Having considered composition and representation as major aspects of the basic internal complexity of visual artworks, I turn to a sketch and some reflection on decoration, an aspect of visual art that is prominent cross-culturally and trans-historically, and which nonetheless is either neglected or given only passing discussion in the visual arts. However, as the great anthropologist of art Alfred Gell notes, a quick and dispassionate survey of the world’s art indicates that decorative art is, at least quantitatively, the most predominant of all visual art forms. Gell offers the irresistible suggestion that the relative neglect of decorative art is partly due to its lack of prestige in Western art, and partly due to the fact that across many sub-genres of decorative art it is a kind of art largely made by women. Later in the book I’ll treat decorative art primarily as an aspect of pottery, while here I’ll mostly restrict myself to a sketch and explication of the account given in E. H. Gombrich’s The Sense of Order, supplemented by some consideration of Richard Wollheim’s suggestion, itself building on Gombrich’s account, that rhythm is both a constitutive feature of and an artistic value produced through decoration.
Gombrich begins the investigation of decorative art by positing a fundamental conceptual distinction between meaning and order in human life. The distinction is rooted in human organisms’ most basic needs and interests. In relating to itself and to its environment, the human beings ask themselves two types of questions: What? And Where? The answers to the ‘What?’ questions are objects that are important to the organism, while answers to the ‘Where?’ questions relate the organisms spatial and temporal orientation to its environment. The ‘meaning’ of anything is the ‘what’, any and all objects that relate to the organisms’ needs and interests; ‘order’ relates to orientation and the Meaning and order relate to organisms’ answers to the questions ‘what?’ and ‘where’ in relationship to its environment and the needs and interests of the organisms. Meaning concerns objects that are important to the organism; order relates to temporal and spatial orientation and the associated frameworks within which the organism and its objects are placed and interrelated. For Gombrich (and very much in line with my earlier discussion of embodiment), the most conceptually basic form of orientation arises from the sense of balance, and with it the sense of up and down. Next in the conceptual line comes the temporal orientation of before and after, and the spatial orienting pairs of near and far, higher and lower, and adjoining and separate (Gombrich, pp. 1-2). A key point (Gombrich calls it a ‘fact’), and again one closely related to points already introduced here, is that “temporal and spatial orders converge in our experience”, as evidenced for example by the fact that “language speaks of patterns in time and of rhythms in space” (p. 10). Various such patterns and rhythms arise in their most primitive form throughout the process of living—the heartbeat and breathing--, and in basic forms of action and movement such as “swimming, crawling, flying, or running”, and in countless other human activities, from rocking a baby to drumming one’s fingers in irritation (p. 11). As these primitive somatic and organic rhythms are taken up into structured activities, such as a child bouncing a ball, a secondary articulation emerges, such as the child alternating hands or clapping her hands between bounces. This further articulation that enriches the primary activity Gombrich calls ‘graded complication’, and reflection on this “reveals its psychological kinship with ornamentation in the visual arts and in music” and manifests ‘the sense of order’ (p. 13).
To see how these basic existential concerns for meaning and order, together with our sense of the rhythmic structuring of life, are articulated into complex hierarchical structures and ultimately into visual artworks, one can look to the ways in which motor skills are acquired and developed. Mastering a skill (such as typing, riding a bicycle, or playing the piano) requires first of all breaking down the practice of the skill into basic, as it were sub-meaningful actions (learning the positions of ‘r’ and ‘t’ on a keyboard and alternately typing them; propelling the bicycle in a straight line by pedaling without turning; doing five-finger exercises), which once learned can then, together with many other such basic actions, be incorporated into complex, hierarchically structured exercises of skill (typing the first draft of a book; riding Paris-Roubaix; playing the Mephisto Waltz). An additional point of great importance is that the structuring of complex, goal-directed tasks through repetition and varying of sub-meaningful actions “records and preserves the pleasure in control” within the accomplishment of tasks like plaiting baskets, weaving cloth, chipping stone, or carving wood, and so connects pleasure to the rise of the decorative arts, which in their typical instances globally manifest such repetition (p. 14).
