In this post I’ll attempt to sketch my basic conception of artistic meaning, with the rest of the book attempting to develop and explicate the conception with regard to the visual arts. Readers familiar with the philosophy of the visual arts of the past half-century will recognize my great indebtedness to the thought of three philosophers in particular: Richard Wollheim on the nature of meaning in painting practiced as an art; Michael Podro on artistic meaning as ‘sustaining recognition’; and Patrick Maynard on artistic meaning as the product of an artist’s conceptual and practical ‘tool-box’.
One way to begin reflecting on the notion of artistic meaning might be to think about meaning generally. But isn’t this to attempt to explicate the obscure with the empty? Recall Dewey’s suggestion that we should dispense with talk of ‘meaning’, or the post-War attempt to give some determinate direction and content to talk of ‘meaning’ by treating it as a linguistic property that can be explicated in terms of truth-conditions of sentences or propositions. More recently some philosophers working within broadly pragmatic or so-called enactivist orientations have offered seemingly converging lines of reflection. In their recently published book The Blind Spot, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and the enactivist Evan Thompson write that “Autonomy and agency imply sensemaking. Organisms are sensemaking beings. They create worlds of relevance . . . Meaning resides . . . at the level of autonomous agency, which is to say at the level of the organism as a whole.” (Frank et alia, pp. 153-4) With a different emphasis, in a series of books published in the past twenty years, the philosopher Mark Johnson, drawing primarily from John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and incorporating recent work in cognitive science and linguistics, has attempted a number of overlapping characterizations. In an initial formulation he characterizes his pragmatist conception of meaning generally as the degree of relationality or connectedness in human experience: “Human meaning concerns the character and significance of a person’s interactions with their environments. The meaning of a specific aspect or dimension of some ongoing experience is that aspect’s connections to other parts of past, present, or future (possible) experiences. Meaning is relational. It is about how one thing relates to or connects with other things.” (Johnson (2007), p. 10; for similar formulations, see Johnson (2017), p. 19 and Johnson (2018), p. 14) Johnson further stresses that meaning in this pragmatist-phenomenological sense pervades the experiences to which it is attached, and that, while it may be unconscious, it must in some sense be felt.
There are two overlapping emphases in the accounts of the enactivists and of Johnson. Both stress the embodied character of meaning, and both argue that the neglect of the body in main lines of Western philosophy occludes or distorts the philosophical understanding of central phenomena in human life. Additionally, both stress that meaning is grasped reflectively through the focal concern with meaning-making. Johnson provides the richer and more detailed account of the structures and mechanisms of meaning-making, and so his work will figure prominently in upcoming posts.
I turn now to the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim, who has offered what seems to me the model for what an account of artistic meaning must include. Wollheim himself thought that what could intelligibly be said about art, and so also artistic meaning, in general was quite restrictive, and said what he had to say about it in his monograph Art and Its Objects, which opens with a sustained discussion of the ontology of artworks, then moves on to and through a range of topics including representation, expression, and style, all guided by the thought that art is a ‘form of life’ (in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sense). When I interviewed Wollheim publicly in 2002, he firmly stated at the beginning that he did not wish to talk about art in general, but rather only about painting as an art. And indeed his extended account of artistic meaning is that laid out specifically for painting when, and only when, practiced as an artform. In Painting as an Art Wollheim begins by asking: “How is painting to be practiced as an art?” (Wollheim, p. 17) He immediately notes that it is uninformative to begin in this manner without having said anything about what it is to be an art, and then suggests that one start with an ‘imaginary development’ “of an activity that isn’t painting [as an art] but is like it, though more primitive”, which he calls ‘Ur-painting’. (p. 19) In Ur-painting intends to deposit marks upon a support with the aim of creating something that acquires “content or meaning”. (p. 22) In the pursuit of content or meaning, the Ur-painting undertakes a process of making which has four conceptually distinct phases: depositing or mark-making;
taking stock of this depositing or making;
abstracting an (unintentionally made) feature from the existing deposit or mark; making a further deposit or mark guided by what was achieved in the first three steps. In practice these steps are typically fused, and the movement through steps one to four is nearly instantaneous. The first three steps make up the central mechanism of meaning-making, which Wollheim calls ‘thematization’ (p. 20), which is the core feature of the artistic process qua meaning-making.
If the artistic process as the repeated undertaking of thematization in the service of producing meaning, then what is (artistic) meaning? Wollheim urges that there a variety of kinds of artistic meaning in painting. The most central are representation (what the painting shows) and expression, which Wollheim understands as the expression of some psychological state, some feeling, emotion, and/or mood. Additionally, Wollheim devotes a chapter to each of four further kinds of meaning: borrowing, where the artist incorporates some material from prior artifacts, especially previous artistic paintings; textuality, where the artist incorporates some bit of text (say, a piece of philosophical doctrine) into the painting; metaphor, where the artist metaphorizes some aspect of the painting (the surface, the way the paint is deposited, etc.); and by introducing the sense that there is an undepicted viewer within the painting, and so an implied viewpoint upon the subject-matter of the work (this is an exceptionally difficult conception that has not found much favor; Wollheim told me that he arrived at it from long viewing of the works of Edouard Manet, wherein he came to think that the persons in Manet’s work are shown as aware of being viewed from some angle other than that of the painter or canonical viewer in front of the work).
Wollheim’s third concern in the philosophy of painting as an art is the exploration of what we might call the psychological conditions of the possibility of artistic meaning. In the best known and most discussed part of his work, he urges that the possibility of representational meaning in artistic painting presupposes a human, species-wide capacity for what he famously calls ‘seeing-in’, the capacity to see some figure in some marks on a surface. Someone adds a few lines to a paper, and a suitably attuned spectator can, for example, see a bull.
Expression presupposes the psychological capacity for expressive vision; one sees, for example, a misty landscape and finds it expressive of melancholy. [PHOTO]
A final capacity, one that is especially difficult to discuss and about which Wollheim says little, is the capacity to find pleasure in artistic pleasure. Without such a possibility, the enterprise of artistic painting would die out after the cultural conditions that gave it a point shifted (aiding magical spells; glorifying great princes; advocating social justice; etc.)
So there are on Wollheim’s account three spheres of concern in the philosophy of painting as an art: the psychological mechanisms of meaning-making as thematization; the varieties of artistic meaning; and the psychological conditions of the possibility of the first two. Can Wollheim’s account fruitfully serve as a guide for a philosophy of the visual arts generally? In this book I argue that it can with suitable qualifications. I’ll start to sketch out how and with what qualifications in my next post.
References:
John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925)
-----Art as Experience (1934)
Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024)
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007)
-----Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding (2017)
-----The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art (2018)
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)