A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art (Aesthetics and Contemporary Art) 1350073830, 9781350073838

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

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Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Series Editors: Tiziana Andina and David Carrier Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract terms. But the true significance of art for philosophy, and philosophy for art, can only be established through close analysis of specific examples. Art is increasingly being used to introduce and discuss problems in philosophy. And many works of art raise important philosophical issues of their own. But the resources available have been limited. Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the first series of its kind, will provide a productive context for that indispensable enterprise. The series promotes philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists, showcasing researches that exemplifies cuttingedge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic rigour and insight of the contemporary world. Editorial Board: Alessandro Arbo (University of Strasbourg, Fr.), Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio), Leeza Chebotarev (Private Art Advisor), Paolo D’Angelo (University of Roma Tre), Noël Carroll (CUNY), Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick), Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin), Cynthia Freeland (University of Houston), Peter Lamarque (University of York), Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY), Luca Illetterati (University of Padova), Gao Jianping (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Birte Kleemann (Michael Werner Gallery), Joachim Pissarro (CUNY), Sara Protasi (University of Puget Sound), Shen-yi Liao (University of Puget Sound), Ken-Ichi Sasaki (Nihon University), Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Uppsala), Vincenzo Trione (IULM, International University of Language and Communication, Milano). Titles published in the Series Aesthetics, Philosophy and Martin Creed, edited by Elisabeth Schellekens and Davide Dal Sasso Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll, by David Carrier Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili, by Paul Gladston Gaga Aesthetics, by Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art, by David Carrier The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World, by Richard Kalina The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi, edited by Tiziana Andina and Erica Onnis ii

A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art Mark Staff Brandl

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Mark Staff Brandl, 2023 Mark Staff Brandl has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © 2013 Mark Staff Brandl All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-3500-7383-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-7384-5 eBook: 978-1-3500-7385-2

Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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For my late father and mother, Earl B. Brandl and Ruth Staff Brandl; my great friend, the late Th. Emil Homerin; my sister, Marcia Brandl-Willhite; and my wife, Cornelia Kunz Brandl.

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Contents List of Figures and Table Acknowledgments Notes on Typographic Style

Introduction 1 What is Metaphor? 2 What is Visual Metaphor? 3 Why Visual Metaphors Matter 4 The Grammar of Visual Metaphor 5 Metaphor(m): A Theory of Central Visual Trope 6 Conceiving Visual Metaphors 7 Visual Metaphor in Criticism: Two Contemporary Painters’ Works 8 Art History Timelines are Visual Metaphors Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

viii x xii 1 17 27 45 67 93 115 129 149 179 181 205 223

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Figures and Table Figures 1.1 Chapter 1: What is Metaphor?, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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2.1 Chapter 2: What is Visual Metaphor?, Part One, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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2.2 Chapter 2: What is Visual Metaphor?, Part Two, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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3.1 Chapter 3: Why Visual Metaphors Matter, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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3.2 Chapter 3: Why Visual Metaphors Matter, Part Two, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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4.1 Chapter 4: The Grammar of Visual Metaphor, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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5.1 Chapter 5: Metaphor(m), Part One, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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5.2 Chapter 5: Metaphor(m), Part Two, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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5.3 The Diagram of Metaphor(m). © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

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5.4 The Diagram of Vincent van Gogh’s Metaphor(m). © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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6.1 Chapter 6: Conceiving Visual Metaphors, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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6.2 Layout and Blocking for Chapter 6: Conceiving Visual Metaphors, ink on paper, 2021, 11 × 10 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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Figures and Table

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7.1 Chapter 7: Visual Metaphor in Criticism, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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7.2 Charles Boetschi, Color Unit 24.1, 1998, acrylic on canvas, 200 × 200 cm. © 1998 Charles Boetschi

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7.3 The Diagram of Charles Boetschi’s Metaphor(m). © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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7.4 Leonard Bullock, Seinpost, 2001–2002; oil, encaustic and spray on linen; 63 × 58 cm. © 2001 Leonard Bullock

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7.5 The Diagram of Leonard Bullock’s Metaphor(m). © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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8.1 Chapter 8: Art History Timelines are Visual Metaphors, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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8.2 Art History Timeline Models. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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8.3 Comics History Timeline Models. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

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9.1 Conclusion, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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Table 8.1 Equivalences in Timelines, Fine Art and Comic Art History. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl

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Acknowledgments First, I would like to thank David Carrier and Tiziana Andina for inviting me to write this book for their important series. Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge the encouragement and assistance I have received from many people throughout my long journey researching, writing, painting, and drawing the essays and artworks culminating in this book. I am deeply indebted to and appreciative of my PhD advisor, from ten years ago, Doktorvater in German, Professor Dr. Philip Ursprung. He not only set an amazing standard through his own art historical work, but motivated me while keeping me on track while I was writing the dissertation in which the ideas here were first developed. After having had some difficult experiences with other academics in the past who found my interests too far outside the acceptable consensus, I was literally floored by Dr. Ursprung’s ability to see to the heart of my thoughts and desires, often even more clearly than I could myself, and then to encourage me to apply them in original ways. He has been a source of inspiration in my scholarship and my art, above and beyond that of most other teachers I have encountered. This object before you would not have existed without him. Likewise, my second advisor, Professor Dr. Andreas Langlotz was a continual source of inspiration to me concerning cognitive science and cognitive metaphor theory. I also wish to thank those who have consistently supported me in my idiosyncratic combination of interests: painting, installation, art history, philosophy, art theory, and comics. Dr. Daniel F. Ammann has been my exciting and imaginative dialogue partner since my arrival in Switzerland in 1988. This theory began in free-for-all brainstorming-like discussions with him. The recently deceased Dr. Thomas Emil Homerin was my main intellectual discourse partner since we were 10 years old. He was often there for me even from afar when I needed to sound out ideas—he in Rochester, New York or Istanbul, Turkey, or Cairo, Egypt or elsewhere, and me in Switzerland, Italy, the Caribbean or Chicago, Illinois. There are many, many others who have been direct sources of inspiration and information to me when I needed them. These include: Dr. George Lakoff, a source for my theory, whom I first called out of the blue, but who took time for me at a peak of his media fame. Dr. Cornel West has always inspired me, both through his writings and recently personally as well. Dr. David Carrier, an x

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internationally important art historian and philosopher, has been a continually stirring correspondent for decades via email and his own numerous books, and now as series editor. Dr. Tiziana Andina, likewise an impressive and important aesthetician and whom I am also now thrilled to have as my series editor. The late Dr. Arthur Danto could have viewed me as troublesome, especially as I challenge George Dickie’s philosophy of the ontology of art based on Danto’s work; he was far too famous and important to have repeatedly taken time to comment on my theories-in-progress as he did. Dr. James Elkins, another superstar of current art history, who truly deserves this status, also found time amidst his prolific productivity to comment on aspects of my thought. Comic book artist Gene “the Dean” Colan, famed for his artwork for seven decades, has inspired me since I was a child. He and his late wife Adrienne became my friends in recent years and their continual, personal comment on and support of my work was motivating, until both of their deaths. Great thanks go to Colleen Coalter, Bloomsbury editor, for her understanding and support through all the setbacks of the last few, exceptionally vexing years. There are many more who have helped me whom I do not mention here: thanks to you all. Finally, thanks and love to my wife Cornelia Kunz Brandl, who believes in me even when I am following strange, seldom-traveled paths of my own devising (a frequent habit of mine), but who also walks them with me (physically and metaphorically), being a much-needed analytical and motivational discussion partner in four languages: English, German, Swissgerman, and that of love and understanding. Switzerland, 2021

Notes on Typographic Style Tropes The typographical conventions of style in this paper for presenting figurative phrases, metaphors and metaphor themes are the recently established ones of the preeminent journal in the field, Metaphor and Symbol. Figurative sentences or phrases are set in quoted lower-case italics (e.g., “My soul is an enchanted boat”). Expressions of foundational metaphors are set in quoted upper-case italics (e.g., “LIFE IS A JOURNEY”). Subordinate instances of these foundational themes are set in quoted lower-case italics (“Our relationship has come a long way”). This is based on George Lakoff ’s work, but with some slight changes. Thus, although he and his co-authors’ books established the field, quotations from their works prefigure and do not always follow this scheme.

Capitalization Names of historical periods, styles, movements, schools, and trends are capitalized when they serve as proper nouns designating specific, usually time and location-bound, entities. They are lower-cased when the word is intended in a general sense or as a broad classification. Therefore, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway are Modernists, but Julian Schnabel and Thomas Pynchon are not, although each may consider himself a modernist. Likewise, many literary theories today are poststructuralist. Paul de Man was one of the leading American Poststructuralists. This is most important in this book in differentiating between postmodern and Postmodern(ism). The time we are in now is after the modern has lost hegemony, thus it is postmodern. However, there is an important subset of that in the arts, from the 1970 till recently, where certain concerns are accentuated such as irony, appropriation, an overvaluation of textuality: this stylistic movement is capitalized Postmodern.

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Introduction

A personal beginning This chapter is the introduction, yet begins with a personal, subjective prelude. How did I come to study the subject of this book, applying analytic philosophy to visual metaphor in contemporary visual art? In the early 1980s, the artworld was in an uproar. I had just become a professional artist, but had also studied art history and philosophy. It was increasingly clear that Modernism had, surprisingly for us then, indeed been a “period,” not the ultimate state of culture, and furthermore that it was slowly coming to a close. Postmodernism seemed a little insipid, even unappealing at first, as diverse anti- or retro-styles vied for the pole position. French literary theory of a Deconstructivist bent slowly became hegemonic, a situation in place until recently. Yet, for most artists and authors, Post-Modernism (still capitalized and hyphenated at that time) seemed an opportunity to seek new theoretical inspiration, to free oneself of the previously prevailing artworld Formalism, while hopefully also offering a way to avoid the trap of what threatened to be a mise en abyme of sophistry under the first influences of Poststructuralism. In heated discussions in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere where I was active, artists sought out new interpretations of the inevitably intertwined dialectic of form and content. Art was clearly not all about form; it was plain to see that creators had something to say, to discover. Equally, art was not all about the inability to say anything, about illustrating the unreliability of form as sole content. There was a widespread recognition that, indeed, form (in a broadened sense) was a tool for discovery and yet also the discovery itself. At first the source of inspiration for many artists was Jacques Derrida and the Yale Deconstructivists such as Paul de Man. Derrida, the French literary philosopher and the founder of Deconstruction, argues that much of philosophy rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories. He sees language as writing, uses the metaphor of “text” for all experience. Derrida

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

also suggests that there is no possibility of intentional meaning. Deconstruction can and has been disparaged as nihilistic, solipsistic, and apolitical, but has also contributed greatly to the contemporary critical analysis of art and society, attacking seemingly fixed notions of gender, race, and privilege. I found Derrida’s notions most interestingly presented in Writing and Difference1 and Margins of Philosophy,2 although Of Grammatology3 is his most popular book. Many of the theorists affiliated with Yale University in the late 1970s, including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom, are especially influential in literary criticism and, as they are influenced by Derrida, are called the “Yale Deconstructivists.” One of De Man’s key texts in my opinion is The Resistance to Theory.4 Theory in this vein remains the most powerful force in literature and art departments in universities and Hochschulen around the United States, Europe, and indeed most of the Western world. As a rather trendy art gallery owner once commented to me in 2003, “Aren’t ALL contemporary artists Derridaian and Poststructuralist now?”5 While this may appear to be true, many of the artists, authors, and students who identify themselves with poststructuralist thought do not fully understand it, not truly applying their own preferred theory. They are generally citing it as an influence for fashionable reasons, verbally espousing many of its tenets, such as the impossibility of fixed interpretation and the death of the author. Denis Dutton describes this situation in his article of 1992, “Delusions of Postmodernism”: That contemporary artists are as eager as ever for attention as unique individuals is demonstrated by the fact that they tend to treat their work as an expression of individual subjectivity in discussion and documentation. That the privileged position of the author/artist is not entirely dead in the minds of artists is also indicated by the unceasing tendency of artists everywhere—including those who style themselves “postmodern”—angrily to dispute hostile critical interpretations of their work which “fail to comprehend” their intentions, which “miss the point” of their work. For many artists, complete freedom of interpretation is fine as a general philosophical theory applied to other people’s work, but not to their own.6

What began as a situation promising a possibility for more free artistic play, unfortunately became the dominant master of the academy. Renowned art historian, psychologist, and art critic Donald Kuspit has asserted in an email that, “In the artworld, followers of Derrida are not against hegemony; they now possess almost complete hegemony.”7

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It was in this context that my study of metaphor theory arose—perhaps a bit defensively, yet also out of enthusiasm. In fact, it was more of a return to previous pursuits than a new interest. Throughout my university studies, publications, and free time, I have been actively involved in aesthetics, the analytical philosophy of art. This passion operates in concert with my ardor for and interaction with the possibilities of an “extended” interpretation of the (oft supposedly dead) medium of painting, of installation art, of comics as an artform, and of display sign-painting. Indeed, I even began my doctoral studies in the department of English Language and Literature (called in German Anglistik) in order to concentrate on the linguistic options of my endeavor. Later, after I had completed the learning of Latin as a portion of my studies, another opportunity arose as the University of Zurich finally had a scholar of modern and contemporary art as a professor, Philip Ursprung, whom I met personally when we both were speakers at the convention of art historians in the United States in Boston—the 2006 College Art Association conference. Almost simultaneously, I became acquainted with Andreas Langlotz of the University of Basel, an expert in cognitive linguistics. These events led me to change to art history, leave my original, more orthodox literature advisor, and begin afresh with the stimulating new influences of Ursprung and Langlotz. Professor Ursprung not only understood my focus, but encouraged me to reach for a whole new form of dissertation, suggesting that I not only investigate other artists’ works, both historical and contemporary, but that I also include my own art in it as an integral component, as well as the performative presentation of the creation of these dissertation works and an attempt to analyze them with the tool of my theory, in the dissertation, my artworks, and a large installation. His book Grenzen der Kunst: Allan Kaprow und das Happening, Robert Smithson und die Land Art has also been very inspirational.8 This all eventually led to the present book of aesthetics. At first my theoretical research consisted of working my way through key books and articles by and about the most influential poststructuralist practitioners of literary theory and of what has come to be called “critical theory”—the expansion of literary theories into the discussions of sociopolitical questions. Simultaneously, I intensified my already existing involvement with contemporary analytic aesthetics and cognitive metaphor theories. In these fields, I was seeking points of conjecture which I felt illuminated my understanding of art in unexpected ways, yet also rang true to my experience as an active artist, art historian, philosopher, and appreciator of contemporary art by others. I was inspired by concepts from many thinkers, yet not the entirety of any sole system. I thus incorporate ideas I find enriching from a variety of

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

sources into my own theoretical construction. I now realize that an ulterior motive was also to be able to theorize myself out of the constraints of critical theory, fighting fire with fire as is often my wont. I sought to discover philosophers offering pertinent, contemporary analyses which, however, also acknowledged agency: that creators were responsible makers of meaning and not mere symptoms of societal flaws. In truth, I heartily hoped for theorists who would go even farther; I was searching for ones who suggested intelligent means of resistance to an at that time (and still now) ever-increasing dominance by the radical right of politics and mass media; likewise, I was seeking methodologies which could serve as insurrection against the even then quickly hardening academicist stifling of art in consensus and market sophistry. Books important to me then included Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method,9 Bakhtin, Essays and Dialogues on His Work edited by Gary Saul Morson,10 Arthur C. Danto’s The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,11 John Lechte’s Julia Kristeva,12 Cornel West’s Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America,13 and R. A. Sharpe’s Contemporary Aesthetics: A Philosophical Analysis.14 I learned from all these and more. However, most crucially, I found the catalytic revelation in the cognitive linguistic approach of George Lakoff and others, the antithetical revisionist theory of Harold Bloom, and the analytic philosophical publication of David Carrier and Noël Carroll. Combined, they accorded genuinely with my experience of art while also electrifying me with new possibilities for understanding art, its production, and its producers. Cognitive linguistic theory was first widely introduced in Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By15 and Lakoff and Mark Turner’s More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor.16 Bloom presented his theory initially in a trilogy of books beginning with The Anxiety of Influence.17 Carrier’s influential works notably include The Aesthetics of Comics,18 Artwriting,19 Museum Skepticism,20 and more. Carroll’s influential books include On Criticism,21 and particularly Beyond Aesthetics.22

Trope and struggle Although also first appearing in the late 80s, cognitive metaphor and the embodied mind concept took until the turn of the millennium to begin affecting the practice and understanding of creators and scholars. Cognitive linguistics is largely based on the groundbreaking work of Lakoff and his two collaborators, Turner and Johnson. Lakoff, who began as a student of Noam Chomsky, initiated

Introduction

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research which led to the creation of an important interdisciplinary, cognitive study of metaphor. Theorists involved in this approach advance the hypotheses that metaphor is the foundation of all thought, that linguistic elements are conceptually processed, and that language is chiefly determined by bodily and environmental experiences. The desire for an imminent fundamental change linked to a new understanding of trope is indeed in the air, not only for me; ever more frequently, artists and authors have begun to refer to metaphor and metaphor theory. For example, Frank Davey, a Canadian poet with an involvement in theory, states the following in an interview with Héliane Ventura in the journal Sources: Lakoff and Johnson suggest that many of our habitual metaphors are connected to our culture’s ideological investments . . . To some extent their work appears to be related to various projects of Deconstruction, in that they raise to consciousness the hidden assumptions of banally figurative language. Political and economic metaphors, they write, “can hide aspects of reality,” “they constrain our lives,” they “can lead to human degradation.” But they also argue that ordinary language is necessarily metaphoric, that cultures need the conceptual frames of metaphor to provide perspectives and coherence. And I recall that as well they examine metaphors around women—women as food (“a real dish”) or as fire (“hot babes,” “hot stuff,” “kiss of fire,” “torrid romance” etc.). It’s this . . . kind of metaphor that I play with in Back to the War in poems such as “The Complaint,” or “Sweets,” or “The Fortune Teller” . . . The ‘link’ that metaphor requires isn’t foregrounded in [my poems] but is merely latent until it is made by the reader.23

Likewise, art critic Barry Schwabsky writes of the influential New York painter Jonathan Lasker in ArtForum magazine: Jonathan Lasker once told me he thought the Minimalists had been trying to make an art without metaphor, and in fact had succeeded; but the point having been proved, he continued, there’s no longer any urgent motivation to produce more metaphor-free work.24

Metaphor theory and Bloom’s revisionism were a revelation to me. I found Bloom’s notion of agon to supplement cognitive conceptions splendidly. Bloom sees the primal activity of the creative life as one of struggling with and overcoming one’s influences by revisionistically, willfully and yet imaginatively misunderstanding them. These theories read true to my experiences and additionally offered openings to the world, criticizing the solipsism and sophistry of much other current literary theory by, among other strengths, subsuming their rivals’ insights.