Gombrich introduces two more basic characteristics to complete the account of decoration. First, he notes, particularly with regard to the decoration of the human body, that “an order is superimposed on an existing order, respecting or sometimes contradicting the symmetries of the organic form . . . Such adornment always means modification of the original structure” (p. 65). Second, he returns to the concept of graded complication with the example of bouncing a ball. The primary activity of bouncing “corresponds to a composition of elements”, and the secondary clapping or switching hands “has the character of ‘decoration’ since it adjusts its hierarchies to the given realities of the game”. (p. 75) Graded complication is necessarily hierarchical, in that a secondary organization (bodily decoration; clapping) is superimposed upon a primary organization (the human body; bouncing a ball). The instauration of such hierarchical organization requires two conceptually distinct steps. Initially, there is a framing whereby the primary organization is acknowledged, treated as, and marked as a unit, and so there is simultaneously introduced a sense of what is within and what is outside of the primary organization. This framing is followed by filling wherein motifs are introduced and arranged in patterned ways to create a secondary order. Upon such ur-achievement of hierarchical organization further structures can be built from linking whereby multiple secondary organizations (that is, ornaments) are connected, whether by linking within the primary organization or linking across to other organized forms. (p. 75)
There is a great deal more material in this large book, but what I take to be the basic points are all included in the preceding sketch. I’ll return to the book and more detailed material in considering instances and aspects of artistic meaning in tattoos and pots. Here I’ll conclude with a consideration of how the sense of the decorative can extend into the most sophisticated and refined kinds of artistic meaningfulness, as evidenced in Richard Wollheim’s account of decoration in Venetian painting. Wollheim wrote an appreciative though in parts quite critical review of Gombrich’s book on decoration shortly after its publication. Wollheim praised the book for its rooting decoration in the natural history of humanity (I think this largely refers to the points that I summarized above with regard to the senses of orientation and organic rhythms), but noted a fundamental problem with Gombrich’s account arising from the use of the conceptual binary of meaning and order, together with a problem about the character of pictorial perception inherited from Art and Illusion (I very briefly discussed this in my previous post, so I’ll leave it unexplicated here), that is: Gombrich’s account of the hierarchical orders of meaning and graded complication seems appropriate when the primary and secondary subjects of an artwork are as it were dissonant; one might reasonably think that the viewer shifts her attention back-and-forth between the two orders. But what of the cases, countless in the world’s art, where the two subjects are consonant, where the decoration articulates and contributes to the meaning of the primary subject? A decade later Wollheim tries to show how such a collaboration between subject and decoration works at the most refined and richest levels of artistic meaningfulness, what I have called following Patrick Maynard artistic meaning at full stretch. Wollheim starts by declaring the “fundamental decorative processes” to be “one, abstraction or simplification, which gives rise to the basic decorative units; two, repetition, or (better) near-repetition, which combines these units into strings, and then these strings into more complex strings; and, three, rhythm, and, sometimes, closure” (p. 57). I have not yet broached Wollheim’s first characterization about the origin of decorative elements through ‘abstraction or simplification’; I think it’s right with regard to an enormous range of the world’s decoration, but does not quite make sense of humanity’s earliest known decorations, including the markings on the so-called Blombos Pebble (c. 80K BP0) and the incised grids on the ostrich shells of the Diepkloof Rock Shelter (both from South Africa), to which I’ll return. In any case it is the third characteristic, rhythm, that is important for Wollheim’s account the Venetian sense of decoration. Wollheim’s explication is brief and highly condensed, but he says that rhythm “lifts decoration out of the field of mere pattern”, and introduces, at least in the Venetian case, a new kind of expressiveness that he calls ‘fragility’, which arises from interruptions or breaks with patterns that manifest “at once an approximation to, but ultimately a careful avoidance of, imbalance” (ibid). How might the expressiveness of decorative fragility enter into artistic meaning?
