Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On William Kentridge’s A Natural History of the Studio

The South African artist William Kentridge rose to international prominence in the 1990s, and his first retrospective in 2001-2002 convinced many (including myself) that he must be considered among the very greatest of contemporary artists. He was best known for his so-called ‘stone-age’ animations, a series of films of around seven minutes in length, which Kentridge made by himself laboriously by photographing some large charcoal drawing, then erasing some bit and re-drawing it, photographing it again, and repeating the process for half a year to produce the film. The animation was jerky, and the process of erasing left smudges that became trails of passage as people, animals, and machines moved within the frame. The retrospective also exhibited Kentridge’s sculptures, usually small constructions of collaged bits and sometimes incorporating industrial artifacts like scissors or coffee pots. Kentridge abandoned painting very early in his career in favor of mostly large charcoal drawings, and later also produced prints and even tapestries. This century also has revealed Kentridge to be among the most intelligent and verbally articulate of artists in numerous writings and interviews in exhibition catalogs, and many lectures associated with his exhibitions. By 2014 he had published two volumes of conversations on his thought and work, one with the art writer Angela Breidbach, the other with the anthropologist Rosalind C. Morris, and a volume of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 2012, the same lecture series that had produced Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, Octavio Paz’s Children of the Mire, and Frank Stella’s Working Space.

     In these volumes presents his artistic practices, whether resulting in drawings, animations, or sculptures, as always arising from and elaborating a fundamental impulse to draw, conceived as the marking of a surface (Kentridge (2014), p. 20) in the service of producing a maximally meaningful figure which expresses something of the artist’s inner life (Kentridge and Morris (2014), pp. 74-6) , but which also accrues to itself an indeterminate range of meanings and significances from the latent contexts of the practice of drawing and the latent geographical, social, cultural, political, and even cosmic contexts evoked by the figure (Kentridge (2014b), p. 18). Kentridge has said that an early reading of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method made the concept of play something essential for him (Kentridge (2006), p. 65, and also p. 11); on  Gadamer’s famous account of the ontology of play as an intersubjective activity wherein the participants, having chosen to play in one particular way (e.g. chess and not other board games) are separated from the prosaic world of non-play and yet have their own distinctive seriousness, encounter each other in a to-and-fro of actions, and wherein the distinction between believing and believing in what you do and not-believing cannot be determinately made out. Artistic vision, whether exercised in making or perceiving works of art, has a three-fold character: one sees something physical (the charcoal), one sees a figure (the tree), and one is aware of oneself seeing both, and so unable to decide what one is really and simply seeing. Art-making and the artist’s artistic seeing occur in a conceptual place called ‘the studio’, which also includes sufficient space for the artist to walk as a part of art-making. For Kentridge this walking is crucially done in making the animations, which involve the artist himself marking a surface, then walking back to view it from a distance and/or photograph it, then walking back to the drawing to change or correct it, and so on for the many months required to make an animation. The studio is also ‘a safe place for stupidity’ (Kentridge (2014), p.128) wherein the artist may play ideas (Kentridge prefers bad ideas to good ones), fragmentary materials, and procedures in the service of creating something sufficiently rich, open-ended, and meaningful to meet Kentridge’s sense of artistic achievement. (For a more extended account of Kentridge’s artistic practice, particularly with regard to his conception of drawing as an artistic medium, see the first chapter in my book Logro, Fracaso, Aspiración: Tres Intentos de Entender el Arte Contemporáneo).

     Kentridge has recently published a further volume of his poetics, A Natural History of the Studio, based upon his six Slade Lectures at Oxford in 2024. This volume largely re-iterates his earlier artistic conception, but on some key points generalizes it or develops it through further metaphoric conceptualizations. These elaborations seem to arise in response to a shift in his artistic practice towards the creation of theatrical pieces involving dancers, actors, and musicians. In the first lecture he re-states something of his poetics together with autobiographical points, and then largely devotes each of the following five chapters to accounts of particular theatrical pieces and the ways in which each piece successively led him to re-thinkings and elaborations of his artistic conceptions.

He re-iterates his understanding of drawing under the metaphor of a membrane, and now in two senses: first as a place where a figuration arises as it were from without, and impulses arise from within; then as a place where indeterminately many heterogenous contexts and associations are invoked and the artist and his agency transform them in the guidance of techniques and an idiosyncratic grammar that is only ever discovered in the process of working (Kentridge (2025), pp. 22 and 29). Kentridge now gives additional emphasis to the conception of the artist’s materials as fragments produced elsewhere, and the process of artistic making as fundamentally a collage of such fragments (e.g. p. 32 and p. 91f). The walking indigenous to the studio is now not so much the to-and-fro between close and distant views of the drawing, but a kind of contemplative prelude to drawing wherein the artist plays with the fragments and hopes that new connections will arise (p. 74). Earlier remarks and pieces by Kentridge suggested that he oriented his work to the exempla of Vladimir Tatlin, Max Beckmann, and Dziga-Vertov.

Now he places himself under the aegis of the Zurich Dadaists as inaugurating the idea and practice of a visual art ‘beyond’ painting, and one that seeks to make work at the limits of meaning and coherence (pp. 74 and 138).

     On two points in particular Kentridge’s thinking has shifted markedly. While he retains a general conception of the studio as a safe place for stupidity, he insists upon three kinds of if not stupidity, but of ignorance that come to view in artistic making: First, there is “a deliberately constructed ignorance” whereby one does not know the facts about the subject of one’s work. Second, there is a ‘complicit’ ignorance where one has remained satisfied with “predictable images” of one’s subject. Third, there is “an inability or an unwillingness to put pieces together” with regard to orienting oneself and understanding one’s subject (pp. 142-44; Kentridge’s example here of the three kinds of ignorances relates to a letter written by the Baptist minister John Chilembwe in 1915 on behalf of his countrymen in Nyasaland (later Malawi) refusing to participate in the (European) First World War). So the artistic process is now also a process of coming-to-know, forced upon the artist by the pressures of trying to find the grammar and techniques appropriate to the fragments treated as artistic materials. The second point concerns what Kentridge had earlier thought of as a utopian dimension of his artistic practice. In his earlier accounts he considered this utopian dimension only with regard to the technique in film of showing a sequence in reverse; the techniques secreted the sense of something being undone, and so restoring something of the fuller sense of possibilities inherent in its inchoate state. Now he says that there is “a glimpse of utopia” “in the working space, the rehearsal room” “of how things could be, of an equality in the contribution to the project--of a human contact away from the hierarchies within which all life outside the rehearsal room was lived” (p. 203). And this is part of an encompassing ‘optimism’ inherent in the very process of making an artwork (p. 189), as it bears within itself ‘a confidence in the future’ (p.191).

     Kentridge’s poetics seems to me the richest and most fertile re-conceptualizations of conditions and practice of contemporary visual art. One wonders whether, despite Kentridge’s enormous prestige, it will be adopted more generally in a contemporary artworld dominated by the models of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and mirthless wit, and Andy Warhol’s po-faced embrace of commercial production and fetishization of celebrity.