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It can now be seen that the Late Modernist attempt to undermine metaphor, as described by Schwabsky and Lasker above, although necessary at that time, did not actually function as expected, but was rather a negational, metaleptic trope in itself. Moreover, Davey expresses a perception that there is a continuation between Derrida and Lakoff, and by implication analytic philosophy; this was an opinion then both controversial and, yet surprisingly, held by many. For example, in Davey’s eyes as a working poet, he finds aspects of Deconstruction and cognitive metaphor to be akin, something that both factions would heartily rebuff. The continuum containing all the theories that interest me is that of the free play of tropes, especially visual tropes. The fascination and excitement of encountering and applying new conceptual systems can lead to productive discoveries, both in the hands of creators and of scholars, whatever their final political status becomes. Applying novel theories can produce new discernments into art contemporary with a given philosophy, but also into aspects of the nature of creativity across a broader time span. Non-Poststructuralist theories offer, still at this time, atypical models, in that they ever more frequently acknowledge agency—that is, the individuals who make art experiences. This renders a chance to investigate philosophically into and speculate on the nuts and bolts of creation. Let me avow something very unmistakably: I see cognitive metaphor theory as an elaboration and yet also element of analytic aesthetics. As conceptual metaphor theory has slowly become the foremost perspective on trope, it has merged with its formerly sometimesantagonistic-viewed parent as it abandoned generative linguistics and positivism. Analytic philosophy and cognitive theory are more concerned with concepts than with words alone, thus fostering application to a wide range of artforms. An important facet of cognitive theory is that metaphors are embodied, that is, that mental concepts are constructed tropaically out of bodily experiences. These foundational perceptions can be used to structure somewhat less-physical events. This has potentially highly significant implications for visual artists, critics, and scholars. Lakoff believes that a proper appreciation for metaphor cuts through the perpetual clash between the so-called “objective” view of trope (that it is purely literary, almost decorative) and the so-called “subjective” view (that it has no direct tie to experience). He promotes an alternative that stresses the centrality of metaphor to our thinking processes, and thereby to our language and other actions. Hence, I see cognitive metaphor theory as similarly offering an alternative to Formalism and Poststructuralism in contemporary visual art by subsuming them both.

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I am using analytic philosophy and cognitive metaphor theory to proffer a mode of thinking about visual metaphor which can be applied to the analysis and creation of contemporary art, while accentuating the efforts of the makers of these objects. After the object-only orientation of Formalism, after the mediumonly focus of Deconstructivism, hopefully, this leads to a feeling of liberation, of agency. Nevertheless, this also brings with it a new sense of the burden of the past. Whereas the Formalist Modernists felt free from the past and the Deconstructivist Postmodernists are endlessly tangled in an inescapable present, authors and artists as viewed in this book are directly responsible for fashioning their own tropes through the processes of extension, elaboration, composition, interrogation, critique, transumption, and deliberate misconstrual.25 This they accomplish in and through the formal parameters of their work, with enough cultural coherence to be able to communicate, but enough originality to be significant. Important tropes cannot merely be selected from a list; they are discovered and built out of revisions of cultural possibilities, in fact, fought for and won. Thus, Bloom’s theory of antithetical revisionism also contributes an important background component to this book, as he writes: But again, why should someone crossing out of literary criticism address the problematics of revisionism? What else has Western poetry been, since the Greeks, must be the answer, at least in part. The origins and aims of poetry together constitute its powers, and the powers of poetry, however they relate to or affect the world, rise out of a loving conflict with previous poetry, rather than out of conflict with the world . . . This particularly creative aspect of a kind of primal anxiety is the tendency or process I have called “poetic misprision” and have attempted to portray in a number of earlier books.26

The heart of Bloom’s theory of misprision is the concept of an indispensable, antithetical agon of each poet. With poetry being the chief artistic discipline for Bloom, the word poet may also be replaced here with artist, which is what I do in this book. Revisionism is exalted to the central fact of artistic creativity. Agon is Bloom’s term for the conflict arising from the anxiety of influence. Each and every creator must wrestle with their precursors, the ones who inspired them to be artists in the first place. Revisionism is vastly expanded and exalted to the primal fact of artistic creativity. This is not an intellectual choice of “favorite paragon.” One cannot choose this figure, rather he, she, or they thrust themselves upon the would-be creator.27 This spar can be seen as a synecdoche of the struggle against pastness in its entirety. Since this method involves sharp opposition, Bloom calls it “antithetical.” An important aspect of this strife is the

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purposeful misreading of the precursor’s works, which Bloom terms misprision. He takes this word from Shakespeare: “So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,/” (Sonnet 87).28 “Misprision” for Shakespeare, as opposed to “mistaking,” implied not only a misunderstanding or misreading but tended also to be a punning word-play suggesting unjust imprisonment. Perhaps “misprision” in Shakespeare also means a scornful underestimation: either way, he took the legal term and gave it an aura of deliberate or willful misinterpretation.29

Creators create themselves and their works by battling their fear of being a Johnny-come-lately. “Strong” authors, as Bloom calls them, attempt to occupy the position of each of their precursor-figures, thus actually forming a new and independent spot for themselves. This, according to Bloom, is a continuous process, even against oneself and previous versions of oneself. Creators, according to him, thus attempt to imagine their works and themselves as somehow imaginatively “earlier” that their precursors. In amendment of Bloom, though, I assert that this “loving conflict” also transpires with the world, as well as individuals, as it involves tropes of bodily experience and sociopolitical factors. Creators, seeking distinctive ways to convey their experiences within their media, are necessarily forced to fence with comparable expressions of similar experiences by their predecessors, therefore primarily with their predecessors’ tropes, as well as the dominant visual tropes of societies and communities within them. Visual metaphor theory offers an important basis for the study of art, in particular its formation. Bloomian agonistic misprision completes the portrayal of the process by which creators arrive at the pictorial tropes so described. The theory of visual trope developed within this book is largely postmodern, that is, after Modernism. It is, however, in some ways against Postmodernism in the narrow, stylistic definition. It is a model unfolding the construction by artists of distinctive pictorial metaphors in the tangible forms and processes of their media. They achieve this by means of an agonistic struggle with their culture’s and predecessors’ visual tropes, doing so in order to uniquely articulate personal perceptions and experiences. Such tropes in the hands of artists are both metaphoric and meta-formal, thus yielding the punning term metaphor(m), the theory explicated in my fifth chapter.30 This word describes and embodies the core of my approach. For creators, artistic value is grounded in form, the way a work is made and its technical aspects. We must envision the concept of form in its largest application, including choices of materials, methods, processes, formats, presentational delivery, referential qualities, and intended public. Yet,

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turning Formalism on its head, these attributes in themselves are significant only due to their meta-properties as tools and modus operandi involving context, tropaic content, and cultural struggle.

This book Philosophical theory will be put in this book in the service of understanding contemporary art and its use of visual metaphor. We will analyze a theory of how meaning is embodied in contemporary, especially Postmodern, creativity: the elucidation of theoretical yet concrete tools with which artists create. I will discuss a large array and wide variety of contemporary visual art, making this something of a “multigraph,” whereas other books in this series will be more monographic in focus. The emphasis here is on the presence of philosophical thought through visual metaphor use in the works of an assortment of contemporary artists. The creators include the famous and the less well-known; friends, foes, and those personally unknown to me, familiar only through their works; indeed, a smattering of all of these. Topics include specific and close analyses of artworks and artists as well as quick mentions and broad assertions. This book is not personal reflection, beyond this introduction. I am, nevertheless, an artist as well as art historian and art theorist. Therefore, while investigating visual trope in the study of chosen subjects, I have been simultaneously working through the implications of metaphor theory on my own in paintings, painting-installations, and performance-lectures. I will not discuss my own works directly in this book. However, I will add a one-page sequential artwork, i.e., comic, at the beginning of each chapter. This selfindulgent detail serves as a hint of my artistic life, to entertain that aspect of my personality, and as an illustrational incarnation of one of my central ideas that visual metaphors are embodied both through their discovery in lived experience and then again actively within artworks. Thus, my theorization will be embodied performatively in these hopefully somewhat entertaining frontispiece pages. Additionally, implementing both the universality of tropes and their manifestation in visual art, I will be including a conceit within and unique to each chapter—a conceit in its sense of a metaphoric scheme, popular with the metaphysical poets, like John Donne, wherein an extended tropaic comparison is utilized throughout a poem, chapter, speech, or other work. Hopefully, mine are not as hyperbolic or oxymoronic as Petrarchan conceits, but rather modestly entertaining opportunities to manifest the main belief in this book: that tropes

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

are important when embodied, both in their discovery and in application. The chapter conceits appear primarily in choices of adjectives, verbs, and allusions. Each chapter of the book, then, with the minor additional elements of chapterprevailing conceits and comic sequences, suggests a plurogenic, braided interlacing of registers, a methodology much inspired by Giuliana Bruno’s book Atlas of Emotion.31

Visual metaphor The speculations in this book may apply beyond contemporary, Modernist, and particularly Postmodernist visual art; however, these are the substance of this volume. My principal proposition is that the formal, technical, and stylistic aspects of creators’ styles concretely embody content in new, culturally and historically antithetical visual metaphors. Tropes of form are sought and discovered by creators. These visual metaphors allow artists to express their desires, both those willed and those discovered within the tropes. Such visual tropes in the hands of visual artists, being both metaphoric and meta-formal, may be located in various details of the diverse forms listed above, such as, but not limited to, construction, composition, paint handling, color, exhibition form, or other qualities of a given aesthetic object. Furthermore, said visual tropes can be complexes comprised of various metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, litotes, hyperboles, metalepses, and other figurative forms beyond such linguistic analogues. These may be made more intricate, be extended, elaborated, composed, questioned, criticized, transumed, misconstrued, and/or otherwise manipulated. There have been major breakthroughs in analytic philosophy and cognitive science in understanding tropes. This began in earnest around 1980, yet has expanded and become steadily more impressive. Major cross-disciplinary communication has been cultivated concerning the connection between “poetics” and thought in general. Many approaches, including the one presented here, are inspired by and profoundly indebted to the continuing work on conceptual metaphor by Lakoff, Turner and Johnson, and the groundbreaking essay on visual metaphor by Noël Carroll. There are now many other contributors to the study, analysis, and application of trope to thought, including philosophers, especially from aesthetics and the philosophy of mind, scientists from several fields, literary and cultural theorists, artificial intelligence and computer experts, scholars of religion, scholars of literature, and even a few creative artists and authors. The standpoint animating all of this is that trope is the basis of thought,

Introduction

11

thus language is only one instance of it, not the other way round. This new concentration on the human power of cognitive imagination strengthens some old contentions of visual artists and inspires new observations, such as this book. The vast majority of these studies, however, still revolve around linguistic metaphor. Beginning with Carroll, and continuing in a few newer works, visual metaphor is also beginning to be addressed, with its similarities to—yet, more important, differences from—textual ones. Most of these have centered, however, on advertising images. There is still much to be done in studying visual metaphors in fine art, especially contemporary art. Philosophical analysis of visual metaphors in artworks is most important, but Bloom’s theory of revisionism supplies a tool for understanding the process of their discovery by artists. I will only delve into the latter when creators are discussed more meticulously, such as in Chapter 7, or their processes in Chapter 6. His “agonistic” revisionism, analytical philosophy, cognitive metaphor, and the theories of visual metaphor interlock with reciprocal rapport.32 The postmodern flowering—even, until recently, overwhelming hegemony— of literary theory, or critical theory as it is more broadly termed, has both bolstered and limited contemporary discourse on the arts, and indeed on visual creativity, with its overwhelming belief in the centrality of language. It is thus a necessity to occasionally address such postmodernist metacriticism in this book, although it will be limited. Likewise, philosophy has experienced a surprising growth in the stature of aesthetics, once the barely tolerated foster child of metaphysics, to a position of vital importance in the discipline. Major literarycritical thinkers and aestheticians have indeed made very discerning insights and speculations, which have direct pertinence for any theory of visual trope. I avoid the still almost war-like divisions between the two fields among art critics. Whereas it would be hoped that all could learn from one another, there may be even a three-pronged separation in some minds: literary criticism vs. aesthetics vs. cognitive metaphor. We must get beyond such partisan thought, fostered by petty jealousies between academic disciplines, old rivalries between schools of thought, and even simple nationalism. My theory of visual metaphor, while simple in many ways, is integrative and cross-disciplinary in its search for the actuality of the various dialectics of the creative act. Even when I occasionally focus on my disagreements with specific theorists in order to clarify the thought process in my own presentation here, this should not mask the huge debt I owe to all the philosophers and thinkers I mention. I see theorization at its best as a polyphonic dialogue, often even a stimulating argument. I may have the tendency to appear polemical, but I genuinely desire heartfelt discussion.

