In my previous post I introduced Michael Podro’s account of artistic meaning, an account that will provide the basic orientation in this book. In this post I’ll present Podro’s account as an alternative to traditional accounts, and try to give some sense of how the account is applied to particular artworks.
As previously noted, Podro’s master term for artistic meaning is ‘sustaining recognition’. One helpful way to approach Podro’s point in coining this term is to consider the prevailing approach (with numerous variations) to artistic meaning in the 20th century. First, a basic contrast is drawn, most commonly between ‘form’ and ‘content’; variations for ‘form’ include ‘medium’, ‘manner of presentation’, ‘sound’ (with regard to poetry), while variations for ‘content’ include ‘subject’, ‘sense’, and ‘aboutness’. Next, one asserts that presentation of ‘content’ without ‘form’ is characteristic of a wide range of non-artistic artifacts or utterances. Correlatively, the presentation of ‘form’ without ‘content’ is empty, something like the presentation of a system of ordering without anything to order. Then, crucially, one asserts that the distinctive characteristic of art and/or artistic meaning is that in them form and content ‘fuse’. On this account, works of art aim at and, if successful, achieve a kind of unity wherein the content is somehow, in ways that are exceptionally difficult to explain, inseparable from the manner in which it is presented. The persistence of this kind of account perhaps testifies to the sense that it captures something of the central characteristics of art and artworks.
Nonetheless, the problems with this class of accounts have shown themselves to be insuperable. For example, in the early twentieth-century the art critic Clive Bell had already noted that any content whatsoever is presented in some manner or other. In the grips of the form/content distinction, Bell was forced to conclude that what makes an artifact a work of art must be its possession of a special kind of form, which he called ‘significant form’. But what makes a form ‘significant’? Bell could do no better than suggest that a significant form is “form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality” (Bell, p. 46), and ‘reality’ is glossed as “that which lies behind the appearance of all things—that which gives to all things their individual significance, the thing in itself, the ultimate reality” (ibid, p. 54). So Bell could offer no non-circular account of what distinguished significant form from non-significant form, and I would suggest that no later author has ultimately fared better. In any case the fundamental and to my mind definitive destruction of the account came from Richard Wollheim, who noted and analyzed the impossibility of distinguishing in a principled way form from non-formal elements in a visual work of art (Wollheim (1995), especially pp. 21-2), and so the very idea of a basic distinction between form and something else such as content, collapses.
Podro’s account, it seems to me, cuts the Gordian knot of the form/content distinction and its attempted applications.. He starts from the very general notion of a recognition, which includes anything and everything involved in the perceptual, imaginative, and cognitive grasp of a subject matter; his book Depiction opens with the sentence “At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject” (Podro (1998), p. 5). I take it that the prototype of recognition in this sense is someone looking at a marked surface and seeing, say, a lion, but it could be much more elaborate, as when one looks at an inked surface and sees Hendrickje sleeping, while someone else only sees a young woman sleeping.
The account does not require that the subject matter be recognized under a particular description or with a particular degree of specificity: one person looks at a wall in the cave at Lascaux and sees an auroch, another looks and sees a cow-like beast.
Podro opposes recognition to ‘complications’, which are anything and everything that the visual artist uses to elaborate the interest, meaning, or significance of the subject matter as (merely) recognized. The recognized subject matter of a visual depiction is something seen, and the relevant complications, because they are something different than what is given to vision, are said to be ‘imagined’. And since the artistic meaning in a work of visual art is something more than what is given in (visual) recognition, artistic meaning generally for Podro is made with the employment of the imagination.
Evidently, Podro’s account will only be convincing if it guides in an illuminating manner the interpretation of actual works of visual art, and most of the book is devoted to the analysis of such particulars, including works by Donatello, Rembrandt, Hogarth, and Chardin. To get an initial feel for how Podro’s account conceptualizes and explicates artistic meaning, consider his brief remarks about the ink drawing ‘Draughtsman and Model’ (c. 1639), one of the dozen-and-a-half works of Rembrandt he discusses.
Podro characterizes this drawing as part of group of Rembrandt’s prints, paintings, and drawings that possess “a low viewpoint which has the effect of occluding the middle ground and bringing foreground figures up into the picture”. A traditional account would likely identify this low viewpoint as a ‘formal’ feature; instead, Podro immediately notes how Rembrandt’s use of the low viewpoint transforms and enriches the viewer’s (mere) recognition of the depicted persons: “the figures that lie on the other side of the occluding ridge [i.e. the middleground which seen from a low viewpoint seems to rise up and block the sense of a continuous space between middle- and background] approach the main foreground group from the opposite side to the spectator, and we seem invited to conceive a symmetry between them and us, and to see their position on the other side of the dominant plane as the counterpart to ours” (p. 64). In ‘Draughtsman and Model’ this use of orientation and its effect is thematized, or, in Podro’s words “becomes highly explicit” (pp. 64-5), as the implied artist in the studio views the figure from the side opposite the viewer. Podro then asserts that this mirroring effect of implying a background viewer opposite the actual spectator of the piece is part of a general feature of Rembrandt’s style, where Rembrandt suggests “that the spectator’s view is one of several possibilities” and so “the subject is not felt to be absorbed or summated in the way it is represented, in the particular view” (p. 65).
In the terminology I use in this book, I would say that the low viewpoint is the mechanism that in its particular uses contributes to the overall artistic meaning of the piece, which is the sense that there are multiple and non-exhaustive views of the subject. One can read Podro’s magnificent book for dozens of further examples of what almost seems to be the non-finite number of uses of a large number of mechanisms. One question that immediately arises is: if something like Podro’s account offers a viable and convincing way of thinking about artistic meaning, then what must human beings be like so that such an account may so much as fit human life, human psychology, human practices and institutions, and human cultures? What sense of the nature of art is involved in this account? And what of aesthetics? If these questions were put to the range of accounts using the form/content distinction, one could readily answer with something like Aristotle’s conception of human life, as the form/content distinction originates in the account of change in his book Physics, as developed in human psychology in On the Soul, in the arts in Poetics, etc. Does Podro’s account offer something analogous, or is it perhaps neutral among differing conceptions of human psychology and institutions? In order to develop this account of artistic meaning, I turn to Podro’s answers to these questions in the next post.
References:
Aristotle, Physics
-----On the Soul
-----Poetics
Clive Bell, Art, (1948), 5th edition (originally 1913)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Richard Wollheim, On Formalism and its Kinds/Sobre el Formalism i els seus tipus (1995)