References:

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1975)

William Kentridge, thinking aloud: Conversations with Angela Breidbach (2006)

--Six Drawing Lessons (2014)

--A Natural History of the Studio (2025)

William Kentridge and Rosalind C. Morris, That which is not Drawn: Conversations (2014)

John Rapko, Logro, Fracaso, Aspiración: Tres Intentos de Entender el Arte Contemporáneo (2014)

Resonance as Artistic Meaning in Contemporary Art

In a recent blog post I sketched a theory of a kind of artistic meaning that I call ‘resonance’. On the conception I’m proposing, ‘resonance’ refers to a basic kind of meaningfulness that arises in generally in works of art. Such meaningfulness has two structural aspects: First, artistically resonant artifacts exhibit what I called following Ellen Dissanayake the character of having been ‘made special’; Dissanayake has recently replaced this term with ‘artification’, so that ‘artified’ artifacts stand out among and from other, more ordinary artifacts by virtue of a salience achieved through an indeterminate range of mechanisms including stylization, symbolic elaboration, and special placement. Other terms pointing to this distinctive meaningfulness might be ‘markedness’ or ‘presence’. Second, artistically resonant artifacts exhibit what the art writer and critic Adrian Stokes termed ‘the invitation in art’, an invitation embodied in the artifact for a recipient perceiver to enter into a state more attentive to materials, structures, and meanings of the artifact than is typically the case with other, ordinary artifacts, and to linger with the artifact and explore--in interactions, in perception, imagination, reflection, and/or contemplation-- its elements and their interrelations. On this conception resonance takes its place among other kinds of artistic meaningfulness such as representation and expression, but it is the most basic kind because one that is most intimately bound to the artistic efficacy of artifacts per se: much art lacks representation or expression, but none lacks resonance, on pain of not being a work of art at all. I have chosen the term ‘resonance’ in the attempt to evoke the ways in which meaningfulness in artworks seems non-finite and seems to spread: aspects of artworks mutually inform and inflect each other, the recipient experiences herself as affected by and corresponding to the work, and the meanings embodied in the work seem to generate open-ended correspondences between the prima facie internal aspects of the artifact and contexts outside the work, whether cultural, social, political, natural, or cosmic.

     Here I’ll attempt to explicate further resonance as a kind of artistic meaning through consideration of some major works of contemporary art, and to use Richard Wollheim’s path-breaking article ‘Minimal Art’ as a methodological guide. In his article first published in 1965, Wollheim drew attention a prominent, though by no means dominant, type of twentieth-century visual art which seemed to possess what he called ‘minimal art-content’, either because the artwork was internally undifferentiated to an extreme degree, or what differentiation the piece possesses comes not from the manipulations of the artists’ hands, but from some non- or extra-artistic source such as nature or a factory (Wollheim, p. 101). His chief examples are Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (1917), where the differentiations of the artifact are those of shapes and volumes dictated by designers and engineers and produced in a factory,

And Ad Reinhardt’s ‘Untitled (Black)’, a near-monochrome that seems to show three dark areas dividing the canvas into equal thirds, with the central third lighter than identically colored areas flanking it, and a similarly sized band, midway in hue between the two colors of the vertical, and bisecting the canvas horizontally.

Wollheim accepts that both artifacts are indeed works of art and suggests that the resistance to their claim to such status stems from their failure “to evince what we have over the centuries come to regard as an essential ingredient of art: work, or manifest effort” (p. 106). So the challenge presented by those who reject the claim that these are works of art is to show in what sense of the term ‘work’ does these artifacts display the marks of artistic work. Wollheim’s answer is first that the Duchamp forces us to recognize that the artistic work consists of two phases: an initial phase modifying the medium (putting paint on canvas, hacking a stone, welding metal, etc.), and a second ‘phase’ where the artist decides “that the work has gone far enough” (p. 108)--it is finished. So the artistic work of Duchamp’s ‘Urinal’ consists not just (as it is usually understood) choosing the (non-artistic) urinal and declaring it an artwork (neither of these are intrinsic the artistic work), but rather in the decision ‘it’s finished’ (which is internal to the artistic process). So Duchamp has highlighted an aspect of the typical process of artistic making, and his extremism just consists in him eliminating every other aspect of the process and its typical manifestations. Reinhardt’s piece, Wollheim suggests, likewise highlights a typically unnoticed aspect of the artistic work, though one from the first phase: we are inclined to think of the first phase as wholly constructive, that is, it is a process wherein the artist alters the medium in the service of working something up, making it quantitatively greater (e.g. depositing pigment on the canvas) and/or more differentiated (hacking stone). What the Reinhardt reveals about artistic work is that the constructive process of making is simultaneously a process of unmaking or destruction, namely “the dismantling of some [prior] image which is fussier or more cluttered than the artist requires” (p. 109). The challenge to ‘minimal art’ as art is answered by showing ways in which the artworks are indeed the results of artistic working, and further they reveal something hitherto overlooked or under-appreciated about the nature of artistic work itself.

     With Wollheim as a model, I turn to the consideration of two works of recent visual art by two prominent artists, where all the works exhibit the kind of ‘extremism’ noted by Wollheim and so characteristic of contemporary visual art. Again, by ‘extremism’ Wollheim (and I) mean works that seem to lack much of the kinds and density of differentiation of surface and/or shape that seem wholly characteristic of the world’s visual art. One of the works, Wolfgang Laib’s ‘The Five Mountains Not to Climb On’ (realized 1984 and 1990), seems at first to be something like pure presentations of monochrome color. The other work, David Nash’s ‘Birch Crack and Warp Column’ (1989), offers more differentiated surfaces, but not in one of the manners typical of visual artworks: a block of wood is alerted with nothing but rows of deep kerfs, the product of repetitive acts of sawing. Both these works lack representational and expressive content, do not seem to evoke or instantiate metaphors, and invoke no symbolic frameworks or systems (unlike, say, the use of circles and squares in Chinese art, which immediately symbolizes Heaven and Earth respectively).

Laibs’s piece shows five small cones of granular yellow pollen arranged in a line on a bare floor.

The pigment is identical throughout, that is, with no variation in hue, value, or saturation within or across the cones, and so strongly unifying each cone into an immediately grasped geometrical shape. The primary range of viewpoints are from head height from a medium distance. The intensity of the color in contrast to the drabness of the floor gives the piece an often-remarked hallucinatory quality, which is enhanced by viewing it from directly overhead, from which position the cones seem to float (I’ve experienced this every time I’ve seen Laib’s pollen pieces). One effect of Laib’s construction of the cones through repeated deposits of small amounts of pollen is to give the cones small, pervasive irregularities, visible upon close inspection and suggestive more of geological processes than standard artistic making.

Each cone relates initially to the other cones as an element in a punctuated line whose termini are the outer two cones. As the viewer’s attention spreads to the placement, the floor is visually activated as both support for and an element alien to the cones. An atmosphere of contraries and dualisms is formed: the pure and the impure, the geometrically ordered and the prosaically disordered, figure and base, the vivid and the drab. Then the cones become peaks, as one imagines the floor cutting the visible cones are merely the peaks of from indeterminately large cones largely under the floor, or as a layer of clouds out of which mountains emerge. While the intensity of the hue visually anchors the basic and orienting presentation of presence and color, it also anchors further kinds of meaningfulness--figure and support, here and beyond, presence and absence, perception and imagination--, and all are set into play with each other endlessly. The elements ‘resonate’ with each other, that is, in the viewer’s act of attuned perception the elements enter into relationships with each other, and further ‘resonate’ with latent physical, conceptual, and cosmic contexts.