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

Therefore, in the following chapters, visual metaphor theory will be seeking “similar souls,” but also countering opponents. A particular strength of my approach, I feel, is that Formalism is subsumed and transumed in it, rather than denied or faithfully obeyed. It allows the incorporation of certain positive aspects of what has been called (artworld) Formalism or (literary-world) New Criticism and Structuralism, while in effect standing them on their heads, showing form to be a function of achieved content. Object-obsessed hypothesizing is shown to be a useful, but not exclusive, tool. In another vein, my theory of visual trope is an attempt to create a logic of critical interpretation, which is however purged of Post-Deconstructivist nihilism. These are two of the reasons why I see my thought as residing within the camp of analytic aesthetics. A general comment on terminology is in order. The term trope is most often used in this book when figurative language in general is meant, and visual trope for the pictorial equivalent. Metaphor is one usual term for the idea which is discussed here. Unfortunately, though, this word is used in two distinct applications, one general and one particular. Confusion often results from this failure to distinguish the species from the genus. Metaphor may mean alternately either figurative expression itself, the genus—therefore identical with figurative language or trope—or that particular instance thereof, the species, usually described as follows. A figure of speech, an implied analogy in which one thing is imaginatively compared to or identified with another, dissimilar thing. In metaphor, the qualities of something are ascribed to something else, qualities that it ordinarily does not possess.33

That is the famous description of metaphor as a “comparison without a like or as,” which is always taught in high school and secondary school literature classes: “Achilles is a lion.” Other terms bring other difficulties, all doubtlessly reflecting the various underlying philosophies of the animal under study. Various general terms include figure and figurative language. These two would cause a problem when the theory is applied to visual art as well as literature. Anything containing the word language is not interdisciplinary enough and figure in visual art is widely used to mean the human form (e.g., “figure painting”). These terms are inadequate in reference to literature anyway. They clearly reinforce views of the subject opposite to those espoused in this book. Connotations such as figure skating or ornateness come to mind, declaring metaphor to be no more than decorative fancy. There are linked terms such as scheme, conceit, symbol, rhetoric, poesy, poetics, analogy, etc. Yet each expresses a particular idea somewhat askew

Introduction

13

of the intentions here. Some of these terms describe ideas which are corollaries or particular instances of applied metaphor. In short, the problems with many of these terms reflect old, deficient and competing theories of the thing itself. Trope could be seen as difficult because it is derived from turning, which might suggest that analogies of any sort are decorative twists on normal “transparent” speech. Turning can be envisioned in other, more evocative images and analogies. As Gerald L. Bruns writes of Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenistic philosopher who amalgamated Stoicism, allegory and Jewish exegesis: Philo’s word for “figurative” derives from the Greek trepein, ‘to turn,’ which means not transformation (turning one thing into another) but conversion (turning something around): when confronted with a dark saying, you can make it plain by turning it toward you, because the light it sheds is on its nether side, shining away from you. Frequently, however, what requires turning is not the saying but the one who fails to understand it. If a saying shines its light away from you, you are not standing where you should be; you need to alter your place or condition in order to situate yourself in the light of what is said.34

Trope and its concomitant adjectives tropological or, stylistically better, tropaic are the most promising. Therefore, it serves as the general term; metaphor is chiefly used in its specific application (“no like or as” species), regularly, though, substituting for the general, along with the other terms mentioned, where this occurs in common use, for stylistic variety or in quotations of other writers. It is included in the title as visual metaphor as well because it remains an important keyword in any literature search of poetics. Most importantly, cognitive science now envisions metaphor as the broad basis of thought itself. Linking striven-for content, discovered form, antithetical historical and critical cultural awareness, visual metaphor is as an area of central conceptual importance to contemporary art, the discipline at the center of this book. It is hoped that later, interdisciplinary application of this study of visual trope will encourage readers and other scholars to envision its potential usefulness in other arts and time periods. This book begins by discussing the definition of metaphor in general in Chapter 1. This is then particularized in Chapter 2, where visual metaphor is defined. This leads to Chapter 3, where the important question of why visual tropes matter in the study of art is answered. Chapter 4 scrutinizes the existence of grammar in visual metaphor: looking at both the similarities and differences between such structure in linguistic and visual tropes. Chapter 5 presents an original theory of central trope, termed metaphor(m), in visual art oeuvres. How

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

artists conceive of, fashion, or discover visual metaphors is surveyed in the Chapter 6. Visual metaphor in use is examined closely in detail in particular artworks in Chapter 7. Finally, in Chapter 8, I apply visual metaphor theory to a study and reimagining of current art history time-line models.

Cacoethes philosophandi I had ever-recurring roadblocks and other difficulties while writing this book, as I did it in the midst of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, under various lockdowns where I had surprisingly more, not less, work as an instructor and artist. This was also the time period of a political battle important to me against creeping fascism in the United States, via Donald Trump, a campaign in which I participated and which took away time from academic pursuits too (although I live in Switzerland, I am active politically in both my countries). I hope by the time of the final publication of this book, both situations will have faded into unhappy memories. Furthermore, I experienced disheartening personal loss, as my mother passed away from MDS cancer in 2019 and my life-long closest friend, renowned scholar and intellectual discussion partner Th. Emil Homerin died surprisingly the day after Christmas 2020 after a short battle against pancreatic cancer. To fully round things out, it was discovered that I have the delightfully termed “old age” diabetes in 2020. Nevertheless, I (and Colleen Coalter) have brought this book into existence. Why have I spent so much time on this idea of visual metaphor? Over the more than two decades since I first had the initial inkling of desire to analyze and write about visual trope, this book and the antecedent PhD dissertation and many linked publications and speeches became my chief artistic creation, although in that time I did more than 100 art shows of paintings, installations, and performance-lectures, as well as taught. These exhibitions, publications, and presentations were in galleries, museums, and Kunsthallen all over the world, but visual metaphor and analytic philosophy in contemporary art has dominated my thoughts since I first brainstormed my preliminary reflections in discussion with Daniel F. Ammann in Switzerland. It has colored all of the other art and teaching I have done. I have been confronted by others in the artworld (not, let me add, philosophers) with question as to why I would want to write such a work. Most frequently, I have answered that it is my own, though radically different, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Wassily Kandinsky’s personal book of theory.35 This is a bit disingenuous, for as compared to Kandinsky I am more

Introduction

15

philosophical and not at all esoteric in thought. It might be more appropriate to say that in my own thoughts it is, with my concomitant artworks, my mixed and cross-media, personal, equivalent of Tintoretto’s Scuola Grande di San Rocco, or at least the prolegomenon to one. A shorter answer to the question: Beyond the pure joy of using difficult reasoning to discover and formulate a serious new perception of art, the aim of this book and theory, like that of many others, is to serve as a truth and corrective to certain deficiencies of the current theoretical landscape in which I exist as an artist, art historian, and philosopher—hopefully, in the minds of others, thus my web presence and lectures, yet chiefly in my own thoughts. As Lakoff has pointed out, and I quote and discuss in Chapter 3, “Philosophy matters. It matters more than most people realize, because philosophical ideas that have developed over the centuries enter our culture in the form of a world view and affect us in thousands of ways.”36 Most of all, I am concerned with understanding works of visual art and the creative thought processes embodied in them. I am convinced that visual thinking is indeed sophisticated deliberation, and universally practiced by contemporary artists, even those who cannot express themselves well in words. I have a daily practice of making art for around fifty years, studying and teaching art history and aesthetics for some thirty-two years, thus am invested in the phenomenological reality of artistic agency. If this or any other theoretical analysis of art is worthy of serious consideration, it is in its usefulness for a fuller understanding and criticism of the works before us. Engaging with the fundamental issues of aesthetic philosophy grants us a rich, promising, and empowering theoretical perspective. Analytic aesthetics has much to offer working artists, critics, and art historians. Philosophical evaluations of art could result in healthy revitalizations and expansions of creative practices.

Figure 1.1 Chapter 1: What is Metaphor?, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

16

1

What is Metaphor?

Definitions of metaphor There are several traditional definitions of metaphor. Generally, I found them inadequate for visual art until cognitive metaphor theory appeared. However, metaphor is a deep and complex issue, about which many intriguing books have been and will be written. I will attempt no true survey in this chapter. Nevertheless, I wish to sketchily mention a few theorists to suggest where I will be traveling with visual metaphor, and in fact, my divergence from many of the traditional characterizations. First, there is the famous description of linguistic metaphor as a comparison without a like or as: “Achilles is a lion.” The American Heritage Dictionary describes it so: metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in ‘a sea of troubles’ or ‘All the world’s a stage’ (Shakespeare).”1 A metaphor, in other words, is a figure of speech that describes something in a manner that is not literally true, yet that shows how two things that are not alike in most ways are similar in an important way. Some of the traditional philosophical definitions are based on this construal in various fashions. Beginning with Aristotle, and continuing for centuries, metaphor was an element of speech, not contemplation—and principally persuasive language, the realm originally called rhetoric. George Lakoff describes such philosophies. He writes, In classical theories of language, metaphor was seen as a matter of language not thought. Metaphorical expressions were assumed to be mutually exclusive with the realm of ordinary everyday language: everyday language had no metaphor, and metaphor used mechanisms outside the realm of everyday conventional language. The classical theory was taken so much for granted over the centuries that many people didn’t realize that it was just a theory. The theory was not merely taken to be true, but came to be taken as definitional. The word metaphor 17

18

A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art was defined as a novel or poetic linguistic expression where one or more words for a concept are used outside of its normal conventional meaning to express a similar concept.”2

Centuries later, metaphor was seen as even less than simply unconventional or merely decorative stylistic devices. For example, Logical Positivism, a school of philosophy originating in the 1920s, centered on logical analyses of scientific knowledge, could not countenance metaphor at all. As Mary Therese Descamp elucidates, “In logical positivism, metaphor was emotive and therefore of no use to philosophy” of this bent.3 Another vision of metaphor, which has had far-reaching effects on contemporary thought, including my own in this book, began with Friedrich Nietzsche. He held that truth itself is in fact “a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” due to the predominantly metaphorical quality of concepts. Furthermore, he portentously sees visuality as being involved in this, suggesting that truth is a “series of creative leaps from nerve stimulus to retinal image to sound as signifier.”4 While rather pessimistically interpreted generally, this reading can be seen as a positive insight when applied to visual thought. There are other historic theories or definitions of metaphor, too sundry to delve into in any cursory introduction such as this chapter, and most are rather beside the point for my path, which is to see metaphor as a thought process and tool of primary importance for contemporary artists. Indeed, contrary to historic conceptions considering tropes to be ornamental or rhetorical, metaphors are in point of fact unavoidable, influential, and inspirational. This is particularly true for practicing artists, even when not fully analyzed by them at the conscious level. There is a delightful chapter of a book by Andreas T. Zanker, wherein he elucidates the metaphoricity of the classical terms for metaphor.5 The word metaphor itself is a metaphor, coming from a Greek term meaning to “transfer” or “carry across.” Metaphors “carry” meaning from one idea to another, as the term suggests. This image of metaphor, or more properly trope, evokes in my mind the figure of St. Christopher, one of the earliest Christian saints—so early, in fact, that he was created pre-canonization. I say created because there is a serious question as to his actual existence as a living being. The story wherein he carries an appearance of the child Jesus across a raging stream may in fact have been invented from the mere existence of the name Christóforos, meaning “bearing Christ.” In all likelihood, early Christians used the name to metaphorically signify carrying Christ in one’s heart and mind. Later, an allegorical anecdote

What is Metaphor?

19

was built up around the word, which is a common folk-etymology tactic.6 St. Christopher is usually depicted as a huge man with the child Jesus on his shoulder and holding a staff, one which can sprout leaves.7 Furthermore, in another pregnant misunderstanding beyond that of his name, an agonistic misprision occurred with the designation of his ethnic origin in the Latin Cananeus (“Canaanite”). It was misconstrued as canineus (“canine”). Thus, in many Byzantine icons, he is depicted as having the head of a dog.8 All of these misreadings are so wonderful that they reflect the beauty and referential complexity of tropaic reasoning. St. Christopher was partially defrocked by the Catholic Church in 1969, having his feast day eliminated, as Pope Paul VI removed many saints whose existences were thought to be more legend than fact, especially those that predated official canonization. As the holy man is thus somewhat in need of work, I hereby make him the patron saint of metaphor as well as of travelers, gardeners, and, sometimes, dogs—all four of which are dear to my art. As noted in the Introduction, putting into operation both this book’s assertion of the ubiquitousness of tropes and its emphasis on seeing them as embodied in visual art, I will be exploiting a conceit within each chapter, as well as my customary proclivity for tropes of visuality. As the reader may already have conjectured, the conceit here will be that of St. Christopher, and a few of his associated realms of traveling, gardening, and dogs, affecting my choices of allusive adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and so on. Many modern definitions propose that metaphors should be considered analogies, relational comparisons that can, but need not necessarily, include suggestions of shared features. How this process works has been analyzed quite creatively by a variety of philosophers. Exceedingly promising is William Empson’s calling out of the “pregnancy” of metaphors, the mushrooming of meaning in them. Their multivalency is vital in contemporary art: that artworks can embody and encompass many dimensions of meaning and significance concurrently. One function of art which has continually sprouted in my writings is that art is the creation of opportunities for imaginative, tropaic interpretation. Philosopher R. A. Sharpe foregrounded this idea in his theory. In his book Contemporary Aesthetics: A Philosophical Analysis, Sharpe offered a profound, elegant definition of art which is able to account for its complexity and contrariness. “As good a conclusion as any is the slogan, ‘Works of art are objects for interpretation.’ ”9 The uniqueness of Sharpe’s insight is that artworks are objects presented for multiple interpretations. Great works may even call for continuous, midrash-like reinterpretation by readers and viewers, and even from their own creators, which

20

A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

helps explain why writers and artists sometimes change their minds about what a work means after it has been long completed. This is close to Nelson Goodman’s perceptive assertion from the Ways of Worldmaking. He claims we can ascertain when something is art, more than what is art, through a series of characteristics, or clues. The fifth one in this philosopher’s list is that artworks contain “multiple and complex reference” functions.10 Sharpe’s and Goodman’s philosophies both suggest the essentiality in art of a multiplicity of interlocked metaphorical readings; I would add, the greater the abundance converging in the work, the more wonderful the work. Stanley Cavell says: “The ‘and so on’ which ends my example of paraphrase is significant. It registers what William Empson called the ‘pregnancy’ of metaphors, the burgeoning of meaning in them . . . The overreading of metaphors so often complained of, no doubt justly, is a hazard they must run for their high interest.”11 I graft this onto Sharpe and my own vision: the “and so on” is one of the chief raisons d’etre of metaphor, especially visual metaphor. Additional modern philosophical accounts of metaphor which I feel can contribute beneficially to an understanding of visual metaphor will color discussions later in the book. These include the so-called “semantic twist account” including its instructive description of “tension” in metaphors, and other ideas in the works of I. A. Richards, Moe Black, and Monroe Beardsley. Harold Skulsky’s invention of the idea of a sub-language “metaphorese” is also a promising insight applicable to the imaginative metamorphoses of form so important to contemporary art. In the “pragmatic twist account,” those philosophers’ emphasis on the performative center to metaphor, stressing speakers rather than words, is a necessary reminder of the lived reality of metaphoric thought and leads directly to the haptic enactment of metaphors in visual art. The traveler matters as much as the trail. Richard Moran’s very visual metaphor for metaphor as viewing a target subject in a new light is equally astute. Likewise, Kendall Walton’s discerning linkage of metaphor and playful make-believe is superb. It may reflect one of the chief functions of art in society. Adult canines train and reward their puppies for correct behavior by playing with them, among other activities such as cleaning them. Art does something similar to culture through playfully imaginative trope. Paul Ricoeur overemphasizes language in my opinion, concentrating on the sentence. Yet, in his book The Rule of Metaphor, he offers a promising theory of metaphor. He declares that metaphor is not merely decorative, but rather is cognitively substantial.12 This leads directly to contemporary Lakoffian interpretations of trope. A significant problem in contemporary analyses of trope is the question of

What is Metaphor?

