In my last general consideration of the great resources of meaningfulness in the visual arts, I turn now to language. The topic is perhaps even more vast and complex than my previously considered resources of embodiment, gesture, and artifactuality; but as before I limit myself to introductory points that are directly relevant to considering the recruitment of language into visual arts and their distinctively artistic meanings. Even so, I don’t think the topic admits of summary treatment, and so discussions of particular work later in the book will add points without pretending to give an exhaustive account. By way of introduction I’ll consider a series of what I take to be fundamental points. First, I’ll sketch what seems to me the best account of something like a standard understanding of the contribution of language to visual artworks with Richard Wollheim’s analysis of the ‘way of textuality’ in paintings. Then I’ll consider the artist Hamish Fulton’s piece ‘Rock Fall Echo Dust’ in light of two major theoretical considerations of very basic aspects of language that can be recruited into distinctively visual artistic meaningfulness: the revolutionary account of the ineliminable quasi-metaphoric activity of language use in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein as analyzed by Hans Julius Schneider; and the account of the effects of repetition in language as analyzed by Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson.
In Painting as an Art Richard Wollheim offers a path-breaking analysis of how painters make language part of the artistic content of their works with a survey of works of Nicholas Poussin. On a standard art historical understanding language enters the content of an artistic painting if and when circumstances bring some bit of language to bear upon the subject-matter and/or its manner of presentation. So, on the example Wollheim cites, some doctrine of Stoicism is part of the content of a painting by Poussin when (a) documentation shows Poussin interested in and advocating some bit of Stoicism and (b) some of Poussin’s subject-matter—an antique setting, a particular figure related to the Stoics, some gesture expressive of an attitude commended in Stoicism, etc.—is shown in the work. Wollheim rejects this as too permissive and recommends more stringent criteria for language entering the content of a painting. He starts from the idea that language in the relevant sense is a ‘text’, and that a text “is something propositional: furthermore it is something propositional that has, and is partially identified by reference to, a history. Examples of a text as I think of it would be a religious doctrine, a proverb, a cosmological theory, a moral principle, a metaphor, a world-view.” (Wollheim, p. 187) Now, for a text to be part of the content of an artistic painting must mean minimally that its presence must alter an appropriately attuned viewer’s experience of the painting, that is, the viewer’s experience of a painting with textual content must be different than, indeed richer, than the experience of an otherwise visually indiscernible painting that lacked that content. Wollheim then places an especially stringent stricture upon the manner of such alteration by stipulating that “a text enters the content of a painting on if, in representing some event that is connected with that text, the painting also reveals what the text means to the artist” (p. 188). Wollheim offers a lengthy virtuoso demonstration of his views that cannot be briefly summarized, but consider his central example of Poussin’s ‘The Ashes of Phocion collected by his Widow’ (1648):
Wollheim here and elsewhere draws attention to Poussin’s manner of depicting nature: “in the background . . . undomesticated nature reasserts itself, and the shaft of a mountain thrusts upwards from out of the thick curly forest that clings to its root. It disrupts the life of the city . . . An air of untamed mystery attaches to the mountain, and this is intensified by its irrational shape, which its silhouette does not reveal” (p. 215). “This mystery is then taken up in the foreground by the unexplained breeze which sways the massive ilexes . . . The wind causes the foliage to rise and fall, so that each clump of leaves is an elusive variation upon a common form” (p. 218). While the foreground shows the heroic act of the widow collecting Phocion’s ashes (Phocion had been unjustly executed for treason and denied burial within the city), Poussin’s association of the elemental forces linking the foreground trees with the background mountain shows the source of the energy of the widow’s ‘transcendent act of probity’: “it comes from the natural stirrings of instinct” (p. 220). So for Wollheim it is not that the painting bears textual meaning because Poussin was demonstrably ‘influenced’ by Stoicism, but rather because Poussin has rendered the relation between irrational nature and Stoic virtue visually expressive.