     In contrast to Laib’s piece, Nash’s ‘Birch Crack and Warp Column’ is highly differentiated, though not primarily as a result of the artist’s repetitive sawn cuts.

Rather, the richness of differentiation arises from two sources: the wood itself is nothing homogenous (unlike Laib’s pollen) but rather full of variety from the striations and grain of the wood; and the thin slices of wood resulting from parallel cutting twist and buckle. With regard to what is given to the viewer in perception, the artist’s action of sawing is a mechanism of releasing into manifestation the pre-existent differentiation of wood. And since the wood is organic, it is subject to temporal processes of expansion and contraction, twisting and buckling, and ultimately dissolution and destruction.

 The piece is nothing finished, but rather bears within its appreciative, sufficiently imaginative perception its artistic origin in Nash’s cutting, and its ultimate decay. The piece ‘resonates’ primarily along its temporal dimensions: the work has a powerful presence, while indexing its coming-into-being and passing-away. And as likewise with Laib’s piece, the work embodies an invitation for imaginative perception that activates it artistically through a course of combined perception and imagination that induces the resonant play inner and outer, and the interlacing of present, past, and future.

     We are now in a position to see how this sketch of resonance as an aspect of artistic meaning in ‘extremist’ recent art parallels Wollheim’s account of minimal art. Wollheim claimed that minimal art isolates aspects of artistic work in the service of revealing hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of such work. Similarly, the two extremist pieces considered here isolate resonance as a kind of artistic meaning, demonstrating how attuned artistic perception responds to the invitation in art to engaged in imaginative perception, which sets up the possibility of a sort of artistic liveness in artworks whereby elements of the work interact with and mutually inflect each other, the viewer follows the process imaginatively, and further contexts, indeterminate in range and number are invoked. Like minimal art, these extremist resonant works alter and deepen our understanding of character of the viewer’s appreciative involvement with visual artworks.

Bibliography:

Julian Andrews, The Sculpture of David Nash (1999)

Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (1992)

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

Klaus Ottmann, Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective (2000)

Hartmut Rosa, Resonance (2019)

Adrian Stokes, The Invitation in Art (1965)

Richard Wollheim, ‘Minimal Art’ (published 1965), in On Art and the Mind (1974)

On Achievement and Content in Recent Art: John Rapko’s Remarks c. 2011

The following are excerpts from an interview done around 2011 of me by a student on my general views on art. I stumbled on the transcript of the interview recently, and was struck how some of the thoughts developed in my current work in the philosophy of art were inchoately present now (2026) in the manuscript I’m writing on the philosophy of artistic meaning. I thought I might put the entire transcript on my blog (johnrapko.com), which consists of the interview at around 3000 words, followed by around 1000 words transcribing part of a class where I respond to students’ questions. However, I have not been able to contact the interviewer,  and am reluctant to publish the piece in its entirety without the interviewer’s permission. So I have excerpted bits of my responses which I hope are of some independent interest, as well as informally introducing some of the guiding thoughts in my recent work. Although I no longer agree with every statement herein, I have refrained from any corrections or additions, and only lightly edited for concision and ease in reading:

On Artistic Meaning and Achievement in Contemporary Art:

     “Art, or the concept of art, you might say, in its contours has two major aspects: the boundary issue indicated by the question ‘What is the distinction between artworks and other artifacts in the world?’ There is no reason to think that the boundary is a sharp line; I don’t think that it is. There is a kind of continuity there. Works of art exist of a spectrum wherein one end is marked by minimal artifacts that are determined rigidly by some purpose, and the other end consists of works of are that are maximally rich with meaning. When we talk about meaning, we talk about multiple types of meaning: paraphrasable meaning, representational meaning, expressive meaning, symbolic meaning, metaphorical meaning, meaning in effects, and resonance.”

     “It does seem to be a feature of that arts that their making involves what linguists call ‘markedness’. Cross-culturally people recognize that certain kinds of people are particularly skilled or particularly powerful in making richly meaningful artifacts. I think that such understanding of the arts is common to humanity. This point of view is becoming increasingly common nowadays as people recognize more and more that there are surprisingly many human universals. . . . In regard to thinking about contemporary art one should always keep the sense of the human universal in the background. Even with the most nontraditional or oddest bits of modern or contemporary art relate, even if by negation or deviation, to these common universals. But I do think there is something particularly difficult in speaking about excellence in art in relation to contemporary art. Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory opens with the thought that it is self-evident that there is nothing self-evident about modern/contemporary art. I think what he’s saying is that because everything in recent art has been subjected to experimental testing and even rejection, we don’t have any shared, more or less binding consensus on what counts as achievement in contemporary art. So I think there’s a particular and very burdensome demand in contemporary art: making a great work of art requires that the artist in some way make manifest the very criteria that govern the work’s making. . . Rosalind Krauss has claimed that there is a distinctive kind of achievement in contemporary art that she calls inventing, or re-inventing, the medium. That’s another way of making the point.”

On Content in Late Modern Art:

     “What one sees there [in Rauschenberg, Johns, and then on into Pop Art] is the abandonment of the idea that there is a distinctive content to art . . . that is what is at the core of what generates the resonance of many works in contemporary art, [that is,] that they work from the common stuff of life . . . What we see in a great deal of contemporary art, art of the last 50-60 years is the taking of a recognizable bit of contemporary life, which can be anything--a flag, numbers, certain things thrown up by the mass media, and so forth. The audience needs this recognizability to gain access to the work of art . . . art aims at a kind of intelligibility . . . so the artist has a demand that the content not be simply or overly private, but . . . for any particular artist [that] allows for enormous range. If it didn’t allow for enormous range, then art making would shut down because it is basic to art-making that it has to allow something of the inexhaustible richness of human life to come to expression; it cannot be a highly restricted activity.”

Not Craft, but ‘Markedness’:

     “I think it goes back to something even more basic than craft, which is ‘markedness’. What the artist makes has to stand out from everyday kinds of making . . . Why does it have to stand out? Because art stands out. Here I think the most basic and very valuable argument was given by Ellen Dissanayake in Homo Aestheticus, where she says that in her biological, evolutionary account of art the most basic feature of art is what she calls ‘making special’ . . . Works of art have to stand out from everyday life in order that the work gain something of the sense that what is being made or done in the work is richer--semantically richer, more expressive, more symbolically charged, more resonant--than all the other things made and done in life.”

Does the Emperor have no Clothes?

     “The taste for art is not a single thing . . . even within an artistic sub-world, there are different strands [of taste] that have come together and maybe coalesce for a certain time . . . I think the problem with the Turner Prize in many instances is that it focuses on, and one might say fetishizes a particular aim in art: the demand for originality. But to what end is originality? . . . I don’t follow prizes all that much; I have never taken them too seriously. Things like the Turner Prize are only half a step away from the Oscars.”

Shock art!