21

whether they express propositions and thus are claims to truth. This is an even thornier yet fruitful question in visual metaphor, which will be addressed later in this book. Metaphor as a thought process is based on an insight derived from cognitive linguists. As Lakoff writes, The word metaphor was defined as a novel or poetic linguistic expression where one or more words for a concept are used outside of its normal conventional meaning to express a similar concept. But such issues are not matters for definitions; they are empirical questions. As a cognitive scientist and a linguist, one asks: What are the generalizations governing the linguistic expressions referred to classically as poetic metaphors? When this question is answered rigorously, the classical theory turns out to be false. The generalizations governing poetic metaphorical expressions are not in language, but in thought: They are general mappings across conceptual domains.13

Lakoff and Mark Johnson avow this most clearly in their pivotal book Metaphors We Live By, in a phrase which lies at the heart of my book, and thus recurs regularly: “Metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and action, and only derivatively a matter of language.”14 Speaking of which, I will often be using the terminology and orthography of cognitive metaphoricians. One example is my preferred choice of source and target rather than the earlier vehicle and tenor for the metaphoric reference and the subject about which one wishes to suggest something new. Although I prefer the first pair, I also use the second as many readers will be more conversant with it. As is clear from the title of my book, my fascination with trope comes from seeing it functioning in visual, especially contemporary, art. Visually generated tropes of thought need to enter into a dialogue with the dominant literary and verbal metaphors of thought. Back in 1994, W. J. T. Mitchell contended in his book Picture Theory that a new “turn”—the “pictorial turn”—will supplant the study of culture as we have known it under the sign of the “linguistic turn.” He models his phrase after Richard Rorty’s term for this dominance of verbal metaphor. This is amazing coming from Mitchell, one of the leading theorists today and an editor of Critical Inquiry, certainly one of the chief propagators of literary theories of the verbal-Deconstructivist bent. Although published many years ago, this idea even now has not yet clearly manifested itself, but my book is one among many attempting to remedy this.15 Donald Davidson formulates a crucial distinction between use and meaning, tropes being a function of use, not predominantly meaning. Although he and I

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

have differing goals in our studies of metaphor, he asserts an important truth that we should all keep in mind. Paraphrasing the famous English-language maxim that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” Donaldson declares that pictures say more than a thousand words—in fact, “Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture.”16 Significant endeavors of my study here of visual metaphors will be to demonstrate that they exist, that they are the results of complex thought, and that they are in many ways superior to verbal metaphors, even if we must use the language developed to describe figurative language to approach them. As Leonardo da Vinci wrote, a poet would be “overcome by sleep and hunger before [being able to] describe with words what a painter is able to [depict] in an instant.”17 Philosophers and artists operate in landscapes populated with a vast array of competing and overlapping circles of discussion, dialogues both historical and contemporary. One’s own thought reflects these, as one wanders among them seeking insightful inspiration, yet one must also critique them. Allow me to quickly name-drop a selection of the philosophers and theorists whose ideas have consequences for an understanding of metaphor and particularly visual metaphor. These are chiefly analytic philosophers, but also philosophers of others species including Poststructuralist theorists. The philosophers will, I suspect, forgive me for my often-eccentric applications and understandings of their work; the literary theorists probably will not, especially because I will disapprove of many of them. A selection of those philosophers important in my thoughts on visual metaphor include, but are not limited to, Noël Carroll, George Dickie, Arthur C. Danto, Jerrold Levinson, Berys Gaut, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Chris Argyris, Donald Schön, John Dewey, Richard Shusterman, Cornel West, R. A. Sharpe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan B. Forrester on Immanuel Kant, David Carrier, Tiziana Andina, and Nelson Goodman. There are literary theorists as well, who although inclined to resist the name philosopher, contribute constructively to the understanding of trope in art. Such thinkers include, among others, Harold Bloom, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, several of the New Historicists, Fredric Jameson, Susan Sontag, Donald Kuspit, and Daniel F. Ammann. I will develop and discuss ideas from these people, with whom I feel I share common bonds. I am not doggedly following them, rather I am positioning myself within a map, or better imagined, a flowering garden of scholarship, to assist readers in understanding my notions, yet also to open their, and my, ideas to critique. There are many more philosophers I could mention in passing. When

What is Metaphor?

23

I began my circling of this topic in the early 1980s, there were a mere handful of publications by theorists on the subject of metaphor in general, and almost none involving visual metaphor. This was still true in the early 2000s when I wrote my PhD dissertation on the subject. Recently, thankfully, books, articles, and scientific studies and journal essays on metaphor have multiplied exponentially. Metaphor is a mushrooming field. I hope that this will occur in the study of visual metaphor as well, especially following Noël Carroll’s groundbreaking essay “Visual Metaphor.”18 I am doing my part here. The heart of my study of visual metaphor in contemporary art will be reached in Chapter 5, where I present my own theory, which I have labeled metaphor(m), or also “a theory of central trope.” For now, let me briefly state that this is the thesis that the formal, technical, and stylistic aspects of artists’ approaches concretely manifest content in culturally and historically antithetical ways through a uniquely discovered trope. I have applied this concept in the past to painting, installation, electronic media, the expanded text concept, art history timeline models, comics, artistic cultural inheritance, and more. Here the focus is on contemporary art. Analytic philosophy and cognitive metaphor theory, especially my metaphor(m) adaptation of it, is put in the service of art and art historical theory, as seen in recent works of art. In this book, I develop a theory of how meaning is embodied in Modernist and especially Postmodernist creativity. My philosophy is the elucidation of a theoretical yet concrete tool with which artists create. It is a general theory of visual trope in art. Visual metaphors are not identical to literary metaphors. (In an online table I have outlined the definitions of the major linguistic tropes and where they overlap with visual ones, which I discuss in Chapter 4. The link is in the endnote.19) Their unique characteristics will be discussed in the next chapter. There are important differences between the two forms. These include visual metaphors’ reversibility, their multivalent fuzziness, and the possibility of mixed and merged visual metaphors not as blunders but rather as assets. Specifically, however, the uniqueness of visual tropes in contemporary art lies in their exceedingly concrete embodiment within aesthetic objects. Our cognition is not limited to our brains. An important facet of cognitive linguistic theory is that metaphors are embodied in their formation; that is, that mental concepts are constructed tropaically from bodily experiences. This has potentially significant implications for contemporary artists and philosophers. The brain, the body, and the environment are indivisibly intertwined. From the interaction of these arises a new understanding of the notion of “mind.” I extend this into the embodiment

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

of optical cognition in general and the tropes in particular which we see in the materials, processes, forms, and images of visual art. Ultimately, these are all embodied in society as well. Most of all, I am concerned with understanding works of contemporary art and the creative thought processes embodied in them.

Figure 2.1 Chapter 2: What is Visual Metaphor?, Part One ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 25

Figure 2.2 Chapter 2: What is Visual Metaphor?, Part Two ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 26

2

What is Visual Metaphor?

The study of visual metaphor Investigations into metaphor in general have greatly increased in the last decades, nevertheless the analysis of visual metaphor is just beginning. One very significant book, titled Multimodal Metaphor, edited by Charles J. Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, points beyond textual and linguistic metaphors into multimodal analysis in light of cognitive linguistics.1 Alison Gibbons, in a review of the book, asserts that it “takes research into conceptual metaphor theory in an important new direction, moving beyond verbal manifestations,” highlighting that “such a project is vital since if conceptual metaphors are to be accepted as underlying patterns of human thought, it must be demonstrated that they exist not just within linguistic structures but in all modal forms of human representation.”2 Without a doubt this is true, and one important area of human creativity frequently ignored, even in that book, is fine art—something that needs to be rectified. For, if we are correct, then in art, as Noël Carroll asserts, “a visual metaphor is a device for encouraging insights, a tool to think with.”3 The serious study of visual metaphor, and particularly its importance in art, begins with Noël Carroll in 1994 in his essay, titled unpretentiously “Visual Metaphor.” It was reprinted in his impressive book Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, in 2001, whereupon visual metaphor began to demand the attention it deserves. Notably, Carroll, and the few others now following his lead, reveal how analytic philosophy and/or cognitive metaphor theory allow us to move from the historical concentration on tropes as verbal entities to a “pictorial turn”: visual metaphors, and what these are in use. I wish to continue this, in particular by reaching beyond the previously adversarial relationships among so-called continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, and cognitive metaphor theory. Using tools from all three when applicable, we can come to a beneficial consideration of visual metaphor in contemporary fine art. 27

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Carroll’s definition of visual metaphor is very significant and an integral element in my own, presented later in this chapter. Carroll’s is the foremost attempt at constructing such an explanation. As he writes, It is the contention of this essay that there are visual metaphors. That is, there are some visual images that function in the same way that verbal metaphors do and whose point is identified by a viewer in roughly the same way that the point of a verbal metaphor is identified by a reader or a listener. The term ‘image’ here is intended to refer only to human artifacts. It is not, for instance, meant to apply to the outlines of animals or the suggestions of faces discernible in clouds. The visual images that I have in mind in this essay are the products of intentional human activity. By calling the images in question “visual,” I wish to signal that these images are of the sort whose reference is recognized simply by looking, rather than by some process such as decoding or reading. One looks at a motion picture screen and recognizes that a woman is represented; one looks at her hand and recognizes that she is holding a gardenia. Such images, of course, are symbols. But comprehending such image-symbols does not rely upon codes nor could there be a dictionary according to which one might decipher or read such images. Rather one looks at the screen and recognizes that which the images represent, that is, wherever one is capable of recognizing the referents of the images in what we might call normal perception (perception not mediated by codes).4

His ontological description is worth the price of entry alone. However, the essay continues. It is an admirable beginning in a search for and analysis of visual metaphors in fine art. Please note that, as Arthur C. Danto writes, “ ‘intentional’ does not entail ‘consciously,’ of course, and there may be room for a theory that refers art to the unconscious of the artist without this in any way changing the conceptual relationships between art and its intentions: metaphors have to be made.”5 In this chapter, Carroll uses a variety of illustrations, such as Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Pie.6 While it does indeed clarify his discussion at that point, far too many mentions of visual metaphor rely on images from Surrealism, or, as in Oldenburg’s case, a kind of Pop Art Surrealism. That is, they examine artworks that emphasize iconography consisting of rather clear-cut combinations of the representations of two distinct entities. No matter how wonderful these pieces are, this can lead to the flawed assumption that the sole situations where visual metaphors exist is in such artworks, additive images or integral images, to mimic Christian Doelker’s terminology for these phenomena within texts. Visual metaphor in contemporary art is far more complex than this. It exists in

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interactions of formal elements, representations, abstraction, presentation, and more. Visual metaphors are, in general, multi-strand (also called plurogenic) images. (As an aside, certain Doelker-invented terminology and categories I use throughout this book were invented by the theorist in the books Kulturtechnik Fernsehen; Analyse eines Mediums, “Wirklichkeit” in den Medien, and Ein Bild ist mehr als ein Bild: Visuelle Kompetenz in der Multimedia-Gesellschaft, his many articles, TV series, and other publications.7) Visual tropes can be portrayed succinctly as visual analogical juxtapositions crafted to provoke comparisons of similarities and dissimilarities among the components. Components is construed here in the widest sense, including but not limited to iconographic representations. In this book, I will be expanding the selection of types of artwork, emphasizing contemporary works, and seeking the most complex ones. Such examples exist, for example, in a group of paintings which contain an intricate composite of visual metaphors and references: Kerry James Marshall’s 1994 and 1995 “Paradise Gardens” series on public housing, including the monumental Watts 1963.8 Equally rich is his Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Super Model.9 I will return to these works in following chapters. In Chapter 7, I trace the significance of realized visual metaphors in tangible detail by studying a single painting by Charles Boetschi and a body of paintings by Leonard Bullock. Both of these contemporary artists use haptic and optical elements, abstract formal and technical aspects of their works, as integral tropaic facets of their approaches. This is true even though their styles are polar opposites: Boetschi’s is tightly geometric and Bullock’s flowingly organic. As in Chapter 1, I am employing a conceit throughout this chapter, and all others. As perceptive readers perhaps have already observed, the conceit here is that of painting. I was tempted to use cinema, as that is the preferred artform of Noël Carroll’s, and he is the dominant philosophical presence in the discovery and definition of visual metaphor. (Film does make a fleeting visual appearance as a framing image in the comic introducing this chapter, for that reason.) However, due to my own proclivities as a painter as well as art historian and philosopher, I chose painting, my personal subject of infatuation. Before I begin my delineation of my topic in fine art, it must be noted that most current studies of visual trope concentrate on modern advertising. This book focuses on contemporary visual fine art, and is decidedly not a “how to” guide, which many of the texts on the subject are in relationship to advertising. In one of the best books discussing graphic marketing, Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising, Charles J. Forceville systematically scrutinizes advertisement, presenting it as a fruitful panorama of visual tropes. While remaining

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unambiguously graphic, commercials and other visual merchandizing are undeniably becoming more visual. Advertising typically features a visual image plus text for clarity. Barbara J. Phillips, in “Understanding Visual Metaphor in Advertising,” observes, though, that “we have noted a decrease in the amount of anchoring copy used in visual metaphor ads over time . . . We theorize that, over time, advertisers have perceived that consumers are growing more competent in understanding and interpreting visual metaphor in ads.”10 Nevertheless, my goal is to not only to depart from the modest vision of metaphor as mapping the meaning of representation x onto representation y (x of course being the vehicle or source; y the tenor or target), but also to get beyond the predominance in visual metaphor discussions of advertisements and design, and thus of that specific form of iconicity. Fine art has an essential polysemy, its works are multivalent. Fine art subsists of embodied multiple meanings, at least since the Renaissance, and most acutely in contemporary art. Much more so than design or other applied arts, works of fine art are created most of all for multiple interpretations and are creations wherein the form and the content are inextricably interwoven, each mirroring the other in its own terms. This multiplicity and intertwining are usually grounded in, and the breeding ground for new, intricate compositions of metaphors. Of particular importance, visual metaphors occur in consciously fashioned images, not in accidental appearances or pareidolia as in imaginary projections, such as seeing castles or cats in cloud formations—“products of intentional human activity,” as Carroll tersely expresses it.11 Artworks may indeed use perceptions of natural visual phenomena as the catalyst for their being, especially in the recent and promising art genre known as Eco Art. Who among us has not looked upward in a deep forest or stand of trees and imaged the shapes between the tree tops as potentially meaningful? French artist Gaëlle Villedary spotlit this in her remarkable public installation Vertige, consisting of mirrors around tree bases.12 The artist describes her work as research which “focuses on the notions of borders and territorial transformations.”13 The title, which translates into English as “vertigo,” has less to do with the queasy feeling itself than with the upset and inversion of up and down. Usually, we look up to the tree canopy, seeing the light between the leaves and crowns, and look down at the feet of the trees and see the roots, earth and shadow. Here, the base becomes filled with light and sky. This plays with yet capsizes projection, both literally and metaphorically. We see something related to this in artist and activist Aviva Rahmani’s pieces, which are transdisciplinary artworks centered on environmental restoration. As has been written of her Blued Trees,14 it is

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an eco-art project to save beautiful places endangered by pipelines and related fossil fuel infrastructure by deliberately installing art installations in corridors projected for gas pipelines expansion. It uses an innovative, creative legal approach, leveraging copyright and property law to protect art embedded in forests and soils—while simultaneously restoring control of beloved spaces and personal property to individuals living in harm’s way.”15

Her conceptually powerful and very visually pleasing installations-in-nature are political actions as well as works of fine art—ones which rely on legal and social strategy but rest deeply in visual metaphor: in this case, blue spirals painted on trees with a casein of buttermilk and ultramarine blue pigment, which is intended to foster the growth of moss. The painted trees become elements, notes, in a 3D score for a Rahmani-composed symphony, while also existing as paintings and sculpture in an expanded sense. The entire work is a demonstration of how nature can be utilized without being abused, how it can be appreciated and protected as well as developed. In effect, the ecologically responsibly painted trees become synecdoches of all of nature, an embodied metaphor for how the appreciation of the forest has been and can be a spur to the creation of music, dance, and art rather than just a rapeable resource. Thus, there is also an element of litotes in this remarkable work, as what it is NOT is as important as what it is. Before we approach a more detailed definition of visual metaphor, we need to address a root question: do they even exist? One might proclaim, “What a question! Google it and look at all those articles on how to apply visual metaphors to advertising.” Those authors take it for granted that visual tropes exist and can be consciously sought out as design devices. Nevertheless, there are some possible grounds on which to reject the idea. Carroll, once again in his pioneering essay, sketches several of these potential objections and invalidates each one. These doubts include the suggestion that visuality is too particular, not abstract enough for metaphor; that all visual metaphors are translatable into words, or conversely that all textual metaphors are already image-based; that there are no uniquely visual metaphors; that tropes are essentially linguistic and images do not contain logical, rhetorical structure. Like Carroll, I feel all of these potential claims, although seldom actually asserted, can be quickly erased. I will address several in following chapters, as they highlight the consequences of visual metaphors and their uniqueness. First, in short, metaphors are a matter of thought. Tropes are not limited to the simple interaction of words in a language-determined net, although that is one support upon which they can be applied. Metaphors are complex occurrences,

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art

matters of thought and action based in haptic experience. Carroll magnifies this vision. He writes, Metaphors do not essentially involve the interaction of words, though words are one of the means of securing metaphorical interaction. Rather, metaphors mobilize the interaction of categories and concepts that include all sorts of information—including beliefs about the world and systems of commonplaces— some of which may be verbal, some of which may be visual, and some of which may not be easily classifiable as either. Any of this information may be brought into play by a metaphor. Moreover, conceptual systems of commonplaces can be activated by visual juxtapositions as well as verbal juxtapositions. Insofar as metaphors are conceptual and categorical, rather than exclusively verbal, there is no reason to suppose that there are necessarily no visual metaphors.16

