I turn now to the final part of my sketch of the great resources of artistic meaning in the visual arts with a sketch of the aspects of visual perception itself that are regularly recruited into visual artworks. As noted in my previous post, there are traditionally different major classifications of the arts, including the temporal and spatial arts, and (presupposing the restriction of the arts primarily to the distal senses) the visual arts and the arts of hearing, with the latter distinction usually supplemented with further categories or sub-categories such as the performative and linguistic arts. There is no reason, I think, to hesitate about choosing between ‘spatial arts’ and ‘visual arts’ as one’s orienting classification, both because of the sense of vision as providing our primary perception of distance, and because accordingly the two come to much the same thing in actual analyses of artistic meaning. Further, and perhaps surprisingly, little need be said here about general features of visual perception, as the construction of artistic meaning in visual artworks arises, as we shall see, more from the recruitment of particular structures of the visual field (such as center-periphery, foreground-background, primary/secondary/tertiary foci, and ‘seeing-in’ (again, the capacity to see something in a marked surface) than from the background conditions provided by vision as such.
For our specific purposes, the account of the basic features of vision provided by the philosopher Hans Jonas will serve. In his essay ‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses’ Jonas gives three basic characteristics of vision, as follows: “The unique distinction of sight consists in what we may provisionally call the image-performance, where “image” implies these three characteristics: (1) simultaneity of the presentation of a manifold, (2) neutralization of the causality of sense-affection, (3) distance in the spatial and mental senses.” (Jonas, p. 136) Jonas explicates these points as follows: (1’) Sight offers a sense of the simultaneous in that it grasps “many things juxtaposed, as co-existent parts of one field of vision.” This is not to say of course that everything within a particular view is ever simultaneously in focus or the object of focal attention (Jonas neglects this point with regard to simultaneity, but introduces it in the discussion of distance, and it will be central to my later account of the structure of the visual field), but that in contrast the other senses, especially hearing and touch, insofar as they offer access to a structured field do so by synthesizing a perceptual unity “out of a temporal sequence of sensations which are themselves time-bound and spatial” (ibid). (2’) Jonas claims that in contrast to the other senses sight distinctively lacks any causal relation or interaction between the perceiver and the object of perception: In vision “I have to do nothing but to look, and the object is not affected by that: and once there is light, the object has only to be there to be visible, and I am not affected by that: and yet it is apprehended in its self-containment from out of my own self-containment, it is present to me without drawing me into its presence.” (p. 146) (3’) Jonas considers the sense of distance to be the most fundamental aspect of sight, as neither simultaneity nor neutralization would be possible if the contents of the visual field were all in the viewer’s immediate proximity (p. 149). Sight requires distance in its very operation, in that a close view may gain distinctness of an object’s detail, but loses the comprehensiveness and integration within a visual field characteristic of vision. Jonas adds a point that was, as we have seen, extensively discussed by Husserl and especially Merleau-Ponty, that is, that everything within the visual field contains a sense of a horizon, of some further possibility of vision that is not yet available: in the visual field there is a “continuous blending of the focused area into more and more distant background-planes, and its shading off toward the fringes, which make the “and so on” more than an empty potentiality: there is the co-represented readiness of the field to be penetrated, a positive pull which draws the glance on as the given content passes as it were of itself over into further contents.” (p. 151) My summary is restricted by its role in my overall project, but I must note that it omits something central to the essay, namely that in all his characterizations and explications, Jonas further suggests that each aspect of vision is bound to very basic metaphysical stances and conceptions; he summarizes these with: “Simultaneity of presentation furnishes the idea of enduring present, the contrast between change and the unchanging, between time and eternity. Dynamic neutralization furnishes form as distinct from matter, essence as distinct from existence, and the difference of theory and practice. Distance furnishes the idea of infinity.” (p. 152)
There is of course a great deal more that could be said about vision (I have been particularly helped by recent writings of James J. Gibson, Brian O’Shaughnessy, Mohan Matthen, and Alva Noë cited in the ‘References and Works Consulted’ below), but the basic points made by Jonas will prove to be sufficient for this stage of the inquiry (again, much more about the structure of the visual field as recruited into artworks will be discussed). To close this sketch of the largest reserves for artistic meaningfulness in visual artworks—the body; gesture; the hand; language; vision—I’ll indicate in the form of slogans the most general ways in which these resources are recruited into artworks. The slogans are ‘Constrain Thyself!’ and ‘All Constraint is (potentially) Expansion!’ What?? What do these slogans mean??
