I turn now to the question of the constitutive internal complexity of visual artworks, and as always here with the guiding concern to show the resources for artistic meaningfulness. Later in the book I’ll attempt to show and analyze how the central characteristics of this complexity are recruited into richly elaborated artworks. I treat this complexity at two levels: first at the level of composition (the conception of which must be freed from its traditional restriction to the great tradition of European tableaus from Giotto to the present), then at the content-bearing level of representation (a consideration foreshadowed a negativo from the previous post’s analysis of Arthur Danto’s struggle to explicate the concept of embodied aboutness).
What is composition in the visual arts? Thomas Puttfarken’s authoritative art-historical study The Discovery of Pictorial Composition reconstructs the development and conceptualization of composition from Giotto onwards, a development that crystallizes the artistic conception of order as what occurs in successful uses of a ‘tableau’, that is, a rigidly bounded, rectangular support upon which paint has been deposited so as to elicit and reward attention to depicted figures in determinate spatial relationships with each other and formal relationships with the edges of the support. As Puttfarken documents, composition comes to be thought of and practiced as something like the following: composition is a feature of a bounded, planar space that contains multiple pictorial elements. The elements are inflected by their relationships with each other and with the (typically rectangular) edges of the plane. The elements are typically and univocally grasped spatially by their placement within three zones of spatial depth: foreground, middleground, and background. Elements are not typically placed symmetrically in a rigid manner, but are rather distributed across the planar surface so as to set up dynamic visual interactions between and among elements (for the concept of visual dynamics, see below). A successful composition is thought to produce a dynamic harmony among elements, as opposed to either a static arrangement or an unresolved interaction. One practical paradigm of (typically) successful composition is exhibited by many works of Claude Lorrain, wherein framing elements (especially trees) align on either or both edges vertically with the edges of the canvas, and spatial recession from foreground to background is created and marked by alternating light and dark planes, across which a depicted or readily imagined path from foreground elements to background elements is indicated.
Puttfarken rightly notes that this modern European conception of composition in the visual arts can hardly exhaust what we mean by composition, and like David Summers he cites Meyer Schapiro’s recognition that much of the world’s pictorial art, including and especially Paleolithic southwestern European painting of caves uses the unmodified and so bumpy surfaces of cave walls, and shows no indication whatsoever of edges or borders indicating the limits of the pictorial treatment.
So Puttfarken proposes a more capacious characterization of composition that would capture the dynamics of Lascaux as much as Claude: pictorial composition should be defined “not simply as the calculated and controlled arrangement of planimetric relationship, but as the way (or ways) in which figures and objects, settings, and whole pictorial worlds relate, embody, modify, even subvert and deny the4 basic formal intention of the bounded image and the viewer’s privilege as it is defined by it . . . The aim of pictorial composition . . . the visual conveying of meaning and significance.” (Puttfarken, p. 30)
Whereas the canonical conception of composition in the European and North American visual arts for the past half-millenium has been that of the tableau, the articulate conceptualization of the elements of composition is more recent, and is particularly associated with the teaching methods developed in the Bauhaus in the 1920s. A later and widely used product of such conceptualization is Maurice de Sausmarez’s Basic Design of 1964, which treats the dynamic potentials within points, lines, planes, and colors in various spatial relationships with each other, their material support, and the edges of the field within which they occur.
The term ‘dynamic potentials’ refers to a perceptual and/or imaginative characteristic of visual items to (seemingly) expand, contract, or link up or uncouple with other visual items, depending upon their particular placements and arrangements. In the teaching conception of the Bauhaus and de Sausmarez, the tendency is to treat such dynamic potentials through consideration abstract elements, especially the relatively simple and regular geometrical elements of points, lines, rectangles, and circles. But such treatment cannot exhaust what we might mean by the term ‘visual dynamics’, as it ignores the effects of figuration, of historically stabilized patterns of attention, and of the relations of the elements internal to the visual rendering to relevant factors and dimensions outside the depiction, including in particular the position of the viewer, the placement of the internally differentiated visual artifact within a broader spatial context, and the uses of the artifact in ritual or theatrical performance.
It seems to me that much of this compositional thinking, both with regard to the conception of the tableau and of visual dynamics, has been largely discarded and forgotten. Academics have mounted tombstones with the words ‘semiotics’, ‘reading’, ‘theory’, and ‘identity’ over the graves over the graves of artists and educators. Perhaps there is an illuminating analogy with the recent neoliberal epoch of capitalism: just as the rise of neoliberalism induced a great period of political reaction, and was somehow bound to its symptoms of decline of mass political movements, anti-unionism, massively increased inequalities of income and wealth, fetishization of identity, and the treatment of the ahistorical neo-Kantianism of John Rawls as the leading political philosophy of Western societies; so the rise of distinctively contemporary art, with the loss of interest in composition, was somehow also bound to the losses of concern with manifestos, bohemian subcultures, historical thinking in the arts, and to the rise of ‘theory’ as an authoritative guide to thinking about artistic achievement. Perhaps too the loss of interest in composition was bound to the historical judgments that both of its central exemplars, the European tableau conception and the modernist conception of advanced art as carried by experimentation with formal elements in abstract art, were things of the past. But of course one can follow those historical vicissitudes of taste without amnesia by developing a broader and better-grounded sense of the compositional dimensions of visual art. For the richest such conception known to me I turn to the writings of Rudolf Arnheim, in particular the second edition of his classic Art and Visual Perception, and his last sustained work, The Power of the Center, with the focus on his later definitive statement.