Beyond Carroll’s conjectures concerning hypothetical objections, there are a few people who truly do not believe there are visual metaphors, or if existing, that they are not useful. Chief among these dissenters would be various Poststructuralists. They see the entire society, especially in the arts, as no more than a slippery set of self-referential texts. Everything is, to them, an instance of text, leaving no space for other forms of thought beyond the linguistic: no haptic, no bodily, no affective, and certainly no visual thought is sanctioned. Poststructuralist, especially Deconstructivist, doubt has been an important corrective to tedious logocentric and unquestioning art and literature theorization. Yet, this postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion has produced the overdominance of irony in Postmodernist art. Artworks influenced by it often become either recriminations or jokes. This is very limiting and has led to a resilient streak of academicism in contemporary art. Literary theorist Harold Bloom asserts that the dominant group of Poststructuralists, modern Deconstructive critics, “truly dispute only degrees of irony.”17 Philosopher and Marxist political theorist Fredric Jameson has a strong sense of the urgency of concrete experience, however subjectively encountered it must always be. For him, the form of literary works is always profoundly intertwined with the tangible. What is important is what a technique or structure can or cannot do, as engaged with the dominant cultural imperatives of its time and place.18 This is a fine observation that can be applied even more emphatically to visual art, especially contemporary art, and the formation of individual tropes. The strength of a trope resides in what it can say or not say about lived experience. I agree with Jameson that reality is more than just a text, and add that in visual art, reality is highly tactile and visual. I see cognitive metaphor theory as offering an alternative to artistic Formalism (the distant cousin of philosophical Logical

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Positivism) and Poststructuralism by subsuming them both, and restoring pivotal aspects of other forms of Analytical Philosophy to the foreground. There is another objection to the use of visual metaphor: that perhaps all artworks are entirely metaphors, thus making the search for, and study of, particular ones futile. Michael Polányi and Harry Prosch avow this in their book Meaning, “Works of art are, in a sense, metaphors.”19 First, there appear clearly to be works of art which are not, or not intended to be, tropaic: certain Formalist abstractions such as paintings by Kenneth Noland or certain naturalistic pieces such as landscape studies by Gustave Courbet. Second, to proclaim so broadly that all artworks are anything is in some respects, if true, trivial and unenlightening. It gets us nowhere in understanding the qualities of individual pieces. Pragmatically such a statement is unserviceable. It can be neither proven nor disproven and sheds no light on the objects at hand. All, or most, artworks invite contemplation of potential meaning; however, that does not necessarily turn them wholly into a metaphor, or even necessarily compel the inclusion of metaphor. I am suggesting that the use of visual metaphor in art is a tool, not a totality. Most works of significant contemporary art contain sophisticated visual tropes, but are not single metaphors per se in their entirety as objects. Furthermore, structurally, the tropes used, in order to be tropes at all, must exhibit considered use of a source domain, a vehicle, applied to the understanding of a target or tenor, whether this was premeditated or not. I do greatly wish to expand this, though, beyond iconography into material, style, and other presentational choices. Style is not just unconscious tics of the hand; it is prospective metaphor source. The formal, technical, and stylistic aspects of creators’ styles concretely embody content, generally as trope. Oppositely, another potential pitfall for philosophizing about trope in visual art could be the intentional suppression or denial of any metaphor at all in individual works or oeuvres. Erasing metaphor while remaining art is a status several artists have claimed for their works. This is indeed a theoretical option; nevertheless, to proudly claim such a practice is an indirect affirmation of metaphor’s position within art. In fact, such a declaration does not even ensure its truth in the given artworks. Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner is quite fond of formulating statements in which he claims to have dismissed metaphor from his artwork. He is completely wrong. In fact, his use of vinyl lettering, revealingly synecdochically called “text” in the artworld, is an obvious combination of tropes, masking itself as non-tropaic, which is in itself another metaphor. One of Minimalism’s chief metaphors was that of theatre as/for presence; others

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included industrial furnishing and factory production as anti-decorative, and objecthood as anti-painting, thus anti-(art) history. One might assert that Minimalism was in truth an assemblage of similes. Likewise, Conceptualism can be shown to be based on a tapestry of metaphors and metonymies. Weiner’s early Conceptualist works were both pseudo-pragmatic and the art object themselves. He presented instructions or descriptions such as “A SQUARE REMOVAL FROM A RUG IN USE.”20 Since then his work has developed into purely abstract language, such as fragmentary lists of prepositions. It has become a sometimestedious variation on concrete poetry, losing the strength it had earlier as vague potentiality. Weiner’s vinyl stick-on letters have been appearing since the early 1970s on the walls of galleries, museums, and Kunsthallen around the world. The artist sees them as free of metaphor. There are in reality two chief metaphors in use— the Conceptualist elephants in the gallery, so to speak, as they are easily perceived yet never acknowledged. First, the use of text itself. Text is a metonymy of intellectuality. Intellectuals, especially scholars, tend to write papers, write books, and the like. They (we) often generate reams of pages of text. It is an important part of their activity, thus a synecdoche of intellectuality. Creating them is an important activity of such people and one of the foremost things others picture when they consider scholars, philosophers, and other academics. Therefore, it makes an ideal stand-in for them, as it is contextually related to their thoughts. Thus, text is a metonymy of intellectuality and intellectuals. Second, such vagueness as Weiner uses nowadays in his texts can be seen as poetic (an interpretation he resists), yet even more so, as either an inadvertent parody or a travesty of the texts that intellectuals create. Scholarly writing is occasionally extremely difficult to read, densely packed, seemingly on the edge of comprehensibility. Purposeful vagueness can thus be overly artsy (a metonymy of the avant-garde) or dreadfully opaque (a distorted synecdoche of intellectuality). We could continue our discoveries of the veiled tropes underlying the physical materiality of Weiner’s presentations—such as the fact that much of the physical work to make his pieces is performed by (usually unpaid or underpaid) assistants: a metaphoric repetition of corporate production; his machine-cut letters: a trope of brain over body (anti-handicraft); vinyl: a synecdoche of the curatorial demands for “contemporary materials”; and so on. All of these are hidden metaphors playing against suppositions of the metaphors of earlier Modernists, thus also making them metalepses. However, our purposes have been served. It is clear that no matter what is claimed, Lawrence Weiner’s art, and I assert, most Conceptual Art and Neo-Conceptual Art, whether good or

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bad, is deeply grounded in interlocking base tropes—metaphors commonly ignored because they are so unheeded. There are far more philosophers and artists, however, who are firm in their convictions that visual metaphors do exist. Carroll, as has been seen, is adamant concerning the actuality and relevance of visual metaphors. The formation of visual metaphors is feasible in every artistic medium that employs opticality. Furthermore, this indeed has been widely creatively realized in every one of them, including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, theater, and dance.21 Carroll explains that this is so, due to the fact that metaphors are “conceptual and categorical, rather than exclusively verbal,” as quoted above.22 Elisabeth El Refaie expands upon this conceptual interpretation of trope. She articulates that “most recent approaches tend to focus on the formal level of visual metaphors and to neglect the important conceptual level. This means that they are generally quite restricted with regard to the type and genre of visual metaphors about which they are able to make any meaningful statements.”23 Focusing on the conceptual and visual facets of trope allows me to position contemporary visual art examples at center canvas. Refaie has written on metaphors in newspaper cartoons, political cartoons, and autobiographical comics. In that spirit, I would like to mention a political cartoon from 2020 in Courrier international. In this issue the editors republished a political cartoon which supported climate activist Greta Thunberg, drawn by Cristina Sampaio and originally appearing in Público, Lisbon, Portugal. The artist pictures a stylized Greta, with her iconic long braids, watering a plant whose over-sized flower is the Earth. Greta’s watering can features a spout made of a megaphone.24 I need not explain the implications. The aspects of the image for my concerns are several. First, it is a concise unity of visual tropes that need not be converted into verbal ones. To try to imagine doing that to them is clumsy at best and truly foolish: “A little girl with braids waters the planet-Earth-flower with a megaphonespout-can.” I can describe it, but not transliterate it. This proves not only the existence, but the efficacy, complexity, and clarity of visual metaphors. Furthermore, the cartoon contains a composite of tropes, which would most likely be derided as mixed metaphors in words, but a mix which works perfectly in a drawing. I will return to the issue of mixed metaphors in visual metaphor in the next chapter. Another proponent of visual metaphor is Robert N. St. Clair. He knowledgeably investigates visual metaphor versus verbal metaphor and how both are culture bound. He does this in particular with an eye to indigenous cultures in the Americas in his essay “Visual Metaphor, Cultural Knowledge, and the New

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Rhetoric.”25 He illustrates not only the fact of the existence of visual tropes, but also how they predominate in the Native American cultures he studies. As he writes, “Modern Western European ways of thinking are based on a print culture that tends to use verbal metaphors, and indigenous ways of thinking are based on oral culture that tends to use visual metaphors.” St. Clair continues, “This realization of culture boundness of thinking on the subject of rhetoric brings with it a sincere effort among rhetoricians to develop some insight into how a non-Western system of communication, or discourse, works. They have found that non-Western systems of rhetoric tend to use visual instead of verbal metaphors.”26 The cultural-boundedness of trope is important to my own theorization as well. Titus Kaphar is living proof of a contemporary artist who critiques the oftenveiled slant of Western art history—a biased viewpoint which perceives only white people, neglecting others. Kaphar modifies often-famous historical artworks to include Africans, especially African Americans. As he describes his own approach, “I cut, crumple, shroud, shred, stitch, tar, twist, bind, erase, break, tear, and turn the paintings and sculptures I create, reconfiguring them into works that nod to hidden narratives and begin to reveal unspoken truths about the nature of history.”27 William Proweller perceives Pablo Picasso’s famous painting Guernica as a prime example of a multifaceted configuration of visual metaphors. Whereas I would see the majority of the artist’s visual references in this work as symbols, there are more than a fair share of visual tropes of other varieties, including metaphor.28 Daniel Serig has researched and written widely on visual metaphor and the teaching of art. In his essay “A Conceptual Structure of Visual Metaphor,” he emphasizes something very significant, that in contemporary art visual tropes arise organically from within the physical processes of artists. He asserts that “findings highlight the cognitive, social and personal domains contributing to their creation of metaphor. The result is a conceptual structure of visual metaphor derived from the practices and exhibition of the artists.”29 Being so visual and practice-based might be one reason why it is sometimes difficult for theorists with purely textual interests to even see the existence of visual tropes. As mentioned, Carroll begins his trailblazing essay with a clear assertion of his confidence in the reality of visual metaphors.30 Carroll introduces several definitional borders to visual metaphor. An important one is the concept of “homospatiality.” As he delineates, visual metaphors are often composites of discrete components, yet these elements “coexist in the same space–they are homospatial–insofar as they are integral features of a single entity, parts of a

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unified whole that coexist within the unbroken contour, or perimeter, or boundary of a single unified entity.”31 He draws attention to this fusion because it graphically suggests the intentionally analogical identity of the parts. He also establishes that the visually tropaic configuration must be physically “noncompossible,” that is, they are not naturalistic representations of some believed real-world possibility, such as an animal-headed god. The image-maker “intends the image to be taken metaphorically, she must also believe that the standard, intended viewer believes that the image represents a physically noncompossible state of affairs (rather than an actual state of affairs, a physically possible state of affairs, a state of affairs in a certain fictional world, and so on).”32 Both of these conditions are truly imperative. However, the way in which Carroll describes them could lead, once again, to the impression that visual metaphors are always veristic surrealistic images or the like. Noncompossibility must be expanded. I will enlarge his astute portrayal, showing that this also holds in the homospatiality of technique, style, form, materials, methods, presentations, formats, and more, with the other variable being the motif. Vincent van Gogh’s flame-like, thick brushstrokes, for example, are one segment of the homospatial and noncompossible unity he presents, the other half being the motif itself. They exist in the same space, the world of the canvas, and are not, say, a representation of an actually lumpily built, smeary, flaming church. Moreover, the range of conceivable source domain components in contemporary art is even broader than the brushstroke one I just mentioned from Modernism. Such possibilities are likely infinite. To continuously widen this vast field of prospects has been a mainstay of the activities of creating artworks for much of the last 200 years. This half of the tropaic equation can include, in a random and non-exclusive list: paint handling, composition, surface, haptic qualities, source of borrowed imagery, sequentiality, camera angles, linearity, painterliness, color palette, material, empty space, site specificity, contextual specificity, presentational form, format, levels of allusion, various sciences, and ecological activities. It can even include social work as in the art of Tim Rollins and K.O.S., community interaction as in the art of Raoul Deal and Dawood Bey, or village and generational life in the art of Colectivo Bini Cubi. Many of these so-called technical and contextual characteristics are integrated with, yet not identical to, image, subject matter, and intended meaning. The formal, technical, stylistic, and public-determining aspects of artists’ approaches concretely manifest content through the use of visual metaphors and indeed are in themselves a key constituent of a central trope, the metaphier, vehicle, or source, depending on the terminology one prefers. They are the essentials of

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artists’ visual metaphors and metaphor(m)s, the latter being a term for my own theory of central trope developed in Chapter 5. My book discusses visual metaphor under the lens of analytic philosophy, yet with the eye of a practicing visual artist and art historian. Visually generated tropes of thought in general enter into dialogues with the dominant literary and verbal metaphors of thought. Visual metaphor and analytic philosophy as invigorated by cognitive metaphor theory has a key role to play in transcending the iconophobia which has so dominated Poststructuralist linguistic theory, establishing a rigorous pictorial turn. Nonetheless, it is a worthy question to wonder how cognitive metaphor theory meshes with analytic philosophy and literary theory. As John Brockman points out, Lakoff, the founder of cognitive metaphor theory, sees it as between the two poles of analytic philosophy and literary theory, critiquing both to their benefit. Lakoff believes that new empirical evidence concerning these findings of cognitive science have taken us over the epistemological divide: we are in a new place and our philosophical assumptions are all up for grabs. He and Johnson write: “When taken together and considered in detail . . . findings from the science of the mind are inconsistent with central parts of Western philosophy, and require a thorough rethinking of the most popular current approaches, namely, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and postmodernist philosophy.”33

Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh magnifies the fancied dispute even in its subtitle: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.34 Francis F. Steen, nevertheless, clear-sightedly points out that while these cognitive metaphor theorists frame their vison of embodied thought, particularly in that book yet also elsewhere, as a confrontation with traditional Western—meaning analytic—philosophy, it is not truly one. He declares that, While they argue that Anglo-American analytic philosophy’s insistence on nonfigurative language is itself enabled by an unconscious act of figuration, this contradiction is in their view a manageable and corrigible failure, requiring nothing but a healthy respect for empirical evidence and a dose of clear thinking. In this sense, Philosophy in the Flesh situates itself in an optimistic mediating position between postmodernism and analytic philosophy.”35

This matches both my assessment and my application of their ideas. In a different light, there are those who see cognitive theory as a cousin of the, until recently, adversary of analytic philosophy: Poststructuralist literary theory. Elizabeth Hart’s essay “Cognitive Linguistics: The Experiential Dynamics of Metaphor”

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straightforwardly addresses and overcomes this divide. Hart finds cognitive metaphor theory as beneficial for postmodern theory as I do for analytic philosophy. She declares that “cognitive rhetoric opens a space for a more profound engagement with poststructuralist theories of culture and history.”36 Fortunately, in this second decade of the new millennium, the dogmatic partisanship between so-called Anglo-American and Continental theory appears to have waned, and conceptual metaphor theory likely has been an intermediary in this. All aesthetic or metacritical speculation must come to terms with the challenges and insights within what is called literary or critical theory. My thought as well has been influenced by selected aspects of postmodern theory. This includes, nevertheless, a skeptical and sometimes even antagonistic response to the sophistry and solipsism of many partisans of theory, especially when applied to visual art. Contemporary literary theory has been perceptively dubbed the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a term introduced by Paul Ricoeur, who felt that all texts are corrupted by societal forces aiming for domination.37 This is a rather paranoid, totalizing conception of creative works, relegating them to symptoms of illness, and of creators, seeing them merely as minions of the powerful. Nevertheless, literary theory can be intellectually stimulating, particularly as a provocative catalyst to thought. The various theories comprising this multifarious enterprise include Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, Hermeneutics, Formalism, several Marxisms, some Neo-Freudianism, ReaderResponse theory, Feminist criticism, Relational Aesthetics, Performative Aesthetics, and a few others. The sundry doctrines of theory expose new insights by subjecting every assumption to recrimination, and often rightly so. The light of such theory may be actinic, but it throws deficiencies into high relief. These approaches have been very valuable in discussing and producing contemporary art. Various dollops of literary theory added to the foundational palette of analytic philosophy increase its fecundity. I view cognitive metaphor theory as a comparable, yet far more significant, enrichment of analytic philosophy; it does not replace it, as Lakoffians sometimes seems to suggest, but rather grounds logical deduction and offers new landscapes for exploration. Its reliance on scientific study, not armchair literary guiles, and the application of logic are two points of coincidence with analytic philosophy, among others. The philosophy of art has assumed an unprecedented prominence in analytic thought concerning contemporary art. The stimulating effect of analytic aesthetics on visual art can be illustrated by looking at Arthur C. Danto’s philosophical criticism. His inspiration of George Dickie’s institutional theory of