Later in this book I’ll offer an analogous account of how Muqi’s painting ‘6 Persimmons’ acquires textual meaning expressive of central doctrines of Ch’an Buddhism. But both the analyses of Poussin’s and Muqi’s paintings show the recruitment of language into artistic meaning in a visual artwork at as it were a later and highly refined stage. In order to complete the introductory sketch of language as an artistic resource in visual art, and to show how very basic features of language, analogous to those already outlined with regard to gesture and artifactuality, can be recruited, I consider Hamish Fulton’s work ‘Rock Fall Echo Dust’ (1989).
Fulton pieces is one of many that derive from and are expressive of his basic artistic practice of taking long walks of many days. His signature pieces are large photographs of natural settings within which the walk has occurred, with text overlain that states the place, duration, and mileage of the walk. ‘Rock Fall Echo Dust’ takes up this format and replaces the usual photograph with the title’s four words, each consisting of four letters, and arranged grid-like in alternating black and orange-red. The use of the text here is first of all an evocation: the viewer-reader is invited to imagine a wholly natural incident witnessed on the walk: a falling rock striking the ground with its immediate aural and visual effects. Or did Fulton push the rock? One notices that the initiating agency is unspecified. Then one notices that the determinate linear ordering of grammar and syntax starts to fade: each word can be both noun and verb; the ordering and visual presentation seem to equalize the weight of each word; the patterned alternation of colors sets up a counter-order: rock-echo and fall-dust. Language is here materialized and visually, but as an incitement of imagination away from the present visual artifact, and then immediately pulverized and rendered indeterminate. How is this possible?
Consider two very basic features of language: in the course of analysis of Wittgenstein on language the philosopher Hans Julius Schneider shows that Wittgenstein had uncovered and drawn attention to the way in which in any instance of language use there is a combination of what Schneider calls calculation and imagination: calculation in the sense that for an utterance to so much as be intelligible the speaker must treat the existing meaning-bearing repertoire of language—the lexicon, semantics, grammar, syntax, and pragmatic understandings—as rule-like in its authoritative guidance of forming a new utterance; imagination in the sense that the new utterance is always novel, a projection of a previous understanding into a new context. Every new utterance is in this sense of creative act, not simply the application of rules (or rather, the mere application of rules is not really intelligible). One of Schneider’s central examples is Wittgenstein’s famous remark in the Philosophical Investigations that he was strongly inclined to say that Wednesday is fat and Tuesday lean, and that the words ‘fat’ and ‘lean’ must have in this context their familiar meanings, but the words and their meanings have been put to a use different from their typical ones (Wittgenstein, Part II, Section 274). The fat/lean example is dramatic, but on reflection quite generally true: all language use involves imaginative projection that “goes from the language (from a particular language game) to areas of “reality” to which we have not yet given voice in language” (Schneider, p. 84).
In their book Relevance Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson draw attention to another basic aspect of language that Fulton recruits into his work which they designate as its capacity for ‘echoic’ (their word!) utterance. On their account linguistic echoing is a primary way in which second-degree interpretations, that is, complex thoughts involving the interpretations of others’ interpretations, enter language. Their example is ‘Peter’ saying “The Joneses aren’t coming to the party” and ‘Mary’ replied “They aren’t coming, hum. If that’s true, we might invite the Smiths” (Sperber and Wilson, p. 238). Mary’s response involves an interpretation of Peter’s thought and attitudes, ‘echoes’ it, and expresses her own attitude to both the fact of the Joneses not coming, something of her relation to Peter, and something of her own attitude to both. Fulton folds echoing, a basic linguistic capacity, into his visual work, both with its proper term and in its action of repetition, as the words ‘repeat’ the natural event, and give rise to an elusive atmosphere of attitudes to that event.
There is of course an unsurveyably enormous amount more to be said about language as an artistic resource, some of which I hope to treat in a future volume on linguistic artworks. I turn next to the final great resource of artistic meaningfulness in the visual arts, the resource of vision itself.
References:
Hans Julius Schneider, Wittgenstein’s Later Theory of Meaning: Imagination and Calculation (2014)
Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987)