   “Shock art has two virtues and infinite faults. One virtue is that the only unforgivable feature of a work of art is that it is boring, if it does not engage anybody’s attention. The second thing is that, although I can honestly say that I despise shock art, there is something valuable about art--visual art, poetry, novels, whatever--that keeps an eye, so to speak, on the disturbing quality of life. I am very influenced on this point by Nietzsche and also a contemporary philosopher, Raymond Geuss . . . My own experience is that pessimism can be quite life-giving. Keeping in mind the grim aspects of life can actually free you from certain anxieties and overly great concern with trivialities and superficialities . . . I do think that Western civilization is afflicted with a certain kind of optimism [that motivates] the whole drive towards knowledge as a source of prediction and control. The great civilizational value of pessimism is that it frees you from the idea that life is a rationalistic project . . . That is a kind of deep excursion into the limited virtues of shock art: it is not boring and it might help free one from optimism. Besides that, shock art seems ludicrous in many ways.”

On Philippe Descola’s Forms of the Visible, Part 2b: But Isn’t It Art After All?

In my previous four blog posts I’ve summarized Philippe Descola’s recent magisterial contribution to the anthropology of figuration in visual artifacts, Forms of the Visible, and compared his treatment of two topics with those from earlier canonical anthropological texts. In this final post I’ll consider two further issues raised by the book: first, Descola’s anthropological account of contemporary visual art, and then consider the question of whether what Descola explores is not so much the anthropology of visible artifacts, but rather more specifically the anthropology of the world’s visual arts.

     2. An anthropology of contemporary art? In a relatively short chapter, relative that is to his treatments of the four major visual ontologies of animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism, Descola considers contemporary art. In order to bring out the distinctiveness of Descola’s interpretation, I’ll first briefly sketch what I take to be a standard understanding of contemporary visual art and its associated art worlds, as well as the indications of an account proposed by the anthropologist David Graeber in the past twenty years. I suggest that a standard account goes something like this: Contemporary visual art (usually referred to as just ‘contemporary art’) is a distinct period the world’s visual art that began around 1960 (give or take a decade). It emerges coevally with the collective sense that modernism and so modern art generally has exhausted its expressive resources. It’s orienting figure is Marcel Duchamp, who much earlier in the heyday of modern art produced a number of artworks that he called ‘readymades’, whose chief characteristic is that the work consisted of (a) an artifact chosen by Duchamp (that is, not something that he himself made), (b) the artifact is given a title (e.g. ‘In Advance of a Broken Arm’), (c) little or nothing is done to the artifact (if a little is done, e.g. painting a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, it is an ‘altered’ readymade; if nothing is done, the readymade is ‘unaltered’), and (d) the artifact is declared a finished work of art, and under the right conditions is exhibited as such in the typical art world settings of galleries and museums. The upshot of the acceptance of the readymades as an orienting model for contemporary art is the adoption of a small set of ideologies stipulations, something like: ‘anyone can be an artist’ (that is to say, for example, that no special training or skill or social status is needed for someone to be considered an artist, and contemporary art is a global phenomenon, by no means restricted to ‘Western’ (North American and European) figures) and ‘art can be or be made of anything’ (so there are no special authorized materials required for artworks, nor any authorized ways of treating or elaborating those materials). Along with the traditional artforms of painting, sculpture, and drawing, contemporary art features new kinds of technological materials (such as video art and computer art), there are two novel super-genres in contemporary art, the installation (where the artist assembles a large number of materials, whether found or made and elaborated, into a distinctive spatial construction), and performance art (where paradigmatically the artist him- or herself performs a marked, untraditional action, usually requiring no special skills or training, and typically in front of an audience at a gallery museum, but also sometimes in non-art spaces and/or without an audience). If there is a central evaluative category for contemporary art (I’m inclined to think there is, but don’t know how to argue the point against an intelligent and unconvinced person), it would be something like ‘the interesting’(the artist Donald Judd proposed something like this in the mid-1960’s with the thought that ‘a work of art need only be interesting’). Among recent prominent anthropologists of art there is little treatment of Duchamp: most extensively,  Alfred Gell treats Duchamp as having revealed the network of agencies that are part of the social making of art, where each artwork “is a place where agency ‘stops’ and assumes visible form” (Gell, p. 250), Néstor García Cancili similarly mentions Duchamp’s readymades as exposing the web of social roles wherein artworks are canonized (Garcíli Cancili, p. 153) briefly as an originator of the twentieth-century artistic aim of producing scandals with one’s artworks, and  David Graeber does mention Duchamp in his account. I cannot see anything in the various accounts of the anthropologists inconsistent with the standard picture. Gell does not address contemporary art except tangentially, while García Cancili’s very interesting book seems to me much more a piece of cultural criticism than anthropology: his central claim is that contemporary art is related to its contexts to degree hitherto exampled in the arts, and that contemporary art “is the place of imminence--the place where we catch sight of things that are just at the point of occurring” (p. xiii). Graeber treats contemporary art as a continuation of modern art, itself an inheritance of the Romantic hope that everyone can be an artist, a hope that clashes with the constitutive feature of the art world, which is to create scarcity as value and value as scarcity, so that only a small set of the world’s imaginative artifacts will be treated as and so legitimized as artworks.

     How does Descola’s account differ from those of his fellow anthropologists? Again, nothing in Descola’s analysis seems prima facie inconsistent with the standard view, and unsurprisingly he pursues the question of what if any visual ontologies are exhibited in contemporary art. His answer is tentative: He begins with the thought that “[s]tarting with Cézanne, and more decisively with the advent of Cubism, entire sectors of European art began to pull away from the iconographic canons of naturalism, anticipating in the field of figuration a probable crumbling of the principles on which that ontology was founded” (p. 452). What succeeds naturalism and its ontology is something that artists must take “from their own resources” (p. 453, quoting Jean Dubuffet. So under contemporary conditions, where no ontology is dominant in the arts, each artist will draw upon whatever they need to realize their expressive aims, including formal apparatuses that may be otherwise characteristic of one of the non-naturalist ontologies. For example, Jackson Pollock will seek to actualize a conception of an artwork that exhibits “a whole set of relations that allow the object to exist within an all-encompassing process” (p. 460), and so will use something like analogist figurations that have the power of fusing gesture with image and image with background (pp. 459-60).

In his performance I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), Joseph Beuys will seek “to abolish the boundary between nature and culture that the colonizers . . . , seeking to restore the possibility of an interaction unfolding between two sensitive agents, or even to confuse the issue by questioning the ontological identities of the protagonists”. Descola asserts without elaboration that in realizing this aim Beuys “forcefully demonstrated [animism’s] constitutive principle” (p. 461).

     It seems to me that with regard to contemporary art, Descola’s account plays a diminished, though not inconsiderable, role in the interpretation of artworks, diminished, that is, in relation to all of his other discussions of the world’s arts. In contemporary art, one starts one’s engagement and interpretation as it were with the artist’s aim, and then consults the relevant characteristics of a plausibly associated ontology in order to bring into focus the formal operations, whether overt or recessive, whose artistic role is to develop and enrich the particular artwork’s meaning. With the rest of the world’s art, one could start with recognition of the relevant culture’s leading ontology, and use that to place the artworks considered in the relevant conceptual framework. One might say that, with regard to contemporary art, not just the artist, but also the viewer, try to make something from their own resources.

