In my previous post of the first draft of my book in the philosophy of artistic meaning in the visual arts, I summarized the art historian David Summers’s conception of spatial arts, and signaled my adoption of a slightly revised version of his account for my own conception of the visual arts as bearers of artistic meaning. Here I’d like to consider his route towards the idea of the spatial arts, and then consider his reasons for rejecting as basic the idea of the visual arts in favor of the spatial. The consideration of his route of inquiry will introduce valuable conceptual resources for my own account, and I’ll try to defuse his objections to the idea of visual arts. We can summarily state his central points with an eye towards their origins as follows: negatively, Summers argues that existing art historical conceptions are (i) formalist and (ii) unduly oriented towards psychology and perception; positively, (a) he adopts E. H. Gombrich’s suggestion for conceiving of the basis of the arts as props characterized by their function (as opposed to, say, visual images characterized by their referents or what they resemble); and (b) he adopts and develops Meyer’s Schapiro’s suggestions about the historical character of non-mimetic aspects (especially format, framing, and size) of artworks as not mere conditions, but rather as enabling and (potentially) elements of artworks and their meanings. I begin with the positive claims:
1. Summer’s route to spatial arts: As noted in my previous post, Summers has stated that his dissatisfaction with the extant mainstream of art historical concepts began with a trip to Tenochtitlan with George Kubler’s graduate seminar, and then later with his own attempts to teach pre-Columbian art. In developing his positive account of spatial artworks as ‘real metaphors’, his most basic and extensive debt is to E. H. Gombrich’s essay ‘Meditations on a Hobby-Horse’. Gombrich there presented a short series of considerations aiming to induce the reconceptualization of an ‘image’, away from something that is primarily visual and gains its identity by virtue of its representational aspect, to something that is primarily physical or material and that gains its identity by virtue of the function it fulfills. Gombrich starts from “a very ordinary hobby horse”, something that “is usually content with its place in the corner of the nursery and has no aesthetic ambitions”, characterized only by "its broomstick body and its crudely carved head which just marks the upper end and serves as holder for the reins” (Gombrich (1963), p. 1).
What makes it a ‘horse’? It neither imitates the appearance of a horse, nor is the toy something ‘abstracted’ from the appearance of a horse, and the “hobby horse does not portray our idea of a horse” (p. 3). Rather the hobby horse substitutes for a horse, and it can do this because it is at least “an imitation of certain privileged or relevant aspects” of a horse (p.60, in that it is rideable, and riding a horse matters (p. 7), it can “fulfill certain demands of the organism” (p.4). In a different context, the same stick could substitute for something else (e.g. a sword). Two questions immediately arise: if images rightly conceived are biologically-based substitutes, how do images so conceived relate to the traditional conception of images as the products of imagination or memory, and that represent some referent? And how does this conception relate to the naturalistic strain of visual art, especially in light of Gombrich’s own account of the development of the naturalistic (Gombrich called it ‘illusionist’) art of the West in his canonical Art and Illusion (written shortly after the essay on the hobby horse)?
Gombrich’s answers to the two questions are at most quite brief, and indeed the answer to the first is limited to what must be called a mere hint. With regard to the first, he suggests a conceptual ‘speculation’, where the owner and user of the undecorated stick ‘ridden’ as a horse “in a playful or magic mood—and who could always distinguish the two?—” fixes ‘real’ reins and is “even tempted to ‘give it two eyes near the top end. Some grass could have passed for a mane. Thus our inventor ‘had a horse’.” (p. 4) So the hobbyist decorates the stick as it were in the direction of making it an image of a horse. Gombrich offers nothing further on either the motivation for or the effects of the decoration. On the second question, Gombrich starts from the idea of a ‘conceptual image’, particularly as that idea was traditionally invoked in the attempt to understand non-naturalistic visual art. The thought was that the conceptual image—roughly, a schematic image that gives an unelaborated, outline, symmetrical figure in a frontal view, marked by symmetry, with the size of parts partially determined by their importance (e.g. if a figure is a watchful god, the eyes are proportionally larger than in a naturalistic depiction). Traditionally, ‘conceptual image’ and ‘naturalistic representation’ are counter-posed, with the former most characteristic of primitive and/or non-Western art, and the latter part of Western art starting with the Ancient Greeks. Gombrich rejects such a dichotomy, but not all of its characteristics: the relatively schematic quality of the conceptual image is re-conceptualized as part of the nature of naturalistic representation itself, under the thought that representation is the achievement of a process characterized by the projection of a schema and its ‘correction’, that is, its alteration and elaboration in the direction of representation more naturalistic than that of the schema. One of Gombrich’s simple historical artistic examples of such alteration is the way in which the introduction of scientific perspective in depiction, shifts an empty patch of an artwork’s material support away from a non-signifying blank to something that signifies light, air, and space (p. 10). Gombrich’s response to the second question, with its presupposition of a uniform historical progress from conceptual image to naturalistic representation, is so evidently inadequate that I pass on discussion, that I omit discussion and turn to Summers’s second source in Meyer Schapiro.