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the ontology of art has had a great impact on the artworld, as have his critical reviews and books such as The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which first appeared in 1981 and has since become one of the most widely read texts in its field.38 Other philosophical problems and solutions could be potentially even more enlightening for creators. David Carrier’s dual roles as an analytic philosopher and respected art critic is also an example of this. Particularly important in recent history has been the widening of aesthetics as a result of the disappearance of narrow positivism as an overdominant force, allowing the expansion in the field we see from the 1960s until today. According to Avrum Stroll, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “idea that philosophical problems are ‘deep disquietudes,’ that they must be taken seriously in their own right and not be assimilated into various forms of scientism as the positivists urged, gave new impetus to a field that the positivists had dismissed as a species of nonsense.”39 Creators themselves have become acutely interested in aesthetics. Gordon Epperson was a contemporary musician who was also deeply involved with the philosophy of art. He found this concern natural and necessary. Musicians (like other artists) are inveterate theorizers, ceaselessly discussing their musical ideas and problems, analyzing techniques, making judgments, striving to get things “right.” They are preoccupied in practice with form, function, and meaning: and their special vocabularies, sometimes as recondite as the argot of professional philosophers, are rich in imagery. They are, to a degree, aestheticians, though it would surprise most of them to be told that.40

As Epperson shows, rejuvenated analytic philosophy of art invigorated with conceptual metaphor theory can inspire new understanding and new creativity. As a part of this, cognitive metaphor theory is significant with its emphasis on embodiment, which makes it inherently haptic and conducive to visuality. Lakoffian theory offers an, at this time, atypical model, as well, in that it acknowledges agency—that is, the individuals who make art experiences, contemporary artists. This renders a chance to investigate into and speculate on the nuts and bolts of creation. The cognitive theory of metaphor is also unusual in that it is a theory more concerned with concepts than with words alone, thus fostering application to a wide range of artforms. As has been and will be repeated in this book, an important facet of cognitive linguistic theory is that metaphors are embodied; that is, that mental concepts are constructed tropaically from elementary bodily experiences. These foundational perceptions can furthermore lead to what is termed “image schemas,” which can then be used to structure somewhat less-physical events. Image schemas generally rely on an

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abstracted sense of space and vision. They can often be described with prepositions or simple directionality: out, inside, from, along, up-down, frontback, etc.41 In contemporary art, image-metaphor activities including image schema and the related image-mappings notion shade into one another along a vast spectrum of possibilities. This has significant implications for the visual artist, the critic, and the scholar. At this juncture, let us synopsize a definition of visual trope aimed at its use in contemporary art. All the aspects of this have been lightly touched on in the discussion above; nevertheless, it is good to completely outline the salient points within a few paragraphs.

A definition of visual trope A visual metaphor is an image that suggests a particular association, similarity, or analogy between two (or more) not commonly connected visual elements. (In art, this may also include the suggestion of a surprising analogy between a pictorial subject matter and the means of expressing it.) This often functions in a roughly comparable fashion to the better-known concept of verbal metaphor, but not always, and visual metaphor has developed many of its own unique characteristics. Visual trope, whether embodied in a 2D, 3D, filmic, or any other aesthetic creation, is primarily optical. It is a nonverbal embodiment of a conceptual metaphor. As Noël Carroll describes it, visual metaphor “prompt insights” in the viewer by depicting “noncompossible” (generally, in real life, impossible to combine) elements in a “homospatially unified” image. Furthermore, the optical tropes are typically intended for the viewer to recognize as having heuristic value, not a representation of an actual previously unknown entity, such as a god, mythical creature, strangely surfaced object, or the like. In cognitive metaphor theory, this would be described as an imagistic target compared pictorially to some visual thing from another category, the source—in I. A. Richards’s language again, the tenor and vehicle, respectively. In truth, the target and source are visually merged, blended, more than merely compared. Comparable to verbal metaphors, these visual metaphors can be dissected into various sub-tropes including metaphor, metonymy, simile, synecdoche, litotes, hyperbole, irony, allegory, symbol, metalepsis, and more. Visual tropes do not exist solely in pictorial, representational images, although they can also materialize there. An understanding of visual metaphor must also focus on the formal, technical, stylistic, and contextual aspects of visual art: composition,

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surface, paint handling, color, placement, editing cuts, format, public, etc.—the nuts and bolts of creation. These are all optically perceivable in artworks as much as representational elements are, and important in contemporary art, therefore I expand Carroll’s insight. Notably, visual trope is a thought process, involving the fact that metaphors in art are embodied in two ways: first, mental concepts are constructed tropaically from bodily experiences; second, these tropaic insights are embedded by creators in the formal elements of artworks. The discovery animating all of this is that trope is the basis of thought. Contemporary visual art contains highly intriguing, creative instances of this. Fine artists’ uses of metaphor are also not necessarily and not generally derived from literature. Thomas Herrmann has shown that in at least one case, the opposite was true. He analyzed how the author Ernest Hemingway was inspired to use metonymy through his appreciation of the paintings of Paul Cézanne.42 Visual metaphors are used in advertising, political cartoons, and elsewhere, but the most intriguing and complex uses can be seen in their application within fine art, particularly contemporary art. In the following chapter, titled “Why Visual Metaphors Matter,” I will discuss what their functions are in contemporary art and what reflecting on them reveals to us about artworks. This will include discussion of the similarities and dissimilarities between verbal and visual metaphors: the unique aspects of visual tropes, including potential symmetry, vast opportunities for and necessity of polysemy, ambiguity, and playful allusiveness. The chief forms of verbal metaphor will be shown to have their visual counterparts, including trope, metaphor, metonymy, simile, synecdoche, litotes, hyperbole, irony, analogy, allegory, symbol, and metalepsis. Additionally, how visual metaphors deviate from these will also be discussed. How and why artists use visual tropes in their works and why it matters will also be deliberated on in specific examples of contemporary artworks, to delineate the insight a philosophical understanding of visual metaphor provides. Visual metaphors exist and are a rich area for study and use, particularly in contemporary fine art.

Figure 3.1 Chapter 3: Why Visual Metaphors Matter ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 43

Figure 3.2 Chapter 3: Why Visual Metaphors Matter, Part Two ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 44

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Why Visual Metaphors Matter

Why visual metaphors matter in life in general Philosophy affects our ways of conducting our lives, and more important to this book, it shapes our artistic production, even if or when we are not completely cognizant of this. As George Lakoff writes, Philosophy matters. It matters more than most people realize, because philosophical ideas that have developed over the centuries enter our culture in the form of a world view and affect us in thousands of ways. Philosophy matters in the academic world because the conceptual frameworks upon which entire academic disciplines rest usually have roots in philosophy—roots so deep and invisible that they are usually not even noticed.1

As James Geary points out in his book I is An Other, “[Arthur] Rimbaud believed the poet needed to see similarity in difference and difference in similarity. Things are never just things in themselves; a visionary company of associations, correspondences, semblances always attends them. Everything can be seen—and, for Rimbaud, everything should be seen—as something else.”2 This is true not only of poets or other artistic creators, but of all humans. Seeing semblances allows us to formulate important insights and is the basis of most reflection. Tropes, whether metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, litotes, hyperboles, allegories, or any other variety thereof, are the heart of rumination, arising from bodily experience, long before becoming embodied in words or images. Metaphor is rampant, whether we acknowledge it or not. Just consider common speech. “We utter about one metaphor for every ten to twenty-five words, or about six metaphors a minute,”3 Geary sums up from various studies. Our infatuation with metaphor as a tool of expression is based on our analysis of our experience of living as a body, in society, in the world, and looking for patterns. We derive pleasure from perceiving configurations of meaning. 45

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Philosopher Tiziana Andina points out that although the degradation of art by Platonists as copies of copies of ideas is long overcome, and has no bearing on contemporary art in any fashion, one point revealed by him is still significant— that is, “in order to state something about art, it is necessary to state something about the relationship between art and reality.”4 This is inherent throughout the essentially tropaic nature of our thought in general and in visual art as well. Visual tropes are the chief link in art between the aesthetic object and lived experience, i.e., reality. Saying something about the relationship between art and reality, here and in Andina’s thought, does not necessarily mean using traditional representationalism in art, although that is also a track. It means referring to, having a basis in, and commenting on aspects of life. The convoluted folk or naïve theory is that if an image somehow resembles a photograph of a certain object, discounting certain aspects of photographic vision (such as out-of-focus), then it is a representation of that object. In fact, representation is largely a matter of social convention. Symbol shades into “picture” and is culturally dependent. A relationship to the world, or some element of it, is a rich evocative arena in visual art. An artwork is open to critical interpretation and bears the weight of previous and current assumptions concerning the uses (and misuses) of similar images. Because of this, we see through conceptual and metaphoric representations. As I will return to again and again in this book, the tropaic relationship to reality is usually embedded in the physical and social aspects of an artwork. As Arthur C. Danto states, thinking more about literature than art, but it is equally applicable, “the greatest metaphors of art I believe to be those in which the spectator identifies himself with the attributes of the represented character: and sees his or her life in terms of the life depicted . . . where the artwork becomes a metaphor for life and life is transfigured.”5 In her book The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition, Andina presents her own promising definition of a work of art alluded to above, yet expressed fully as, “It is a social object, an artefact, that embodies a representation, in the form of an inscribed trace upon a medium that is not transparent.”6 The word representation is, as explained, to be interpreted in a vastly inclusive sense, but most intriguing in her phraseology are the terms and concepts inscribed and not transparent (“forma di traccia inscritta in un medium che non è trasparente” in her original Italian). This could sound as if it demands a physical object based in some form of naturalism, but that is not true. It can also imply other forms of aesthetic object, such as an installation within an art context, concretizing lived experience in more complex fashions. That idea meshes with my notions of

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embodied visual metaphor. The perceivable bearer of meaning, the physical vehicle, is not transparent because it is inextricably interwoven with the meaning via embodied tropes. Visual metaphors come to matter because the largest and most fundamental part of our commonplace conceptual system is tropaic, and this includes art production and appreciation. Figurative comparisons structure how we perceive, think, act, and create. This includes visual analogies in all aspects and forms of art. Once again, embedding in this book both the ubiquitousness of tropes and their embodiment, in their formation through experiences in life and in application in visual art, I am employing conceits. We have thus far seen chapter conceits of St. Christopher and the discipline of painting. The conceit this time is created via a visualization of comprehension or understanding via the German word for this, das Verstehen, the noun, the nominalization of the verb verstehen, and the related forms of der Verstand (“reason” or “intellect”), das Verständnis (“grasp” or “insight”), and so on. Verstehen derives originally from an image of an intensification of standing, perhaps walking, carefully around something. The English word understand comes from the meaning of standing in the middle of something, not underneath it, as one might at first assume. This is something more like the Latin inter-, than the common modern under.7 Taking this as a cue, I envision installation art as a viable, workable conceit. Installations are works of visual art that encompass entire spaces, such as rooms, forming single, unified artworks. They are artworks one should walk through, around, and within, in order to appreciate them. Thus, my conceit, appearing in choices of adjectives and allusions, reflects that in this chapter.

Why visual metaphors matter in art Visual metaphors help us understand what artists are articulating, both intentionally and unintentionally, and how creators achieve this in the flesh— plus, to some extent, their initial inspirational insight. “A metaphor is both detour and destination, a digression that gets to the point,” writes Geary.8 Visual metaphors are the quintessence of what artists know, what they attempt to convey, and what they succeed in communicating. Moreover, they give us tools to abet us in critiquing works or aspects of works, which will be closely carried out here in the chapters on critical evaluation of visual metaphors in art. One of renowned art historian James Elkins’s Stone Art Theory Institute’s seminars was titled What Do Artists Know?9 My answer would be that they know how to

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manipulate visual tropes in fresh fashions, and thereby how to create new, meaningful visual metaphors. Elkins’s books The Poetics of Perspective10 and Pictures and Tears11 offer, in very different ways, significant analyses of and speculations on visual tropes and their effective and affective applications in great fine art. In the former, he critiques the now-standard explanations of perspective as a formal discovery, which has been used to express contradictorily both scientificity and subjectivity. Elkins exhibits the ways in which techniques of perspective are and were artistic choices, to reveal interpretations of reality. He sees perspective for its creators as a plurality of potentially metaphorically useful systems. In the latter book, Elkins sees our modern, purposeful coldness when viewing exhibitions and artworks as a deficiency in our ability to appreciate art. Pictures and Tears centers on the experiences of people where art has made them cry. Notably, he does not simply discuss works where this could be solely due to representations of religious or political imagery, but also on some nonrepresentational work which has done so as well. This too, especially in its humanistic eccentricity in today’s art history scholarship, has broad implications for any theory of visual metaphor in art. I would assert that the crucial locus of such emotional impact is situated in the social appreciation of powerful, recognized, yet newly created metaphors for shared human experiences. Artistic use of visually tropaic form is more multifaceted than it may at first seem. As Geary articulates, “Metaphorical thinking half discovers and half invents the likeness it describes.”12 The employment of visual tropes in art allows creators to express their desires, yet ones which are a combination of those willed, those discovered, and those constructed within the metaphoric structure. Linguistic metaphors have generally been considered imaginative, yet ambiguous, even vague. In point of fact, this is quite contrary to how visual tropes are experienced in contemporary art. To quote Geary again, “The truth is, metaphor is astonishingly precise.”13 He is speaking of all metaphor, but it is particularly applicable to visual ones. They are even more exact in visual art than text; they are emotionally and intellectually complex, yet specific, if not always immediately and casually comprehensible. Philosopher Richard Wollheim perceptively proposes that whereas in most of life we concentrate on generalities, “in the visual arts, however, we escape, or are prised away from, this preoccupation with generality, and we are called upon to concentrate our attention upon individual bits of the world: this canvas, that bit of stone or bronze, some particular sheet of paper scored like this or like that.”14 This extreme specificity can be appreciated in visual metaphors within all aspects of art objects, not only their physical

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supports. Even when so-decidedly particular, visual metaphors are even more open to multiple interpretations on the part of the perceiver than most tropes in language. In contemporary art, visual tropes frequently purposefully open themselves to multivalent construal. This does not mean, however, that they are hazier. Rather, they are multilayered, each stratum in itself a trope and a very specific one. The exact location, identification, and interpretation of the tenor, vehicle, or target and source, as well as the connector or copula (generally a version of “to be” in language) is part of this rich complexity. These are the questions of structure, the grammar or rhetoric of metaphors, which will be considered in relation to visual tropes in Chapter 4. The detection and application of visual metaphors in advertising and marketing have become a major discussion point among designers, as mentioned above. Matthew O. Peterson writes, “Metaphor is routinely expressed through pictures in contemporary advertising. Earlier work on visual rhetoric in advertising sought direct analogues for the tropes and schemes specific to verbal rhetoric. More recently, theory has developed out of characteristics particular to pictures.”15 They matter in that field ever more and more, yet are interpreted predominantly as an unproblematic instrument. However, as outlined in Chapter 2, this book deals with contemporary fine art, and thus of central importance is art’s crucial polysemy, subsisting in embodied multiple meanings, which is not typically the case in advertising. Visual trope is also a tool in fine art, but one of discovery, embodiment, and multifarious allusion rather than a device to craft clear, strong, and iconic statements, as it is in design. This polysemy is an important basis for visual metaphor in art. Andina’s definition of artworks cited above includes some salient points tackling this when she states that a work of art is a social and historical artifact containing a representation in the form of an inscribed trace, upon a perceivable medium.16 This melds well with my own definition. I claim that artworks are objects created for multiple interpretations, wherein the form and the content are inextricably interwoven, each mirroring the other in its own terms. Both of us recognize the most important aspect is that of embodiment, of form and content being inseparably entwined and inscribed. Multivalency and embodiment are the key components of artists’ new, often intricate, visual metaphors as the chief carriers of this materialization. To sum it up in a concise fashion, the purpose of this book is to display the ways in which visual metaphor shows us what works of contemporary art are about and how they incarnate this. A Lakoffian sense of embodiment is envisioned, but a parallel idea also surfaces in Arthur C. Danto’s work. David Carrier describes this concisely. “Here, then, is Danto’s definition of art: ‘to be a

