In my previous post I raised the issue of the nature of artistic meaning in the visual arts, and then suggested a range of instances across global art that should be part of the explananda of a contemporary account of such meaning. How can one investigate and reflect upon artistic meaning? One line of thought that suggests itself is to consider whether there are ‘elements’ or basic units of artistic meaning, which then are perhaps combined and elaborated upon in artworks. Perhaps if we can make sense of the distinction between simple and complex instances of artistic meaningfulness and then consider a range of relatively unelaborated instances of the former, we might start to get a sense of what kinds and ranges of meaningfulness are distinctive of visual artworks, as opposed to natural objects, mere artifacts, and visual designs. This would be a so to speak bottom-up approach, as opposed to a top-down approach that starts from reflection upon the concept of artistic meaning and the possible distinctive characteristics of artistic meaning, and then uses the results as a guide for identifying actual kinds and instances of such meaning. The bottom-up approach will doubtless strike some people as an odd way of thinking about the minimal contents of visual works of art, but its strangeness is perhaps lessened by recalling, first, its motivation: the most prominent philosophical investigations for the past two centuries have typically assumed that there is a conceptual gulf between artworks and other artifacts, but also that the distinction can be explicated without references to artistic meaning. The more typical question is ‘What is (a work of) art?’, which is posed in abstraction from the question ‘What kinds of artistic meaningfulness are there?’. The sterility of the great historical sequence of answers to the question ‘What distinguishes artworks from other artifacts’—expression, form, artist’s intention, ‘atmosphere of theory’ (which in practice are just factories for generating counter-examples)—if nothing else indicates the need for a different approach. Second, one notes the persistent thought that there is a ‘language’ of art. Since languages have a range of basic elements—phonemes, morphemes, words, syntax, sentences—we can consider whether there is anything analogous in the visual arts to the ordered hierarchies of linguistic features.
In my reading the most sophisticated developed account of the visual arts that aims to make good the art-language analogy across global art is that of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Accordingly, I’ll try to reconstruct and analyze his account as a stepping stone on the path of investigating artistic meaning. But before summarizing and analyzing the account, I’ll introduce what seem to me the most penetrating arguments against the idea that artistic meaning is language-like. In the 1980s the philosopher Richard Wollheim developed what was then a highly unfashionable account of artistic meaning, an account he typically restricted to artistic painting. It was then and still is unfashionable to think that there is a distinctive kind of meaningfulness in artistic painting. The particular polemical target for Wollheim was a the range of fashionable approaches classified under terms like ‘structuralism’, ‘post-structuralism’, ‘semiotics’, ‘hermeneutics’, and ‘deconstruction’, all of which, he urged, assimilate pictorial meaning to linguistic meaning. But there are, Wollheim countered, three major arguments against the assimilation. Consider the following: “(1) the word ‘bison, and below it the sentence, ‘The bison is standing’; (2) a picture of a bison—say, a cave-painting of a bison; and (3) an actual bison.” (Wollheim, p. 185) The first counter-argument against the identification of pictorial meaning and linguistic meaning is that the word ‘bison’ and the sentence ‘The bison is standing’ gain their meaning through the application of rules: one rule that ties words to the world, another that ties sequences of words to the world where the meanings of words are fixed and the sequences are governed by principles of combination of grammatical parts, such as phrases and clauses. This differs from pictorial meaning in that (a) pictures and their meanings are not exhaustively analyzable; and (b) in pictures we cannot determine which element the pictures presents: is the cave-painting word-like in presenting a bison, or sentence-like in presenting the fact that there is a bison?
The second argument highlights the arbitrariness of the relationship between words and what they depict. Whereas one can look at the cave-painting and see that there is a (depiction of a) bison (and this is similarly true across a vast range of depictive styles), one cannot do likewise see or otherwise discern the referent of a word merely by seeing or hearing the word. The third argument insists that one can learn what an animal looks like from a depiction of the animal, that is, that knowledge of depiction partially transfers to knowledge of a referent, whereas even if one knows that the word ‘bison’ refers to something, one needs additional information to know what sort of thing it refers to, and a fortiori what that thing looks like. (pp. 186-8) Wollheim notes two further differences between linguistic and pictorial meaning: sheer perception shows one what a picture looks like and what a picture means in virtue of its looking like such-and-such; and pictures always depict from a particular point-of-view. Again, there is nothing similar to these in linguistic meaning. Wollheim concludes with the thought that these points are really common knowledge, and that the great range of theories that treat pictorial meaning as language-like are willfully mistaken: “We all know all of this from childhood, and theory needs to go back to school.” (p. 190)
I cannot but agree with Wollheim’s points, but of course this does not show what no argument could show, namely, that there are no significant ways in which depictive meaning generally and artistic meaning in visual art in particular are analogous. Wollheim would surely agree that the characteristics of linguistic meaning he cites do not collectively offer an exhaustive description of everything bearing upon meaning in language, and so there is still the possibility that nonetheless other characteristics of language and meaning are also part of depictive or artistic meaning. With this in mind we turn to the formidable Lévi-Strauss. I set aside his general account of structuralism and its method, as well as his initial application of it to kinship and then to the mythologies of the Americas, and focus upon his remarks on visual arts. Lévi-Strauss’s writings give some sense of his knowledge of the European tradition of artistic painting, with a detail of a painting by the 16th-century portraitist François Clouet playing a central role in his central characterization of the nature of visual art. A late interview reveals that from an early age Lévi-Strauss collected Japanese woodblock prints, and that this artform was a life-long passionate interest. Most readers will know of two great topics in his anthropological writings (both of which were the subjects of two of his earliest (1942-3) publications): the account of Caduveo (Amazonian) face-painting in Tristes Tropiques, and his general interest in the visual art of the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest. His central characterization of (visual) art in La Pensée Sauvage (formerly translated as The Savage Mind, and recently re-translated as ‘Wild Thought’) is crucially supplemented with his extended remarks on artistic meaning in the Introduction of his first volume on Amerindian mythology, The Raw and the Cooked.