3. But is it art?

     I conclude with a brief reflection. Early on Descola insists that he is not discussing artworks, but rather figurations, in particular those that are embodied in the world’s visual artifacts. His reasoning is briefly presented, and it seems to me fairly typical. He says that figuration is “a universal impulse”, but “that does not make its products a unified category, and that is why philosophers of aesthetics as well as art historians have sought unsuccessfully to specify a transhistorical class of art objects on the sole basis of perceptual or symbolic properties that inhere in them” (p. 5; on p. 7 Descola credits Duchamp with showing that it was impossible to identify art objects on a perceptual basis). He asserts that likewise symbolic properties cannot play the role of identifying artifacts as artworks, and so the impossibility of such a project succeeding “is intrinsic to the very enterprise of classifying any artifact whatsoever as an art object” (p. 7).

     Against this, I would suggest the following claims and observations: Descola has not considered other ways of picking out and identifying artworks, such as a recently fashionable ‘cluster’ account wherein one abandons the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for something being an artwork, but rather suggests that there are a range of characteristics exhibited by prototypical artworks, and we might loosely identify artworks as those artifacts which possess ‘most or all’ of such characteristics. Another suggestion, which I’ve tried to develop in some of my writings, is to suggest that, although there is no fixed transhistorical conceptual boundary between artworks and artifacts generally, but we might think that artworks are part of a spectrum of meaningfulness, with ordinary artifacts exhibiting a zero degree of artistic meaning, and paradigmatic artworks a maximal meaningfulness. It’s striking that Descola does not treat in the book what one might take as paradigmatic ordinary artifacts (this table, this laptop, this book), but rather always artifacts that are richly meaning-bearing and so readily treatable as embodying one or another of the four ontologies. One might think that Descola has willy-nilly produced his own serviceable definition of an artwork: a work of art is an artifact that is sufficiently elaborated so that it bears richly elaborated meanings, in particular those that embody some reigning visual ontology.

References and Works Consulted:

Néstor García Caclini, Art Beyond Itself: Anthropology for a Society Without a Story Line (2014)

Philippe Descola, Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration (2025)

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (1998)

David Graeber, ‘The Sadness of Post-workerism’, in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (2016)

--'Another Art World, Part 1: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity (with Nika Dubrovsky)’, in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . (2024)

On Philippe Descola’s Forms of the Visible, 2a: Descola contra Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Gell

In three previous posts I attempted to summarize the central claims and characterizations in the anthropologist Philippe Descola’s magisterial recent book Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration. Again, and more briefly, Descola takes up his claim from his earlier major theoretical work Beyond Nature and Culture that human beings form and adopt basic ontologies with regard to two nodes: their conception of interiority, and their conception of materiality. Then a human group adopts a basic orientation towards these two nodes in stressing either the continuity or the discontinuity between themselves and their group on the one hand, and other human groups, animals and plants, and the material world generally on the other hand. This provides of grid of four conceptual possibilities, which are actualized in the ontologies of animism (continuity of interiority, discontinuity of materiality), totemism (continuity (although within discontinuous blocs of beings) of interiority and materiality), analogism (discontinuity of interiority and materiality), and naturalism (discontinuity of interiority, continuity of materiality) (as summarized at Descola (2025), p. xii). In the manner of philosophical anthropology, Descola makes posit that human beings will seek to ‘make visible’ their distinctive ontology in visual artifacts, and so there will be kinds of artifacts and works of art peculiar to each human group that ‘figure’ their ontology. The book opens and closes with methodological and philosophical reflections, then oughly two-thirds of the dense book outlines and analyzes the different artifacts of each ontology, and two additional chapters consider hybrid modes. Here in the second part of my review I’ll set aside questions with regard to Descola’s conceptual framework of the four ontologies (for some initial criticisms in English, see Lloyd (2012)), and consider three topics: 1. What kinds of interpretations of the world’s visual artifacts does Descola’s account induce, and how might his interpretations improve upon standard views?  Then, in a final post, I’ll consider: 2. Does Descola’s account of contemporary visual art as a hybrid mode add anything to our understanding of such art? And 3. Why might we think that, contrary to Descola’s self-understanding, he is offering an account not primarily of the world’s visual artifacts generally, but rather visual artworks?

     1. One of the central topics in the anthropology of art in the past century has been the notion of so-called ‘split representation’. Discussing this kind of representation in the arts of the Pacific Northwest in his canonical book Primitive Art, Franz Boas characterizes it “as representing complete animals more or less distorted or split” (p. 223), in particular when “either the animals are represented as split in two so that the profiles are joined in the middle, or a front view of the head is shown with two adjoining profiles of the body” (p. 224).

Boas shows the use of split representation across the decoration of utensils, jewelry, house fronts, and hats. He offers no extended explanation of the technique and its prevalence in Northwest arts, but does point to several factors: “Farreaching [sic] distortions result from the adjustment of the animal body to the decorative field and from the necessity of preserving its symbols” (p. 221); “in the front view of the animal the symbols [that is, the figural motifs identifying the animal] are shown to best advantage” (p. 229); “There is a tendency to cover the entire surface with design elements” (p. 251); “It appears that what we have called for the sake of convenience dissection and distortion of animal forms is, in many cases, a fitting of animal motives into fixed ornamental patterns” (p. 280); and that this art is of a piece “the heraldic idea” expressive of “the totemic aspect of social life” (ibid). From more recent art history one is reminded of Leo Steinberg’s account of the uses of the ‘splay-out principle’ in the late nineteenth-to-early twentieth century, with Cézanne bringing the sides of inanimate object around to a frontal view Picasso’s technique in his Analytic Cubist phase of rendering the splayed sides of a subject and so bonded the motif to the broader pictorial field,

and Picasso splaying the female subject in order “to confirm a known fullness of the body by wrenching its averted sides into view” (Steinberg (2022), pp. 53-5).

For Boas the use of split representation is ultimately a way of rendering the three-dimensional (whether a real-world instance of, say, a bear or a whale, or of a sculpture or human structure) on a two-dimensional surface.

     Building on Boas’s account, in the mid-1950’s Claude Lévi-Strauss treated split representation as a technique of pictorial representation in four historically unconnected cultures, the Pacific Northwest, early China, the Caduveo of the Amazon (about whom he had already written in Tristes Tropiques, and the Maori of New Zealand. Split representation in China is exhibited in the famous taotie figures on early bronzes,

the Caduveo in their face paintings,

and the Maori in their facial tattoos and carvings.