My conception motivating these slogans arises in response from two unlikely sources: the social philosopher Jon Elster’s account of aesthetic value, and the philosopher of sport Bernard Suit’s path-breaking proposals for and analyses of the nature of games. Elster is a prolific writer who has focused in part on investigating and attempting to explain puzzling kinds of seemingly irrational behavior and thought. He devoted sections of two books from the early-mid 1980s to explain aesthetic value. He approaches the issue with the claim that “artistic creation involves maximization under constraints, and that good works of art are local maxima of whatever it is that artists are maximizing” (Elster (1983), p. 78) The term ‘constraint’ in the context of artistic creation signifies anything and everything to which the artist limits herself (in essence pragmatically declaring “I shall do and use this, this, and this, but not that, that, and that; for example “I shall use this kind of paper with this kind of pen and this kind of ink and draw in Rembrandt’s manner without solid outlines” etc.) Elster notes that constraints “arise from the embrace of a technique, which in turn involves the exercise of substantive constraints particular to a tradition, as well as from various technical, physical, or administrative limitations.” (pp. 79-80) As he puts it in the later book, artistic creation on this conception is a two-step process of choosing constraints and then making choices within constraints (Elster (1984), p. 200n). ‘Choice’ in this context is of course not arbitrary, both in that the artist typically works within traditions that supply constraints, and such constraints in turn guide ‘choices’ in style, subject-matter, rhetoric, etc. that are in much of the world’s art highly determined by social conditions of patronage and reception. But the point is that without such constraints aesthetic value cannot arise. (I cannot here address Elster’s arguments for this claim, which I accept in ways perhaps more qualified than Elster’s). In a loosely similar way, Bernard Suits has proposed and argued for a conception of games as playing under conditions where the participants make a “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Putting more formally, he writes: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]. ‘’ (Suits, p. 41) There is of course an enormous amount that requires reflection and explication here, but the most general point shared by Elster and Suits in this context is that maximally achieving certain kinds of aims requires the acceptance of certain constraints. The rest of this book can be seen as a partial attempt to explicate this thought in the context of the visual arts.
With that, which cannot be more than a hint and a promise, I turn next to the great resources and structures of distinctively visual art, which shall include spatial metaphor, seeing-in and inflection of marked surfaces generally, the structuring of the visual field, and ornamentation. In my next post I’ll present and offer critical reflections upon the major account that seems to me close to, but importantly different than, the account I’m developing here, namely the account of the basic forms and kinds of meaning in spatial arts offered by the art historian David Summers in his magisterial book Real Spaces, with its treatment of the great Olmec heads as the paradigm of spatial artworks.
References and Works Consulted:
Tyler Burge, Perception: First Form of Mind (2022)
Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality (1983)
--Ulysses and the Sirens (1984)
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1986)
Edmund Husserl, Ideas II (1913)
Hans Jonas, ‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses’, in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966)
Mohan Matthen, ‘Active Perception and the Representation of Space’, in Perception and Its Modalities (2015), ed. Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
Alva Noë, Action in Perception (2004)
--Varieties of Presence (2012)
Brian O’Shaughnessy, On Consciousness and the World (2002)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Dustin Stokes and Stephen Biggs, ‘The Dominance of the Visual’, in Perception and Its Modalities (2015), ed. Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs
Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978)
David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003)