Whereas de Sausmarez offers the conception of an isolated, episodic visual experience understood as “at one and the same time a receiving of fragmentary information, a giving of form to these visual sensations and the arousing of felt response”, and starts from spots in clusters and zig-zags (de Sausmarez, pp. 13 and 20), Arnheim starts from the existential features of embodied viewers and the attractiveness of and interest in centers of visual attention. The relevant existential features concern the basic attitudes in which human beings conceptualize themselves amongst other human beings. One attitude, particularly prominent in infants, involves seeing oneself as the center of the world, so that the world seems to radiate out from oneself, with an inverse correlation between the relative distance of phenomena from oneself and the relative strength and intensity of one’s concern with the phenomena, which further manifest themselves as directed towards or away from oneself. The second attitude arises from the recognition that one is only one center among others—family members, associations, nations, and humanity as a whole. Abstractly and thinly considered, the two attitudes are irreconcilable, and “the interaction of the two tendencies represents a fundamental task of life. The proper ratio between the two must be found for existence in general as well as for every particular encounter between the inner and outer centers.” (Arnheim (1982), p. 2) Arnheim understandably calls the two attitudes or tendencies the ‘centric’ and the ‘eccentric’, and the basic postulate of the book is that artistic composition is motivated and structured by the concern to symbolize the interactions between two basic, differing systems of centric and eccentric compositional concerns. The prototype of centric composition is a symmetrical sunburst pattern (p. 4), with the circle as a ‘center’ (a technical term in Arnheim which means first of all a focus of energy, but also something placed in the middle some field (p. 13)):
The prototype of an eccentric composition arises with the introduction of a second element, something that also is a center. The first center is then inflected towards the second; “it acknowledges the existence of other centers by acting upon them and being acted upon by them” (p. 5). Arnheim illustrates how a second element instaurates an eccentric system with a simple diagram:
The first diagram (a) exemplifies a centric composition wherein a center sends out a vector whose activity evaporates at some indeterminate distance from the center. The latter diagrams represent eccentric compositions, the middle one showing a first center acting upon a second, the third diagram showing the second center acting upon or being attracted to the first.
A second major factor, the acknowledgement of which in visual compositions induces asymmetry and so eccentricity, is the earth and its gravitational force: “the geometric center of the earth is its dynamic center as well . . . The dominant pull of gravity makes the space w live in asymmetrical. Geometrically,, there is no difference between up and down; dynamically, the difference is fundamental. In the field of forces pervading our living space, any upward movement requires the investment of special energy, whereas downward movement can be accomplished by mere dropping or by merely removing any supports that keep objects from falling.” (pp. 14-16)
Having laid out the existential conditions of compositional dynamism, Arnheim then incorporate any and all of the insights of the Bauhaus-de Sausmarez lines of thinking, without being constrained by Eurocentric and/or abstractionist prejudices. I here refrain from further summary of Arnheim’s views, as my concern at this point is only to show what compositional resources, as articulated in traditional accounts, can be recruited into artistic meaningfulness. Arnheim’s account is as far as I can tell consistent with the general account of embodied vision and fundamental metaphoricity outlined earlier in this book, and has perhaps the further advantage that it avoids allegations of certain problems allegedly endemic to at least Lakoff’s account. A number of critics (see for example the writings of Tsur and Verstegen in the bibliography below) have rejected Lakoff’s account of metaphor in art. The critics have alleged that Lakoff goes wrong in insisting that metaphor in the visual arts and poetry is a one-way affair. So on Lakoff’s account if the metaphor ‘life is a journey’ occurs in an artwork as part of its artistic meaning, then the (relatively determinate) frame ‘journey’ maps onto the (relatively indeterminate) target ‘life’, and thereby ‘life’ is conceptualized in part through characteristics proper to ‘journey’ (for example, life has a beginning and an end, life involves moving through places and stages, living a life involves effort, etc.) But, on Lakoff’s account, there is no reciprocal effect in metaphorization: ‘journey’ does not take on characteristics of ‘life’. Critics have alleged that this misses the characteristic phenomenology of the arts, wherein all semantically active elements interact with and inflect the meanings of each other and the ultimate sense of the whole. Whatever the accuracy of the charges against Lakoff’s understanding of metaphor in art, Arnheim’s account shows how the basic Lakoffian points concerning motivation through existential features (e.g. ‘up is more’ because gravitational force is overcome through effort, stacking raises the level of a stack, etc.) can be acknowledged within an account that provides resources for the analysis of the complexity of artistically meaningful structures and the irreducibility and non-finite character of artistic meaning.
In my next post I turn to the second, and conceptually secondary, resource of artistic meaningfulness given through the internal complexity of artworks, that is, representation or figuration.
References and Works Consulted:
Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1974) --The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982)
Maurice de Sausmarez, Basic Design: The Dynamics of Visual Form (1964)
Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400-1800 (2000)
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)
Reuven Tsur, ‘Lakoff’s Roads Not Taken’, in Pragmatics & Cognition (1999)
Ian Verstegen, ‘Is Lakoff Arnheimian?’, in Debates in Aesthetics (2022)