The relevant passages in both books are quite difficult with their intricacy and allusiveness, so in both cases I’ll start with summaries including extended quotations and then attempt to note the central points. In Wild Thought Lévi-Strauss begins with the thought that artists fashion “a material object that is at the same time an object of knowledge.” (p. 26) He moves immediately to the analysis of a detail, the lace of a neck ruff, from a late sixteenth-century portrait by Clouet, and asks why this should arouse “very deep aesthetic emotion”. He then surprisingly suggests his highly counter-intuitive fundamental characterization, that “the very type of the work of art” is a scale model. How so? Lévi-Strauss offers the following: a scale model first of all allows us to grasp something as a whole and not, as in everyday acts of knowing, starting from something’s parts. The quantitative reduction of a thing inherent in a scale model makes the thing less daunting and it seems to us ‘qualitatively simplified’. Further, a scale model, even if life-size, “always involves giving up certain dimensions of the object: in painting, volume; in sculpture, colors, odors, or tactile impressions; and in both cases, the temporal dimension”; accordingly, the work of art projects “a property-space with smaller and fewer sensory dimensions than those of its object”. (p. 29) The fact that the scale model is an artifact, something constructed and made by people, implies that it is “not a mere projection, a passive homologue of the object: it constitutes an actual experiment on the object”. Returning to Clouet’s painting of lace, Lévi-Strauss notes that the depiction presupposes “inside knowledge of its morphology and its technique of construction . . . it cannot be reduced to a diagram or a blueprint; it achieves a synthesis of these intrinsic properties and those that belong to the spatial and temporal context. The final result is the lace ruff, such as it is absolutely, but also such as, at the same instant, its appearance is affected by the perspective it is presented from, making some parts stand out and hiding others, the existence of which nevertheless continues to influence the rest.” (p.30)
Lévi-Strauss’s text here is extraordinarily condensed, but, if I understand it, his analysis turns on the point that an artist makes something external, an artwork in time and space, which also expresses or embodies something non-temporal and non-spatial, what he calls an ‘inner knowledge’, a ‘being’. He indicates that this ‘inner’ phenomenon is of ‘the order of structure’, while the ‘outer’ phenomenon (the spatio-temporal materiality of the artwork) is a piece of ‘outer’ knowledge or ‘the order of event’. (pp. 30-31) What is the point, then, of making or experiencing an artwork? Initially, Lévi-Strauss had begun with the thought that Clouet’s depiction of the lace arouses a seemingly inexplicable “very deep aesthetic emotion” (p. 26), and he concludes his account with the claim that the “aesthetic emotion comes from this union of the order of structure and the order of event instituted within a thing created by man, and so virtually be the spectator, who discovers its possibility through the work of art.” (p. 31) The appeal to ‘the aesthetic emotion’ is wholly undeveloped, and so really functions only as a place-holder for an account of the effects of artworks.