Though the use of this technique of representation is far from a human universal, and by hypothesis the occurrence of this striking technique cannot be explained through historical contacts, so it must be interpreted as an instance of the exercise of basic human capacities for cognition and depiction in response to some general imperative under some non-global constraint or condition. In Lévi-Strauss’s hands, the technique gains two kinds of intelligibility: its place in comparisons and in series, and in light of its aim.  He begins by noting the similarities of the principles governing the Pacific Northwest and early Chinese styles, in particular split representation, dislocation of details, and highly elaborate symmetries. He then asserts that the seemingly very different Caduveo style is also an instance of split representation, though more abstracted, and one wherein the symmetry occurs not just along the vertical axis, but also along the horizontal. The Maori designs, like the Caduveo, are abstract and decorative in comparison with the Pacific Northwest and China. I refrain from presenting Lévi-Strauss’s highly compressed analyses, and simply note his assertion that consideration of these instances of split representation pushes “to its most abstract expression the study of dualism” (p. 255), in that one finds throughout these instances persistent dualisms that are transformed into each other in these arts, dualisms including representational/non-representational, carving/drawing, face/decoration, person/impersonation, individual existence/social function, and community/hierarchy. Echoing and amplifying Boas, Lévi-Strauss concludes that split representation is characteristic of cultures oriented towards totemic ancestors, and it “results from the projection of a three-dimensional mask onto a two-dimensional surface (or onto a three-dimensional one which nevertheless does not conform to the human archetype) and in the same way that, finally, the biological individual himself is also projected onto the social scene by his dress” (p. 257).

     Unsurprisingly, given his polemic against the use of the nature/culture dichotomy in anthropology, Descola will not take up Lévi-Strauss’s conclusion about dualisms, but further he dissolves Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist framing, extracts the elements, and re-interprets them within his own broader and more systematic framework. As I understand it, Descola treats ‘split representations’, not as a perceptually salient and striking kind of cross-cultural and -historical visual representation; but rather interprets them as special cases, “salient because of [their] rarity, within a range of techniques that allow image-makers to make visible in a unitary figure an element of the world envisioned simultaneously from diverse viewpoints” (pp. 188-9). That is to say, the general imperative that Descola takes to govern this class representations is the demand to represent some figuration and/or visual field from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, in the service of providing a representation with richer content that would be possible in the canonical (say) naturalist manner of presenting a single instant from a single viewpoint. Descola leaves the famous Shang Chinese taotie undiscussed, and only discusses Chinese representations as paradigms of visual analogism; and likewise he drops consideration of the putative instance of split representation closest to Lévi-Strauss’s heart, the Amazonian animist face-painting of the Caduveo. Following the lead of the art historian Hubert Damisch, he treats Boas’s alleged example of split representation in the body painting of dancing boys in the Pacific northwest

as rather a case of the ‘exploded representation’ of distributed identifying motifs of the bear and frog painted about the boys’ bodies. In their characteristic uses in dance, the painted bodies do not present a single image composed of opposed profiles, but rather an “oscillation between a human body and an animal body” (p. 101).

     Another striking example of how Descola’s framework elicits an interpretation different than a prevailing conception is his account of the famous statue of the god A’a from the Polynesian island of Rurutu.

Gell had argued that the statue of A’a exhibits two important meaning-bearing characteristics: first, the god is depicted as bearing numerous small figures of gods in different poses, and this manner of depiction “demonstrates the property of self-similiarity [sic] at different scales of magnification/minification”; and second, that the statue is hollow with a lid on the back, and so is also a box, and so is a primary image of Rurutan divinity, “encompassing and subordinating all the subordinate gods who sprout from its surface and once resided in its interior” (Gell, p. 137) These characteristics are in the service, Gell argues, of depicting the kinship among the gods, which corresponds “to the kinship units (clans) comprising Rurutan society as a whole”, and so ultimately in “represent[ing] personhood in the form of genealogy” (pp. 137-9).

     Descola flatly contradicts Gell’s account of A’a, both for stylistic reasons and for reasons flowing from his four-ontology framework. He counters Gell’s claim about self-similarity by noting that the small figures differ both in their forms and their postures from the used to depict A’a (Descola, p. 567, n.116), and that the relevant Polynesian ontology is analogist (and not totemic, as the genealogical conception would be on Descola’s account). Rather than the ‘fractal’ conception of personhood indicated by Gell, on Descola’s account the fundamental ontological aim of the statue is present a totalizing conception of Rurutan divinity by “embodying a meta-relation”, as well as an analogist conception of persons as consisting in “a multitude of variants in unstable balance” and who exist “only by virtue of internal and external relationships that make them what they are” (p. 310).

       Because of the intricacy of Descola’s accounts, I’ve reached my customary length for a blog post and so end here. In the forthcoming final post I’ll consider his account of contemporary visual art and some reflections on the question of whether Descola is willy-nilly presenting an account of not visual ontologies generally, but more specifically ontologies of the world’s visual arts.

References and Works Consulted:

Hubert Damisch, ‘Paradoxe du danseur Kwakiutl: Note sur le dédoublement de la représentation’, in Pour Jean Malaurie (1990), ed. Sylvie Devers

Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

--‘Human Natures’, in Social Anthropology (2009)

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

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (1998)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955)

--‘Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America’, in Structural Anthropology (1963)

G. E. R. Lloyd, Being, Humanity, and Understanding: Studies in Ancient and Modern Societies (2012)

Leo Steinberg, ‘Drawing as if to Possess’, in Picasso: Selected Essays (2022)

On Philippe Descola’s Forms of the Visible, Part 1c: Naturalism as a Visual Ontology

To complete the summary of Descola’s book, having summarized his accounts of animism, totemism, and analogism as ontologies of figuration, I turn to his consideration of the fourth ontology, naturalism. Descola’s discussion of naturalism is markedly different in two ways from his previous three accounts, in that naturalism as a visual ontology only emerges quite recently in human history, at the beginning of the fifteenth-century in Europe, and it exhibits a well-documented progressive development that has been the subject of written reflections almost since its inception, in particular in the art history of the past two hundred years.

4. Naturalism: Descola claims that “the two indices that best denote naturalism in images” are the “observable subjectivity of humans and the arrangement of the world’s qualities in a unified space--Descartes’s res cogitans and res extensa”. In naturalism the human subject “must be represented unequivocally as the ground of a distinctive interiority of which the other existents [that is, plants, animals, artifacts, and all of material nature] are deprived” (p. 346). Descola treats naturalism as unfolding in a historical trajectory, one well-known to anyone familiar with any standard history of European painting since the Middle Ages: initially indicated in some of the pages of the Limbourg Brothers’ miniatures from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, it effloresces in different ways in the Flemish painting of Roger Campin and Jan van Eyck on the one hand, and in the Florentine Renaissance on the other. The so-called genre painting of everyday life in the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth-century marks the next phase, upon which follows the various movements of European painting, with its exemplary culmination for Descola in Mondrian’s transition from landscape to abstract painting. I’ll give a short summary of Descola’s account along with his central images:

     The October of the Limbourg Brothers et alia in the first half of the fifteenth century provides an initial instance of the kind of descriptive realism that is characteristic of the naturalist visual ontology.

The style of depiction makes it seem that we viewers “are observing a real event, as if we had broken in on it somehow” (p. 355) The sower and the ploughman are engaged in characteristic ordinary activities, with no figure seeming to carry a higher meaning. In comparison with earlier European depictions, which typically gave indications of “what one should know, fear, understand, or hope for”, here and thereafter “painting served simply to show what there was to see” (p. 356). Analogism has given way to naturalism. In the early fifteenth-century Flemish painting of Roger Campin the concern for realistic rendering and precision of the depiction material details enters into religious painting, spectacularly so in the Merode Triptych with the grain of the wood and the folds of the fabrics (p. 375).

