In my previous post I first introduced very general recent characterizations of meaning in human life, and then summarized Richard Wollheim’s account of meaning in painting practiced as an art. My suggestion is that, with adjustments and qualifications, Wollheim’s account can be used as a model for the philosophical understanding of artistic meaning in the visual arts generally. Recall Wollheim’s three fields of concern: a characterization of the core of the artistic process qua meaning-making as thematization; the description of a variety of kinds of artistic meaning, including representation, expression, creating an implied viewer in a picture, borrowing, textuality, and metaphor; and the investigation of the psychological capacities (perhaps species-specific) that are presupposed for artistic meaning to so much as be possible, in particular seeing-in, expressive perception, and the capacity for certain kinds of pleasure in seeing. While Wollheim’s account of seeing-in has attracted a great deal of attention from academic philosophers of art, with numerous appropriations, qualifications, extensions, and/or rejections, and likewise to a much lesser extent his account of expression, most of his thinking summarized here, and the overall shape of the account and his guiding concerns, has been largely neglected. I’ll return to each of his points at some length, but for now my concern is with the general features of his account and its scope.
One question that immediately suggests itself is: Why are these particular capacities (seeing-in, expressive perception, visual pleasure) invoked? By contrast, a broad range of accounts of the psychological sources and cultural origins of visual art have cited the ‘imagination’, with varying characterizations and emphases concerning what the typical operations of the imagination are, as the explanans (for a representative example, see Currie (2003)). A personal anecdote leads into the heart of the question: Wollheim’s Painting as an Art was based upon his Mellon Lectures, and he also delivered a revised version of the lectures as a graduate class at UC Berkeley in 1986. As a three-time college dropout those lectures at Berkeley; hearing them was one of the great intellectual adventures of my life. For me the most startling thing in the lectures was at one point Wollheim off-handedly saying that the paintings of Barnett Newman, though perhaps an interesting kind of conceptual art, were not artistic paintings at all, that is, they were not instances of painting practiced as an artform.
The alleged reason they weren’t was because they did not present the viewer with any sense of depictive space; adapting Frank Stella’s remark about his minimalist painting, ‘what you see is what you see, and that’s all that you see: there is no figure/support, foreground/background, no part/whole elements or a fortiori relations’.
I’m uncertain what Wollheim would have said if pressed—one of his outstanding characteristics was making surprising and seemingly wrong remarks that, after one reflected for some minutes or years, showed themselves to be right; but I think part of his point was that neither seeing-in nor expressive perception were exercised in seeing Newman’s paintings, and so they could not be among the vast number of richly meaning-bearing paintings that comprise the world’s artistic paintings.
If something like this way of taking Wollheim’s point is right, then even if we were to agree with Wollheim that seeing-in is a basic psychological and perceptual capacity exercised in painting as an art, a more general account of visual art (which must include Newman’s work) will need to include other perceptual capacities among the conditions of the artforms introduced in my earlier posts. What further perceptual capacities are involved in the making and perceptual encounter with visual arts like decoration and masking? In pursuit of such conditions subsequent posts will start from much more basic features of human life than those proposed by Wollheim: those relating to embodiment, the use of the hand, artifact-making, and vision generally.
Two further points where my account will differ from Wollheim’s are in the conception of and roles for imagination in visual art, and in the role of materiality. Wollheim has a great deal of interest to say about the imagination, but in this context our concern is that he sharply distinguished the exercises of the imagination from those uses of seeing-in that are basic to artistic painting. Wollheim’s general attitude was that the artistic uses of the imagination supervened upon the conceptually prior exercise of seeing-in. Wollheim restricted the artistic employment of the imagination to what he called ‘imaginative projects’, such as imaging what a particular depicted figure’s mental state is; and so unsurprisingly he does not take imagination under any conception to be among the basic perceptual capacities exercised in painting as an art. Secondly, by ‘materiality’ I mean both the sense that mark-making typically involves the depositing of paint and/or the inscribing of line, and that both the sheer physicality of the marks, and the ways in which they introduce senses of dynamism and intentionality, are insufficiently acknowledged and developed in Wollheim’s account.
Accordingly In this book I’ll adopt and attempt to develop the account of meaning in the visual arts introduced by the philosopher Michael Podro in the late 1990s in his profound book Depiction, which was additionally developed with regard to drawing as an art by the philosopher Patrick Maynard in his book Drawing Distinctions. The points made in Wollheim’s account will then be treated as a part of Podro’s more general account. So in my next post I’ll sketch the basic features of Podro’s account of artistic meaning as a matter of what he calls ‘sustaining recognition’.
References:
Gregory Currie, ‘The capacities that enable us to produce and consume art’, in Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts (2003), edited by Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)