-1949). At his best in small sketches and etchings where he captures “that generalised air of decoration which hangs over the city like a kind of light” (p. 58)

But, so Wollheim the connoisseur asserts, in his paintings Fortuny tries to raise the decorative content to the level of art, “it is beyond his powers, he cannot”. An artist who can raise the Venetian sense of decoration to art is Veronese, for example in The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (1565).

Wollheim gives one of his incomparable descriptions of this painting that defies summary, so I quote the key parts. First he claims that there is a swag, that is, a hanging piece of fabric, that lies under the arch and links the left and right parts of the painting; the reader is startled to read then that “The swag is the naked body of the saint, who is being lowered down on to a wooden block, where he will be secured and then beaten to death” (p. 59) The figure of Saint Sebastian appropriates a basic element of decoration in the service of artistic meaning: “the decorative rhythm of the painting is momentarily disturbed around the swag, or at the point where the body of the Saint is exposed to our view . . . It intensifies to an unbearable pitch the tragedy that is about to occur”.

Even more startling is Wollheim’s interpretation of the hooded figure, which he asserts “is fragility” (note: not expresses or represents fragility, but is fragility itself). The hooded figure appears to stumble and then recovers himself. “He rights himself, and, with him, so does the picture. The flow returns, but meanwhile, and not accidentally, he has held up the rhythm, if only for a moment, and in that moment of suspension . . . Veronese registers poignancy.” I take Wollheim’s interpretation to be, among many other things, the most forceful imaginable riposte to Gombrich’s (seeming) neglect of the possibility that meaning and order, and so pictorial subject and decoration, can be consonant, and further that decorative elements can contribute, irreplaceably and massively, to the meaning and significance of the pictorial subject.

     I have postponed consideration of the elements of decoration, and instead rehearsed Wollheiim’s astonishing interpretation of the artistic uses of decoration, in order to suggest a further point about the scope of the philosophy of visual art. I have earlier suggested that such a philosophical account should cover the full range of the visual arts, from tattooing and decoration of pottery to drawing, painting, and sculpture, and also include the contribution of the visual arts to the performing arts of dance and theater. Wollheim’s review of Gombrich, together with his interpretation of Veronese’s painting, indicates a further point about the range: the philosophy should consider not just visual artworks, but also the social, political, and historical dimensions of art practices, and the roots of these within what Wollheim called the natural history of humanity.

     In a final post before turning to the basic visual artforms—body decoration and tattooing, pottery, masking, drawing, painting, and sculpture—I’ll consider a final general topic, one that is frequently mentioned in philosophy of art and art criticism, but which is rarely considered at length, perhaps because of its difficulty and elusiveness: I mean the topic of pleasure. Can we say anything intelligible, plausible, and even illuminating about the roles of pleasure in the making and viewing of visual art? I’ll try to develop the rudiments of an affirmative answer in my next post.

References and Works Consulted:

Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927)

Roger Fry, Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (1926)

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998)

Jason Gaiger, ‘Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm’, in The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (2019), ed. Cheyne, Hamilton, and Paddison

E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960)

--The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979)

Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (1992)

Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)

Philip Rawson, Ceramics (1971)

--Drawing (1987)

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)

Dorothy Washburn and Donald Crowe, Symmetries of Culture: Theory and Practice of Plane Pattern Analysis (1988)

Richard Wollheim, ‘The Psychology of Decorative Art [Review of Gombrich 1979]’, in The Burlington Magazine (May 1979)

--‘The Shape of the Story’, in Modern Painters  (circa 1990(?))