Lévi-Strauss goes on to add what seems to me a qualification of profound interest and insightfulness. He considers a Haida club carved with symbols. Where, then, is the order of the event in such a work? Everything “appears to be a matter of structure: its mythical symbolism as much as its practical function. More precisely, the object, its function, and its symbol seem to fold back on each other and form a closed system in which there is no room for the event.” (p. 31) The seeming counter-example of the club forces him to treat the order of ‘the event’ as an instance of a more general category which he calls the ‘mode of the contingent’. (p. 31) There are, he asserts, three aspects or ‘distinct moments’ of contingency in the process of artistic creation: “the occasion for the work, its execution, or its purpose”. Only the first aspect or mode being, that of the work itself, is of the order of the event. In that first aspect the artist “apprehends this contingency from the outside: an attitude, an expression, a distinctive light, a situation”, and the artist incorporates these contextual features into the work itself. In the second moment, the execution, the artist incorporates the material aspects of art-making—the characteristics of the material and the tools—into the work. And in the third moment, the purpose for which the work is made, the artist puts herself into the position of the destined user of the work and embodies that purpose in the work. (p. 33)
A summary of Lévi-Strauss’s conception of art would perhaps be something like this: Works of art are (a) artifactual models wherein (b) elements of meaningful structures are integrated with contingencies of making, material, and/or occasion in such a way as (c) to elicit an aesthetic emotion in appropriately attuned recipients. This formulation suggests that to see whether and what sort of account of artistic meaning Lévi-Strauss offers, we need to investigate what he means by structures. I’ll take that up in my next post, and finish here with a reconstruction of his theory of art-kinds, and the different kinds of elements. For this purpose the key text is the ‘Overture’ that opens the first volume of his massive study of Amerindian mythology, The Raw and the Cooked. The second half of the Overture aims to explain and justify Lévi-Strauss’s use of musical terminology and concepts (‘sonata’, ‘symphony’, ‘toccata and fugue’, etc.) to organize his analysis. This leads him to give an account of the elements of music, and then further to contrast those with the elements of poetry and painting. As in Wild Thought, the prose of the Overture is dense and allusive; what follows represents my current best attempt at understanding his views: All three art-kinds present the integration of two distinct orders of elements in combination. At the first level, the elemental features of music are sounds and forms, of poetry words and forms, of painting colors and forms or designs. At the second level there is a “choice and arrangement of the units”, which are interpreted “according to the imperatives of a given technique, style or manner—that is, by their transposition in terms of a code characteristic of a given artist or society.” (Lévi-Strauss (1969), p. 20) Lévi-Strauss goes on to sharply distinguish the character of the first level of articulation in music from those of painting and poetry. The elements of music are sounds, not noises, and so are already cultural phenomenon; in the fullest formulation of this point, he writes: “The system of intervals provides music with an initial level of articulation, which is a function not of the relative heights of notes (which result from the perceptible properties of each sound) but of the hierarchical relations among them on the scale.” (p. 16) By contrast, it is nature, not a cultural system, that offers inexhaustible array of colors and so the relevant elements of painting. One consequence of this, he thinks, is that whereas a note carries no ‘natural’ resonances or meanings (a C# is not as such the sound of the nightingale or the freight train), colors bear a sense of their pre-artistic existence in nature—“midnight blue, peacock blue, petrol blue; sea green, jade green; straw color, lemon yellow; cherry red, etc.” (p. 19)—, so that there is a “congenital subjection of the plastic arts [of color] to [prior] objects”. (p. 20) Lévi-Strauss only gives the briefest of indications with regard to poetry, with the point that “the vehicle of poetry is articulate speech, which is common property. Poetry merely decrees that its particular use of language will be subject to certain restrictions.” (p. 18) I take this to mean that ‘articulate speech’ comprises all the elements of the first level of articulation for poetry, and the systems of verse—including quantitative stresses, rhyme schemes, meter, and genres—are its second level of articulation.
Even this partial summary of Lévi-Strauss’s brief and dense remarks on art gives, I would think, a feel for the great interest of his artistic theory. Again, his central point is that all works of art are reduced models, and that meaning and/or ‘aesthetic emotion arises from the inaugural fact that any model is a reduction of that which it models, in that in necessarily leaves out an indeterminately vast number of characteristics of the model. The combination of levels of articulation results in an artifact, something made, that synthesizes perceptual and epistemic dimensions of what is modeled, and thereby gives rise to aesthetic emotion. Here I restrict myself to an initial comment: nothing in Lévi-Strauss’s account seems to violate Wollheim’s strictures on the non-linguistic character of pictorial meaning. And yet Lévi-Strauss insists that the arts are a language. In order to explore whether and how this conception of artistic meaning is sustainable, in my next post I turn to two points: What does Lévi-Strauss mean by ‘language’ and ‘structure’? And how does he conception of art account for actual artworks? To this end I shall turn to first his initial formulation of the concept of structure out of the linguistics of Roman Jakobson, and then will consider his two most sustained analyses of art, the face painting of the Amazonian group the Caduveo, and artworks of the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest.
References:
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Indian Cosmetics’ (1942) and ‘L’art de la côte nord-ouest à L’American Museum of Natural History’ (1943), in Anthropologie Structurale Zéro (2019)
-----‘Interview with Junzo Kawada’, in The Other Face of the Moon (2013)
-----The Raw and the Cooked: An Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Volume One (1969)
-----Triste Tropiques (1973)
-----Wild Thought (2021)
Richard Wollheim, ‘Pictures and Language’, in The Mind and its Depths (1993)