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work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning’ ”.17 This embodiment, I assert, subsists primarily in the tangible visual metaphors of an artwork, which also then determines what it is about. Visual tropes in art are the inspiration, tool, and goal of the work. Studying the workings of visual metaphor allows us windows into works of art and the creative thought processes concretized within them. Particularly in contemporary art, artists seek out new interpretations of the inevitably intertwined dialectic of content and form. Art is clearly not solely about material form, as some Formalist Late Modernists would have it; it is plain to see that creators have something to say, to unearth. Equally, art is not all about the inability to say anything, about illustrating the unreliability of form as content, as some Postmodernists allege. The technical, physical, presentational, contextual, even social forms of art are tools for discovery and yet also are the discoveries themselves. Through this fissure between content and form, the great beast, long considered dead, can be envisioned in a new and splendid form: evocative trope, i.e., ludic visual metaphor in visual art. Karsten Harries writes insightfully, “There are moments when the inadequacy of our language seizes us, when language seems to fall apart and falling apart opens us to what transcends it . . . As language falls apart, contact with being is reestablished.”18 The inadequacies and yet richly oblique adequacies of all our forms of communication and expression, visual art most of all, can be used to playfully reestablish interaction with reality—an appreciation of “lived experience,” as I prefer to call it, rather than reality. Indeed, in many ways, “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor,” as the great poet Wallace Stevens asserted.19 Furthermore, as author Vladimir Nabokov so famously pointed out, in his afterword to Lolita, “ ‘reality’ [is] (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes).”20 Nevertheless, contact with this “reality,” with lived experience, is the great object and goal of our attempts at understanding, and repeated reunderstandings, which the conscious use of metaphor encourages. Artistic inspiration is of course a question larger than achieved technical and formal embodiment, and yet deeply rooted in it, via the tropaic use of these elements. The procedural embodiment of making is its own re-embodiment of insights frequently first gleaned in their manifestations in experienced life. So much concerning the muse is intuitive and even difficult for creators themselves to elucidate; therefore, we must extrapolate. Artistic revelation’s basis lies in the search for meaning, new import, through active meaning making. Mark Johnson contends that all meaning making is deeply aesthetic.21 Visual trope as comprehended through cognitive blending theory and Analytic Philosophy,

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especially of the Pragmatist school (metaphor as tool), can assist us in understanding this. Both of these will make repeated appearances in the details of my analyses of specific artworks in this book. Struggle is an important aspect of this process of creation of sense via the crafting of artworks—in particular, artistic or poetic struggle in the sense of “Agon,” as illuminated by literary theorist Harold Bloom, mentioned in the Introduction of this book. This conflict, arising from the anxiety of influence, will be attentively utilized in Chapter 5, when introducing my concept of metaphor(m). This is my notion that creators seek and struggle to discover and construct a central visual trope of form in a dialectical, even dialogical, circle of testing and understanding— in effect, walking around and examining their creations in a circle of formation, self-critique, and reshaping. This process allows them to express their desires, both those willed and those revealed by the visual trope, while wrestling with their tropaic insights and their inspirational antecessors. This is the source of their motivation for the work at hand and further creations after it. Considerations of visual metaphor through Analytic Philosophy allow deeper perceptions, clearer critiques, and appreciation of new metaphors in contemporary art. Following Carrier’s lead in Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll, the major goal of my book is to demonstrate how aesthetic philosophical reasoning can bring contemporary art into focus.22 Analyzing visual tropes assists in elucidating why so many contemporary artworks are so profoundly thought-provoking. Nevertheless, not all, not even most visual artists are directly influenced by and/or knowledgeable of philosophy. That is not the claim here. The majority, though, I believe, make discoveries themselves within their work and processes that are best understood and appreciated when considered in light of Analytic Philosophy or even Continental Theory. Some, I would maintain, are indeed influenced second-hand through reading articles or hearing lectures by critics who are themselves influenced by philosophy. More important, though, is that when there are similarities of thought between written philosophy and analogous discoveries made within art, the ideas are “in the air” of the culture and time period and ring true. There are, nonetheless, a few artists who are highly conversant with and knowledgeable of philosophy. One particularly distinguished contemporary abstract painter and philosophy devotee is Dan Ramirez.23 As Richard Shiff astutely describes Ramirez’s approach, Dan Ramirez devotes significant mental and emotional energy to writing about his experience as an artist. His texts are not mere records of the activities or thoughts of the day, but exercises in a process of reasoned observation that passes

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art through numerous variations. He labors over his writings, progressively refining them, though with no intention of publication. Analogous to his aesthetic practice, his writing has evolved into a sustained exercise in self-understanding. Often citing philosophical texts, it constitutes a philosophy of its own.24

The most important of the philosophers in Ramirez’s thought is Ludwig Wittgenstein. The artist titled a series of his works of the 1970s “TL-P,” in homage to the philosopher’s book that inspired him, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.25 In this series, the painter developed much of his unique personal style. These works unite an ostensibly Minimalist or Formalist approach with very non-Minimalist implications of representation and evocatively gradated areas of color that suggest atmosphere and even harken back to Romanticism. His compositional components include balanced internal divisions, indirect traces of the Necker cube, gradated blends, areas of opalescent and iridescent color against flat hues, all in acrylic and graphite. His is a fully conscious adaptation of received contemporary form. Ramirez says, As an undergraduate I was struck by the beauty of Minimalist art, and 40 years later I still find its forms inspiring. But even as a student I rejected the idea that Minimalist art referred to nothing outside of itself, to nothing beyond its literal presence. I accepted that those who followed these ideas truly embraced them, but I felt that human perception was far too complex for works of art to be spoken about in such limited and absolute terms. To me a work of art is about much more because it is both made and perceived by human beings.26

His interpretation and struggle with his personal forebearers, the Minimalists, is distinctive, and inspired by his reading of Wittgenstein. To cite the well-spoken artist once more, Ramirez says, I was fascinated by the Tractatus. To be brief, contrary to many scholars of the time, I believed Wittgenstein to be fundamentally concerned with spiritual and mystical ideas despite the fact that he was dealing with logic, mathematics, and language. For example, Wittgenstein spoke of the possibility of things being “other than what they are,” and I found this a far more intriguing statement than the Minimalists’ “What you see is what you get.” I found Wittgenstein’s courage, sensibility and lack of certainty about the very things he was writing about to be very poignant. This resonated strongly with my own desire to explore and ask questions and to accept ambiguity and uncertainty in my own work. It was inspiring and very liberating to me.27

Works such as TL-P 6.432, of 1977, show this well. The sheen of the graphite forming a truncated pyramid on hand-woven paper creates a surprisingly

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intimate harmony between sensuality and minimalistic restraint.28 While this is a drawing, a full-fledged painting, in acrylic on canvas, titled TL-P 6.421, from 1976–7, confirms his knowledge and mastery of the discipline even more powerfully.29 Another contemporary visual artist who makes extensive use of philosophy integrally and knowledgeably in his work is Jeff Hoke, especially in his Museum of Lost Wonder. His “museum” is imaginary, but to assist in envisioning it, he has created a website and wonderful book about it. Over the past thirty years or so, Hoke has been concentrating on this artwork, both his Lebenswerk and a Gesamtkunstwerk, merging myth, science, alchemy, and inspired speculation into vast, yet make-believe personal exhibition halls. His epistemological philosophical inspirations are primarily metaphysical and cosmological doctrines, often of an esoteric direction, and sometimes utilized tongue-incheek. I could discuss him in the paragraphs below concerning Mongrel Art. His book has text, paintings, cartoons, diagrams, cut-and-paste models and more, all united into one mammoth gem, a banquet for the eye, mind, and imagination—a sprawling, gorgeous amalgamation of science volume, arcane textbook, graphic novel, painter’s catalogue, psychological manual, do-it-yourself, thought experiment, and activity book. Hoke’s tome, website, and in fact all his artworks are encyclopedic, drawing on philosophy, astronomy, religion, biology, physics, psychology, and Tibetan Buddhism. The true strength of Hoke’s imaginary, mongrel museum lies not only in its fascinating breadth, but in the unanticipated clarity with which it all fits together.30 There are others like Ramirez and Hoke, yet most other artists make discoveries themselves, without necessarily having direct philosophical inspiration. Even so, their art can often best be appreciated by linking it to significant, similar, philosophical insights, as manifested in central visual tropes. Where are visual tropes often seen in art? In imagery, process, form, and context (including presentation and audience). Here is a very perfunctory list of artists using visual metaphor in these areas, and potential philosophies with which their practice shows kinships or aspects of their art that could fruitfully be philosophically discussed more deeply in the future. This is a rather broad, bird’seye view of the situation. All of the artists below would make excellent subjects of monographic essays into their art and visual metaphor. Let us start with visual metaphor in imagery. Lisa Lipinski writing of René Magritte, the renowned Belgian Surrealist, in René Magritte and the Art of Thinking, situates Magritte’s art in the context of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and poststructuralist linguistic theory from leading figures such

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as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze;31 a commendable task, even though the choice of theorists is rather artworld-fashionable. Other, more enlightening figures, through whom we could appreciate Magritte, include Roman Jakobson or Petra von Morstein, specifically in her reflections in her 1983 essay “Magritte: Artistic and Conceptual Representation.”32 Magritte, as a Surrealist, is using the combination of disparate representations, usually only two, or the displacement of an expected representation with another, as in the large egg instead of a bird in the birdcage in his painting Les affinités électives (“Elective Affinities”).33 This he does not do randomly, but rather carefully uses metaphor and metonymy, as Randa Dubnick discusses so well in her essay “Visible Poetry: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Paintings of René Magritte.”34 From the Modernist Magritte, we go to Kerry James Marshall, one of our most exciting contemporary painters.35 Ken Johnson has summed up his work well. Marshall, the Chicago-based artist whose work is the subject of an interestingly problematic exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, is an exceptionally skillful and imaginative painter and draftsman. He makes large paintings, in a style you might call Allegorical Pop, that have the folk art-like inflection of a sign-painting artisan. Rich in social satire and metaphorical resonance, his paintings have mainly to do with the African-American experience. Among his most memorable efforts was a fiercely ironic series of canvases from the 1990s depicting low-income housing projects as idyllic, pastoral places populated by African-Americans, usually painted in inky black tones that comically literalize the demographic term black.36

Marshall paints fully black almost-silhouettes of “black” people, not slightly browner than most ostensibly “white” people, as in reality, but fully flat, deep, rich, lamp-black human forms in otherwise more naturalistically hued settings. The artist’s use of the iconicity of this is a masterful manipulation and criticism of racist terminology, upturning it into positive visual metaphor. His command of Western painting techniques yields a virtuoso institutional critique, such as those we see in installation artists Daniel Buren or Hans Haacke. However, this is surprising in his work, as Marshall does so in painting, a medium often dismissed by critics as unable to do such exploration and expression. Fruitful philosophical issues staged in the artist’s work include color as trope, color as false trope, architecture (such as housing projects) as embodied and failed metaphor, artistic medium as arena of metaphoric battle, and more.

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Even what is consciously excluded from artworks may be metaphorically important. Maddy Rosenberg is an artist and curator who works in painting, artist’s books, printmaking, drawing, and installation. Images of details of architecture turn up frequently in her work, often very European and historicallooking ones. These recurrently include sculptural elements that are representations of humans, yet never contain direct delineations of people. When viewing a group of such works, this absence becomes quite clear, and a very loaded statement. The pieces become haunting in a manner suggestive of Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical works, yet with no juxtapositions of non sequitur images. Jackson Pollock, the famed Action Painter, is a Late Modernist whose work has been extensively, and justifiably, discussed in light of philosophical phenomenology. It is clear the traces of process in his pieces are his chief visual metaphor.37 But what of contemporary artists whose processes are not so apparently experiential, and yet tropaically, philosophically important, such as William Kentridge? Leora Maltz-Leca offers a splendidly insightful philosophical analysis of Kentridge, the South African draughtsman, animator, and installation artist, in her book William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises.38 Maltz-Leca sees the artist’s stirring and unique combinatory process of making art (drawing, erasing, cutting, pasting, filming, animation) as tropes for how we think and live.39 The importance of Paul Cézanne’s formal achievements is part and parcel of art history instruction. Yet how his achievements in form could operate metaphorically has seldom been analyzed philosophically, apart from two discerning studies, “Cézanne and the Poetics of Metonymy” by Julia Friedman40 and “Interior Landscapes: Metaphor and Meaning in Cézanne’s Late Still Lifes” by Bridget Alsdorf.41 The Post-Impressionist painter’s cinder-block-like brushstrokes, his geometrically solid compositions, and color-formed space all point toward a central trope of constructed, firm, stable art—in many ways a refutation of the visual tropes of ephemerality in the art of his antecedents, the Impressionists. In Carrier’s monograph on artist Lawrence Carroll, he uses philosophical commentary, employing the resources of analytic aesthetics to discuss the formal achievement of this abstract artist in relation to art history, traditional Modernist abstraction, and the expanded object. This could serve as an outstanding model for discussing other contemporary artists. Additionally, it would be instructive to take Carrier’s appraisal of Carroll’s art into the detail of the visually tropaic associations of his painterliness, his technique of cutting, emphasis on edges,

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expansion of the traditional Modernist panel painting, and perhaps even his personal, psychological interpretation of the tradition of painting. Another knowingly theoretical creator is artist and writer Matt Ballou. He is inspired by the notion of conceptual blending created by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, which will be discussed in depth in the following chapter.42 His paintings may be either representational or seemingly fully abstract, yet share beautifully haptic surfaces and palettes, as he finds mergers of two or more oppositional settings into one mental and aesthetic space to be possible in both approaches, and more important to meaning than any sectarian stylistic affinity of a work. Ballou achieves a tension between tactile surface and handling through which he can suggest forms in space as well as flat surface, a dialectic which is pregnant with potentially metaphoric significance. He enthusiastically plays with our neuronal capacity for flipping among options, even when seemingly conflicting ones. He creates optical versions of contranyms. In an artwork such as wheneverWHEN (Michigan), the artist fashions visual metalepses out of two synecdoches.43 The binary settings are Modernist painting and more traditional Romanticist, Pre-Modernist, painting. He is using a part, a synecdoche, from the first-named realm, i.e., flatness, which was so acclaimed by Greenbergian Late Modernism. From the latter, he revels in an opposite synecdoche, that of implied space, whether perspectival or atmospheric. These two settings are blended in a new, merged conceptual site that allows both. This creates a visual trope based on (two) earlier trope(s), thus a metalepsis, yet also a visual zeugma due to its contrariness. Conceptually, albeit not stylistically, akin to Ballou is the artist Mark G. Taber. He is very influenced by cognitive metaphor notions, having created a marvelous series of short gif animations illustrating image schemas. He is currently creating two-dimensional still-pieces in two series: “Tychist Objects” and “Force of Nature.” Both concentrate on using the inherent characteristics of digital, computer-based image making, that is, physibility—fashioning objects that exist in the form of data, but which are aimed at being printed out as analogue objects. The “Tychist” artworks are titled from Greek tyché for chance (via Charles Sanders Peirce). They are realized in beautifully colorful abstractions in acrylic on board, sometimes recalling Postpainterly Abstraction and early European abstract painters. The “Force of Nature” pieces, his most individualistic works, are graphite on paper, or acrylic on board. They suggest naturalistic representations jumbled through linear intrusions caused by chance vectors. The underlying matrices (as the term is used in printmaking) are collections of algorithms, chains of commands, rather than carved blocks of wood or chemically altered