Jan van Eyck’s stupefying rendering of details is in the service of embodying the proto-Cartesian res extensa in the pictorial project of showing “material continuities linked in a cascade of reciprocal determinations” (p. 385)

     Descola mostly passes over the exceptionally well-known pictorial achievements of linear perspective in the Quattrocento in Italy, pausing to note Konrad Witz’s inaugural depiction of a real site in The Miraculous Draft of Fishes (1444):

Instead, he devotes his attention to the conceptual aspects of the use of linear perspective. In the use of linear perspective objects are made ‘commensurable’, that is, there is a common spatial measure given through scale and placement. Consequently, “[t]his general commensurability meant that the world had become geometrizable, that is, that human subjects had constructed a representation of the world that was true from their own standpoint.” (p. 395) Descola stresses that with linear perspective the viewer of the scene (first of all the implied artist’s view) is external to the scene, arbitrarily placed, but also ultimately the only unifying agent of what is depicted within the homogenous space: linear perspective “isolates a fragment of the world and transforms its nature by changing the parameters of visual flow: first decomposing the visible into discrete points made independent of spatiotemporal determinations, then recomposing these points in a unified geometric space that gives coherence and continuity to the diverse objects placed within it by demiurgical viewers necessarily external to the objective frame instituted by themselves on the basis of the subjective position they occupy.” (p. 407) Linear perspective provides a fixed image which the perceiving subject, constitutively outside the scene, can grasp (p. 428). An image in linear perspective is like a snapshot, one given for a particular subject at a particular time. In that sense such an image is as if a gaze objectified (p. 429).

     The Dutch painting of the seventeenth-century Golden age largely ignores the Italian manner of conceptualization and instead flows directly from the Flemish achievement: “Just like the painting of the Flemish masters two centuries earlier, that of the Golden Age makes manifest the attention paid to the surface of existents and the desire to represent their diversity through a homogeneous iconic treatment.” (p. 400) The conceptualizations and procedures of Dutch painting involve “the empirical and temporary slicing out of a phenomenon observed from the best angle”. In comparison with the Italians, this ‘dilutes’ “the hold of an organizing agent” in favor of rendering in a manner that seems to provide the very “self-evidence of the visual experience” and with it “a restoration of mystery to everyday life”. (p. 408) One immediately thinks of the mysterious interiorities of the figures in Vermeer, while Descola cites examples from Pieter de Hooch and especially Gerard ter Borch’s The Letter (1660-1665) (pp. 411-12):

     The tradition of naturalism culminates for Descola at the end of the 1910, in particular in the work of Piet Mondrian. On this account Mondrian is a naturalist who inherits the project of descriptive realism, and his movement towards abstraction is driven by the ambition to figure “the very experience of description” (p. 429). Mondrian strips depicted objects “of their surface articulations and the false pretenses of linear perspective so as to make tangible on the canvas only the mental operation involved in the representation of a piece of the world” (p. 430). Mondrian’s progression is of course a much-analyzed moment of high modernism (among many, see for example Golding (2000)), which Descola sketches from Polder Landscape with a Train and a Small Windmill on the Horizon (1906-07)

where the spatial depth of the landscape is given by the scale of the depicted train and windmill, through View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers, Domburg (1909)

with the effect of mass given through juxtapositions of broad planes and the slightly convex line marking the meeting point of the dunes and the tide-swollen sea, to Pier and Ocean 5 (Sea and Starry Sky) (1915; mis-titled in the text)

with the depiction reduced to short lines set in an oval, and the sensation of depth, expanse, and swell is given primarily through the play among small-scale crossings, the vertical thrust of the jetty at the bottom, and the oval frame.

     This completes Descola’s breath-taking account of the four visual ontologies of animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. A key addition is Descola’s qualification that the reign of any ontology in any culture is never total; other ontologies might occur in marginal areas, or the culture itself might use one ontology for a large range of its visual artifacts, but another ontology for a specialized range. Descola devotes a chapter largely to the Tsimshian of northwest Canada whose visual ontology is primarily animist, especially in its shamanistic practices and related artifacts like masks and rattles, but also contains totemic heraldic elements in its decorations of houses. I suspect that for many readers what will be initially the most startling and provocative claim in the book is that contemporary visual art, which seems for Descola to hold sway starting in the immediate post-World War II period with Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, involves a thoroughly mixed ontology: no one ontology predominates, and various artists use different ontologies in the service of their particular artistic aims. So by way of reflection and conclusion, in my final post I’ll first consider Descola’s account of recent visual art, then indicate a few places where his general account is the basis for attractive accounts of particular visual artifacts, accounts that differ from prominent prevailing accounts, and conclude with a sketch of some reasons for thinking that Descola has provided, contrary perhaps to his own intentions, an general anthropological account not just of visual ontologies, but also of visual artworks.

References and Works Consulted:

Philippe Descola, Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration (2025)

John Golding, Paths to the Absolute (2000)

On Philippe Descola’s Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration--Part 1b: The Visible Figures of Animism, Totemism, and Analogism

After the intermezzi of my early art loves and a short book review, I return to the consideration of the anthropologist Philippe Descola’s magisterial Forms of the Visible, surely the greatest contribution in the twenty-first century, along with Carlo Severi’s two books, to the anthropology of art. As outlined in the earlier post, Descola’s most recent book explores the hypothesis that each of the world’s four great ontologies--animism; totemism; analogism; naturalism--generates a distinctive kind of visible figuration in artifacts. Descola devotes 80-110 pages to each of the four ontologies, so my summary will necessarily leave out a great deal; I will, however, try to render here what I take to be his central points for the first three (with the summary of the fourth to follow in my next post). For each type of figuration, Descola presents the distinctive central problems and aims of the figures, then for the first three ontologies takes up one or two particularly well-documented examples in anthropological literature; for the fourth type, naturalism, the characteristic ontology of Western Europe from the 14th through mid-20th centuries, he unsurprisingly draws from major and mostly familiar works of art history, though including some recent Francophone accounts that were new (and invariably interesting) to me. So:

1. Animism: In Descola’s conceptual grid in animism humans and other beings have similar interiorities but manifestly distinct ‘materialities’ (i.e. bodies). The so-to-speak core ontological experience is detecting in non-humans (plants and animals, and also rocks and any salient physical object) “an intention that seems to be addressed to us” (p. 57) With human beings’ basic familiarity with grasping the interiority of other human as a background condition, “the challenge of animist image-making is how to make the subjectivity of nonhumans perceptible and active” (p. 58). Further, an animist image must somehow acknowledge that “[w]hether human or nonhuman, an intentional subject is never alone in the animist world” (p. 60). Thirdly, “metamorphosis is the litmus test par excellence of animism, because it reveals with great clarity the keystone that ensures solidity and coherence in that ontology: not only do subjects, human and non-human alike, enjoy comparable inner lives, but that mobile attribute can inhabit very diverse bodily envelops” (p. 80) Descola’s central examples of animist figuration come from the far northern peoples, first of all the Yu’pik of Alaska, and also the non-contemporary Dorset and Thule cultures of northern Canada, along with related cultures of far Eastern Russia and Greenland, with further examples primarily from the Amazon. The Yu’pik are among the world’s greatest mask-makers, whose masks in many cases show some readily identifiable animal embedded with a human face.