Wollheim first considers a Venetian oeuvre wherein the works lack rhythm, the works of a Spanish painter whose adopted city was Venice, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871-1949). At his best in small sketches and etchings where he captures “that generalised air of decoration which hangs over the city like a kind of light” (p. 58)
But, so Wollheim the connoisseur asserts, in his paintings Fortuny tries to raise the decorative content to the level of art, “it is beyond his powers, he cannot”. An artist who can raise the Venetian sense of decoration to art is Veronese, for example in The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (1565).
Wollheim gives one of his incomparable descriptions of this painting that defies summary, so I quote the key parts. First he claims that there is a swag, that is, a hanging piece of fabric, that lies under the arch and links the left and right parts of the painting; the reader is startled to read then that “The swag is the naked body of the saint, who is being lowered down on to a wooden block, where he will be secured and then beaten to death” (p. 59) The figure of Saint Sebastian appropriates a basic element of decoration in the service of artistic meaning: “the decorative rhythm of the painting is momentarily disturbed around the swag, or at the point where the body of the Saint is exposed to our view . . . It intensifies to an unbearable pitch the tragedy that is about to occur”.
Even more startling is Wollheim’s interpretation of the hooded figure, which he asserts “is fragility” (note: not expresses or represents fragility, but is fragility itself). The hooded figure appears to stumble and then recovers himself. “He rights himself, and, with him, so does the picture. The flow returns, but meanwhile, and not accidentally, he has held up the rhythm, if only for a moment, and in that moment of suspension . . . Veronese registers poignancy.” I take Wollheim’s interpretation to be, among many other things, the most forceful imaginable riposte to Gombrich’s (seeming) neglect of the possibility that meaning and order, and so pictorial subject and decoration, can be consonant, and further that decorative elements can contribute, irreplaceably and massively, to the meaning and significance of the pictorial subject.
I have postponed consideration of the elements of decoration, and instead rehearsed Wollheiim’s astonishing interpretation of the artistic uses of decoration, in order to suggest a further point about the scope of the philosophy of visual art. I have earlier suggested that such a philosophical account should cover the full range of the visual arts, from tattooing and decoration of pottery to drawing, painting, and sculpture, and also include the contribution of the visual arts to the performing arts of dance and theater. Wollheim’s review of Gombrich, together with his interpretation of Veronese’s painting, indicates a further point about the range: the philosophy should consider not just visual artworks, but also the social, political, and historical dimensions of art practices, and the roots of these within what Wollheim called the natural history of humanity.
In a final post before turning to the basic visual artforms—body decoration and tattooing, pottery, masking, drawing, painting, and sculpture—I’ll consider a final general topic, one that is frequently mentioned in philosophy of art and art criticism, but which is rarely considered at length, perhaps because of its difficulty and elusiveness: I mean the topic of pleasure. Can we say anything intelligible, plausible, and even illuminating about the roles of pleasure in the making and viewing of visual art? I’ll try to develop the rudiments of an affirmative answer in my next post.
References and Works Consulted:
Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927)
Roger Fry, Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (1926)
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998)
Jason Gaiger, ‘Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm’, in The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (2019), ed. Cheyne, Hamilton, and Paddison
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960)
--The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (1979)
Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (1992)
Patrick Maynard, Drawing Distinctions (2005)
Philip Rawson, Ceramics (1971)
--Drawing (1987)
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
Dorothy Washburn and Donald Crowe, Symmetries of Culture: Theory and Practice of Plane Pattern Analysis (1988)
Richard Wollheim, ‘The Psychology of Decorative Art [Review of Gombrich 1979]’, in The Burlington Magazine (May 1979)
--‘The Shape of the Story’, in Modern Painters (circa 1990(?))