In order to flesh out his conception of spatial arts, Summers first takes up a suggestion from Umberto Eco’s discussion of Gombrich’s essay in his Theory of Semiotics. After rehearsing Gombrich’s account of the hobby horse, Eco notes that in play only some of the dimensions of the stick are significant in that particular context; it’s the linearity of the stick that makes it rideable, but its verticality (at least in that context) is of no significance. Eco then asserts that the linearity of the hobby horse stick is a spatial dimension, and its spatial dimensions “are not an intellectual construction, but the constructive conditions for a possible object, and as conditions they may be reproduced, equal to themselves, in varied circumstances.” (Eco, pp. 210-11) From Eco’s discussion Summers will reason that any substitute, at least if it’s a physical object or material artifact, will have constructive spatial conditions, and in an artwork such conditions include its format and the spatial environment within which the artifact is placed. Summers can then incorporate Meyer Schapiro’s famous discussion of the ‘non-mimetic’ elements of the ‘image-sign’ (and so also in artworks) into his account. Under the characterization ‘non-mimetic’ Schapiro includes artworks’ material surfaces (unworked or worked, smoothed or bumpy, rectangular or circular or unbounded, etc.) and their borders (or the absence of borders). Schapiro’s general points are that all these elements are historical phenomena, and that they can be relatively ‘neutral’ or relatively meaningful depending upon the artistic contexts in which they occur and the uses to which they are put (or not put). Schapiro’s essay greatly improves upon Gombrich’s in noting and describing how non-mimetic elements are historically introduced and elaborated as bearers of meaning; for example, Schapiro describes how the ground line, “thickened into a band and colored separately, becomes an element of landscape or architectural space. Its upper edge may be drawn as an irregular line that suggests a horizon, a terrain of rocks and hills” (Schapiro, p. 31). Summers will only have to add the point (explored at great length in his book) that the elements of presentation of a spatial artwork can also include its physical environment, through for example orientation towards the night sky, the winter solstice, or distant mountains (as with my example in the previous post from Machu Picchu).
2. Does Summers, then, offer compelling reasons for discarding the notion of the visual arts in favor of the spatial arts? I don’t think so, but also I cannot see that it greatly matters in our context whether one treats visual arts or spatial arts as basic. What matters, rather, is how the spatial and/or visual elements are put to use in the creation of artistic meaning. Summers goes over the relevant considerations both in his essays of the 1980s and in his book, but he limits himself to a few very general assertions and points. He seems to believe that traditional art historical categories are biased towards ‘perception’, or, sometimes, ‘psychology’. He seems further to think that this both induces art historians to neglect spatial categories, and that traditional categories are ‘formalist’ is some malign or impoverished sense. A quick retort to Summers’s criticisms would be that spatial arts are made to be seen (even such works as the great mosaics of La Venta, which were made then buried, were designed is ways that evidently and massively similar to countless other works of visual art),
and this seeing is inevitably part of human psychology. Nor has Summers offered any reasons for thinking that all of the great, mainline works in art history (Summers often cites in this context the works of Erwin Panofsky) are impoverished on account of their formalism (for the best criticism of formalist accounts known to me, one that shows how a formalist account as normally understood cannot be part of the basic levels of description and explanation of visual artworks, see Wollheim (2001)). If Summers were nonetheless to insist on treating spatial (not visual) arts as basic, our focus on artistic meaning as the putting to use of artistic elements would not be affected beyond an occasional non-substantive editorial change from the phrase ‘visual art(s)’ to the phrase ‘spatial art(s)’.
Having fleshed out Summers’s account with the invaluable additions from Gombrich, Eco, and Schapiro, I can now turn to the basic structural distinction within the visual arts, which I shall treat under the headings of ‘aboutness’ and ‘ornament’.
References and Works Consulted:
Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics (1976)
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960)
--‘Meditations on a Hobby-Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form’, in Meditations on a Hobby-Horse (1963)
George Kubler, The Shape of Time (1962)
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Meyer Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs”, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (1994)
David Summers, ‘”Form”, Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics and the4 Problem of Art Historical Description’, in Critical Inquiry (1989)
--Real Metaphor: Towards a Redefinition of the ‘Conceptual’ Image’, in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1991), ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey
--Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2003)
Richard Wollheim, ‘On Formalism and Pictorial Organization’, in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2001)