Such masks are often made in pairs “so as to make evident a relation of complementarity” between different species and/or different verses of the dancing song wherewith the masks are used. (p. 60) The human faces figure “attributes of human interiority” (p. 61), with the frequent halo-like bands giving further attributes of humanity such as a face, hands, or clothing (pp. 62-3). The Dorset culture (800 BCE-1500 CE) produced many small figurines of animals in movement.

Descola considers these and similar, though typically simpler, sculptures from other Northern groups to be typically animist in that they are ‘think animals’ aiming to keep the hunters’ prey constantly in mind (p. 66), and that their implied movement facilitates this aim. Considering one category of Yup’ik masks, asymmetrical ones with one eye half-closed,

supports this interpretation, in that the masks figure “the importance, for hunting, of penetrating eyesight”, with the half-closed eye representing the animal seen by the hunter but not itself seeing him (pp. 67-8). Metamorphosis, especially animal-to-human-to-animal, is in Yu’pik masks in their showing “the capacity of each class of existents to have a specific vantage point on the world, owing to its physical aspects, along with the possibility of any being to shift into the vantage point of another” (p. 85)

2. Totemism: The most general aim of totemic images is to show “unambiguously that the human and nonhuman members of a totemic class share the same essential and material identity” (p. 147), an identity derived from some original prototype. The visible qualities that individuals might share include kinds of behavior, forms, luminosity, textures, and moral dispositions (p. 146). No one familiar with the world’s anthropology of art will be surprised that Descola’s central examples of totemic images come from Australian Aboriginals, both the northern groups in Arnhem Land and those from the central western desert, stunning images in art that are richly documented and much discussed in the literature. The original prototypes are various beings of the mythic Dreamtime, and the actions of those beings have given rise to prominent features of the landscape, and further the pigments used in depictions likewise derive from those prototypical beings (p. 147). The bark paintings of the Arnhem Land Yolngu offer exceptionally rich and full instances of such totemic images.

The complex compositions include numerous figurative blocks containing figures and embodying their Dreamtime stories and associated with particular sites. Those beings, stories, and sites are themselves associated with some particular clan. Accordingly, “[e]very Yolngu bark painting thus figures simultaneously an organizing story of the Dreamtime, the genesis of an environment, a map schematizing topographical features, and a sort of crest; the whole attests to a profound link between a descent group, a site, and an ontological genesis” (pp. 155-6). Another prominent totemic image is the so-called ‘x-ray’ paintings that show an animal with some visible internal organs.

In some cases the internal organs provide indications for butchery, but also in ritual contexts provide motifs that facilitate decorated dancers’ identification with the totemic being. More generally, in such paintings the being is depicted as immobile, because each represents “the atemporal charter of the totemic organization”, and, as a silhouette against an undifferentiated ground, deprived of relation to any particular milieu (p. 162). The well-known dot paintings of the deserts accomplish the tasks of totemic imagery in different ways.

The paintings represent a “topological morphology” (p. 169) of sites and paths created by the movements of Dreamtime beings.

     Thus the different types of paintings--bark, x-ray, and dot--exemplify three different formal approaches to the problems of totemic imagery: the bark paintings render Dreamtime narratives; x-ray paintings (“undoubtedly the ideal-type of totemism” (p. 181) the most straightforward depiction of the Dreamtime beings and their characteristics; the dot paintings show the generative activities and physical trajectories of the beings (pp. 180-84).

Analogism: The central ontological task of analogist figuration is “to make visible the web of correspondences deployed among discrete elements”, and accomplishing this “requires a proliferation of the disparate components of an image as a way of resisting the temptation to take the image as a representation of an individualized subject” (p. 230). Analogist figuration aims not “so much to imitate an objectively given referent with verisimilitude as to restore the weft of affinities within which this reference acquires meaning and exercises a certain type of agency” (p. 231) Descola’s discussion of analogist imagery is the longest in the book, and ranges much more widely than his accounts of his first two kinds, with examples from West Africa, Polynesia, the Mimbres pottery of New Mexico, Medieval Europe, the Huichol of Mexico, China, and Japan. The greater length is perhaps required because it “is difficult to identify an analogist image with certainty” because “the ontological schema that serves as its framework turns out to be much more abstract” than those of the other ontological modes (p. 231). A corollary of this is that it “is even probably characteristic of analogist images in general that they illustrate, condense, or punctuate utterances, as if the complex task with which they are entrusted--to put disparate things in order--cannot be achieved with the help of spatial organization alone and requires, in addition, the temporal sequencing and the semantic counterpoint that a narrative contributes” (p. 237).

      With these complex tasks of and strictures upon analogist imagery, one is perhaps not completely surprised by Descola’s claim that “[t]he classic figure of the analogist imagery . . . is a chimera, a being composed of attributes belonging to different species but presenting a certain coherence on the anatomical level” (p. 234), and indeed chimeras are attested in a great range of cultures.

What Descola calls three ‘modalities’, that is, visual mechanisms of image composition, govern the creation of analogist hybrid beings generally: recomposition, where (as in the photo above) the figuration shows “a more or less coherent being on the anatomical and functional levels” (p. 248); lexicalization, an image showing a standard animal taxon but whose name derives from unrelated lexemes (e.g. ‘catfish’ or ‘bulldog’); and agglomeration, where the being figured is composed of many plants, animals, and/or artifacts.

Again, as analogist images are often made of disparate elements, they primarily figure not so much individual beings or even collections of objects as modes of organizations and mechanisms of connection (p. 259). Descola claims that there are again three primary ways of achieving this basic aim of analogism: ‘hypostasis’, where some depicted being occupies a dominant visual position without eradicating the distinctive characters of the beings that make it up (p. 259), (as in this Sri Lankan mask:);

‘functional aggregation’, where the various beings depicted evidently collaborate in carrying out a common function, as in the altar-like mesas of Mexico and the Andes;

And ‘expressive determination’, where the figuration “reflects a situation in which each of the assembled elements can be seen as a particular aspect of a pre-existing whole” (ibid), as in the well-known Hopi Katcina dolls.

Here the doll has a crown of braided corn husks interspersed with eagle feathers, a fox fur collar, a serpentine tongue, and a multi-colored face each color of which carries a symbolic meaning.

Further kinds of typical analogist images are those that “figure correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm” where the figured being contains indications of worlds in miniature and also something of the universe in which the being lives (p. 277), and similarly where “a single motif at different scales and at different levels of encompassment” (p. 300) is shown, as in the famous statue at the British Museum of the god A’a from the Pacific island of Rurutu:

The fourth ontology, naturalism, requires a lengthier explication of Descola’s account for even the barest summary. I’ll begin my next post with such a summary, and then compare Descola’s interpretations of particular images from each of the four ontologies with well-known prior analyses from the anthropology of art and art history, with the aim of bringing out some of the distinctive insights provided by Descola’s approach.

References and Works Consulted:

Philippe Descola, Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration (2025)

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)