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limestone. Furthermore, each physical artwork can be far more unique than any traditional edition of prints, each being generated anew each time, not simple printouts (hence posters) of a scanned original, as so many so-called digital prints are. The surprising, tropaic aspect is that Taber uses mathematics, digitality, determinism, accident, and chance in interlocking, dialogical fashions to create beautifully humanistic artworks. His central metaphors are particular embodiments-in-action of the image schemas he animated earlier, ones which merge seeming opposites, thus are antitheses; however, he masterfully exploits them to the point of structural chiasmi. In addition, as he has written in his book The Physible Universe, his concern with digital versus analogue is united with a metaleptical concern for previous fine art.44 Finally, we have context. This concern is quintessentially Postmodernist; our current period features artworks which increasingly include a strong conception of who the audiences will be for each work and how they will encounter it. Important contemporary photographers Ken Lum45 and Dawoud Bey46 would be two ideal candidates for sustained philosophical investigations of the stirring complexity and social importance of the embedded visual tropes in their extended interactions with the public, who is often also the subject, of their works. Looking into how artists’ conceptions merge with philosophical ones, or at the very least, how making such comparisons enlightens us to the strengths of the artworks, is productive. However, it is important to point out again that the assertion here is that the creators have most often discovered the ideas within their work and creative processes; they should not be seen as illustrations (which, though, has been the case in some Postmodernist interactions with literary theory). My emphasis is on how contemporary art and philosophy intertwine in metaphor and what we can learn from this. The contention is, following the lead of Carrier, that aesthetic philosophical reasoning as a method of appreciation in contemporary art can illuminate the art better, in my case doing so through the investigation of artists uses of visual trope.47 The fascination and excitement of encountering and applying new conceptual systems, i.e., philosophy, in the free play of tropes in visual art can lead to productive discoveries, in the hands of both creators and of scholars. It can produce new discernments into contemporary art, but also into aspects of the nature of creativity across a broader time span. Recent Analytical Philosophy, especially that including Cognitive Metaphor Theory, offers an, at this time, atypical model in the Poststructuralist-dominated artworld, in that it acknowledges agency—that is, the individuals who make art experiences, artists. This renders a chance to investigate into and speculate on

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the nuts and bolts of creation. This also allows us to be more concerned with concepts than with words alone, thus fostering application to a wide range of creativity, especially visual artforms. In Chapter 7, I will demonstrate this by discussing the significance of realized cognitive visual metaphor(m)s in tangible detail by studying a single painting by Charles Boetschi and a recent body of paintings by Leonard Bullock. To return to some perfunctory examples, there is a loose set of contemporary artists employing an approach I term “Mongrel Art.”48 This is art that antipuristically and syncretistically unifies varieties of artforms, disciplines, tendencies and philosophies into visual artworks. It often involves popular or democratic and street artforms outside the “standard” fine art ones, as well as socalled traditional, time-honored, and also technologically “new” disciplines, as it seeks to revitalize and transform them all. This is not appropriation or fusion, but a personal and disjunctive dialogue of arbitration. Mongrel artworks are syncretistic, not merely eclectic at their best. This is a visual realization of what in literature has been called mingling a variety of voices; it is the amalgamation of a diversity of visualizations. This is achieved in contemporary visual art chiefly through concrete expansion of disciplines, among other elements, but such an enlargement is as important for its visually tropaic evocations as its physical actuality. Visual metaphor in itself is inherently a mongrel activity, which encourages this direction of art. Artist Christa Donner is one prime example, as she merges installation art, illustration, painting, and feminist concerns.49 The Wormfarm Institute by Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas in rural Wisconsin in the United States is a grand, interdisciplinary project integrating culture and agriculture, where an active organic farm is also an art center, an artist residency program, and an art-event coordination center—in total, a Mongrel work of art at an institutional and regional scale.50 Artists, curators, and collaborators John Jennings and Damian Duffy merge comics, hip-hop aesthetic, fine art, literature, and scholarly research.51 Another is the young Mexican cooperative of fine art and graffiti art painters who call themselves Colectivo Binni Cubi.52 They personify this mongrel approach, while displaying Bakhtinian heteroglossia in their art. This Mexican collective has created a variety of works in their drive to enliven, indeed rescue, their local Zapotec culture. Their most representative and notable ones are where the artists collaboratively paint huge mural portraits on the walls of traditional houses paying homage to living, local people respected in their community. Titled “Nuestros abuelos, nuestras raíces” (“Our Grandparents, our Roots”), these works are often celebrated with village festivities including music, food, and the presence of the honored guest. Colectivo Binni Cubi

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embodies polyphonic form in several ways: the collaborative structure of the works being made by a fluctuating number of artists, the interaction with local communities, and the interaction of the subject and the creators. Their work also advocates for the liberation of voices offering alternatives to prevailing, even dominant international and national narratives. The rich metaphoric implications are numerous. The visual unification of fine art painting techniques and graffiti, highly anti-classist, hints at possible applications to creativity and society beyond art. The synecdoche of using a living, local, respected figure as the subject, rather than a religious or mythologically symbolic one, reads as both a critique of inherited art and a celebration of lived culture. Painting as an opportunity for a non-Neo-Conceptualist event reaches beyond superficial spectacle to become constructive visual hyperbole (the large scale) and perhaps even visual litotes (“this is no cathedral painting, yet even better”). New York painter Tom Sanford is another syncretistic, mongrel creator. He mixes traditional, representational oil painting techniques and references with those of graffiti art, hip-hop culture, and caricature. This combination permeates his entire process, from the act of painting through to the subjects (often community-based) and the presentations, which are often forms of installation and street art. Bakhtinian philosophical notions which can be used to more fully understand the complexity and promise of such contemporary Mongrel artists include his sense of the living fluidity of expression; heteroglossia, polyphonic form and dialogic form; his insight that these may engender the liberation of alternative voices; and his presentation of the carnival as a suggestive metaphor.53 In his view, language is not a neutral static object (à la Ferdinand de Saussure). Language, especially creative literature, is an “utterance,” a social act of speaking, involving struggle, ideology, class, speakers, and listeners. This applies to Mongrel visual artists as well. They are creating social acts of visual expression, through visual presence and metaphor. Such works of visual art are also not “uniaccentual.” Multitudes of points of view naturally mingle within each artwork. Such artists, exemplified by Colectivo Binni Cubi and Tom Sanford, supply us with an artistic version of the philosophical necessity of accepting a belief in the existence of other minds. They are in continuous multilayered dialogue with each other, the local community, and the artworld and society at large, having discovered avenues of expanded, localized, and alternative-voiced outreach that can best be understood as visual tropes. Heteroglossia may be envisioned as an unsystematic, almost chaotic struggle of a variety of voices. Likewise, the “strongest” artworks (to use Bloomian terminology) are many-layered and composed, yet often not truly systematically

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unified. I see this in the novels of James Joyce, some of Pablo Picasso’s most important works such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,54 and the early installations of Dennis Oppenheim such as Early Morning Blues.55 Continuing this line of reasoning, Bakhtin both asserts heteroglossia as a foundational truth and promotes its exploitation in writing. Again, this is true in contemporary visual art as well, generally in the tropaic implications of the postmodern expansions in their works. Bakhtin finds an exemplary version of heteroglossic literature in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. This author created what the theorist terms a new polyphonic or dialogic form. The various points of view which arise in a novel, within or between characters, are presented and utilized, but not hierarchically ordered. The formation of visual artistic tropes, and creative thought in general, is accurately described in such terms. An artistic trope is dialogically forged and used. It revels in the interplay of equivocal, interlocked meanings. There are multiple theses and antitheses yielding no syntheses, but rather opportunities for even more productive conflict. Such struggle is subversive and liberating. Finally, Bakhtin’s use of the carnival as metaphor is attractive, albeit perhaps too often cited. It is embodied in a delightful and culturally specific form in the wall murals (and accompanying festivals) of the Colectivo. Updated carnival. Art can, in such applications, undermine the dominant conventions and rules through jesting and unruliness, yet be deadly serious as well. In our time such festivities as Mardi Gras or Fastnacht often have disappeared, been commercialized beyond use, or have degenerated into exploitative, sexist, drunken sprees. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri envision plurality itself as a potential carnivalesque arena of liberation in their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, one resistant to neoliberal globalization and homogenization.56 The spirit of the carnival lives on in the creation, enjoyment, and artistic application of tropes, especially visual ones in art. Raman Selden describes the this spirit as “collective and popular; hierarchies are turned on their heads . . . opposites are mingled . . . the sacred is profaned. The ‘jolly relativity’ of all things is proclaimed.”57 The carnival as trope can best be seen as replaced by the trope as carnival. Borrowing a phrase from Morson in his essay “Tolstoy’s Absolute Language” wherein he describes the novel in Bakhtin’s eyes, we might say that all visual tropes “are framed by an implicit ‘for instance.’ ”58 As we see, the works of various contemporary artists can be enlighteningly elucidated by looking into the philosophical applications of their visual metaphors. These include, but are not limited to, tropes of resistance in Mira Schor’s art59 as assessed via Julia Kristeva60, especially in Schor’s recent paintings on top of and correcting biased newspaper headlines. Equally illuminating can

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be uncovering the metonymies of Hans Georg Gadamer’s ideas of “the limits of method” and “the circle of understanding,” with the constituent “fusion of horizons”61 as attained in artist duo Alex Meszmer and Reto Müller’s “democratic art” in their Transitory Museum of Pfyn, Switzerland;62 and the complex communal similes of interaction analogous to John Dewey’s “double loops of learning”63 in Raoul Deal’s interdisciplinary, intercultural community art, such as his recent United Migrant Opportunity Services mural project in Milwaukee, Wisconsin64. Dewey proposed that learning is more than the often-prevailing view described as “error and then correction.” He believed learning to be a reiterating process of testing, learning, correction, and then re-testing, after modification of the underlying goal, which can be, and generally is, altered, thus seeing it as two loops of correction. Similarly, the philosopher of hermeneutics, Gadamer proposes that understanding is accomplished by coming to a situation with preconceptions, testing these and then necessarily altering one’s judgment, resulting in ever-repeating circles through which one then deepens the comprehension of any whole through knowledge of its parts encountered in subjective yet open investigation. This version of gaining knowledge elucidates the strengths of the projects of both Meszmer/Müller and Deal. They apply it to the creation, presentation, and interaction with chosen audiences in productive feedback-loops of learning for all involved, most of all themselves. We also see the four basic components of philosopher Cornel West’s “Prophetic Pragmatism” functioning in the exciting painting-objects of Titus Kaphar:65 “discernment, connection, tracking hypocrisy, and hope.”66 All of these are rich grounds for interpretation in terms of the philosophy of visual metaphor, and bring us back to the central interaction of art with reality, through trope. This is a series of more-than-double-looped hermeneutic circles, first within artists’ inspirations, then in the material, techniques, and presentation, and finally in what they articulate about and contribute to life for viewers—and then, often, in the further development of artists in their works due to what they have learned from its reception. Even though West and Kaphar offer necessary hope, it must be noted that they also clearly present the fact that lived experience is not always positive. Reality exists in what West repeatedly calls “brutal fact,” especially for those without much power such as disadvantaged minorities.67 Thus visual metaphors of critique and expectation are frequently interlocked. Kaphar’s visual metaphors are powerful, usually solidly based in image schemas. He recreates traditional artworks, usually paintings, which he then alters by overpainting, cutting into, folding, crumpling, or allowing other paintings to peak through created gaps. All of these alterations embody revelations of concealed, or at least

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ignored, racism. He uses aggressive, destructive acts to fashion highly constructive considerations. This is masterful use and combination of several visual tropes: cutting through the surface is a metalepsis of painting as well as a simile of being cut out of society; overpainting is a metaphor for hiding and yet does the job of a litotes, negatively disclosing the truth; crumpling and folding are violations of the integrity of the picture plane, which is a metaphor for the desecration of humanity through racism; the additional images peeking through holes in the dominate image are disclosing truth in a very tangible manifestation. Most of his works make complexes of visual tropes that as a whole read as very contemporary, slightly ironic, yet deadly earnest allegories. There seems to be an implicit positivity in the very use of visual metaphor in art, even when socially or personally critical. Artists, of course, use tropes which explore the entire human experience, including anger, fear, love, frustration, depression, injustice, and much more, both positive and negative. Nevertheless, one of the strongest aspects is that the difficult work of discovery and creation offers a facet of positive aspiration to all of these simultaneously. It is mandatory, art seems to say, that we hope against all hope. Creative and theoretical activity certainly must be foregrounded against a background of the tragic, but with a potential foreground of confidence as well—at the very least in the possibility of expressing the tragic for others. “Culture is, in part, convincing people not to kill themselves,” West has written in Prophetic Reflections, continuing that “the question becomes, then, as cultural critics and as cultural artists, how do we generate vision and hope?”68 One answer, inspired by West and operative in Kaphar, is that we can do so by building new tropes to live by, ones which criticize inadequate cultural metaphors, but additionally point to wider vistas of inspiriting desire—metaphors of operativeness for “existential empowerment.”69 There is the circle, concretized in tropes, of understanding the experience of life in general and another intertwined circle of understanding the possibilities available in one’s media, tools, process, form, imagery, context, and public. For most contemporary artists these are indivisible. Thus, visual metaphor is a fruitful and vital area of research for philosophers, critics, and art historians, as well as artists so inclined themselves. A major function of visual art is the creation of opportunities for imaginative, tropaic interpretation. As mentioned here in Chapter 1, in Robert A. Sharpe’s book Contemporary Aesthetics, he offers a profound, elegant definition of art which is able to account for its complexity and contrariness and its inherent necessity for interpretation. As he writes, “Works of art are objects for interpretation.”70 Indeed, we add, occasions for manifold interpretations and re- understandings.

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Visual metaphors in contemporary art are often iconic image-mappings or image schemas raised to life-determining power, Weltbestimmung through Weltanschauungen. To explain, iconicity in language is one example of linguistic, metaphorical image-mapping. This is when the structure of the meaning is understood in terms of the structure of the form of the language presenting that meaning. The operation of image-mapping is simple to describe, and generally simile-like. A mental picture is projected onto another “target” image. For example, envision matching the appearance of a tree to that of a woman. Her litheness as she stands slowly moving in the breeze is dramatically foregrounded in this process, brought to the reader’s or viewer’s attention. This can then be carried out in creative works on the means of expression: the words, sentence structure, brushstrokes, outline, etc., are made supple, tree, and woman-like. Such mappings are possible because of the existence of image schemas, such as schemas characterizing bounded spaces (with interiors and exteriors), paths, motions along those paths, forces, parts and wholes, centers and peripheries, and so on, as will be discussed in following chapters. In visual art, the mappings are the meat of the issue. Not only as in language would a word meaning “long” be made artificially lonnnnnngggger to express this, but in art this activity is carried out on each and every aspect of the work: paint stroke, composition, installation size, collaboration or not, darkness, light, movement or not, and so on. To bring my chapter conceit of installation back into the spotlight, here I have reached what artists refer to as their style or approach in creating such artworks. The second of these terms is often preferred by creators because in common use the term style has been debased, signifying nothing more than individual, characteristic forms of expression without content or thought—habitual, unconscious quirks, also referred to as tics. True style is much more than this. It is the distinctive, personal mode of production and expression of an artist which is visibly unique to their work: their distinctive, intellectually and emotionally charged mechanics of embodying meaning in visual tropes. The Academicists were trapped in an illusionary past, Formalist Modernists felt delusorily free from the past, and the Deconstructivist Postmodernists sometimes appear endlessly tangled in an inescapable present. Contemporary artists are in fact directly responsible for fashioning their own visual tropes through struggling with the past, concentrating on the present and attempting to build hopeful new tropes for the future. This is realized by altering received tropes through the processes of extension, elaboration, composition, interrogation, transumption, and/or deliberate misconstrual, forming embodied visual metaphors reflecting and critiquing their experiences of life. This they

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accomplish in and through the parameters of their work with enough cultural coherence to be able to communicate, but enough originality to be significant. Trope is a fundamental mechanism of thought, one that allows us to use physical and social experience to understand other objects and events. Such metaphors therefore structure our most crucial understandings of our experience, and our creation of art; they are metaphors we live and create by, often shaping our perceptions, actions, and artworks without our ever necessarily directly noticing them. However, we can choose to notice them, concentrate on them and actively seek to improve our understanding through them. This usually occurs for both creators and viewers through the arts, wherein we discover new vantage points on our experiences. Therefore, contemporary artists are creating new visual metaphors to live by. What Th. Emil Homerin has written of metaphor and naive belief in the context of religion holds for the arts as well, explaining why visual metaphors in art matter. Homerin was an American scholar of religion, especially mysticism, especially the Sufis, yet he often has great insights for culture in general and visual art in particular, as well. He has written, When a myth or belief is no longer accepted as a literal account, whether due to a period of crisis or cultural transition, it may be recast in a new form, humanizing and assimilating more primitive dimensions by the symbolic and evocative nature of metaphor. The primary symbols of a culture are then perceived and colored by the individual consciousness receiving a specific complexion over long periods of time, and their multiple, often subtle, meanings lend themselves to those religious and poetic usages whose function is to establish man’s meaningful existence in a seemingly indifferent world.71

Certain assumptions may, following Homerin’s assertion, become more useful, not less. Artworks which were previously viewed as “inspired oracles of an ecstatic saint” may now be interpreted as “profound descriptions of humanity’s existential state.”72 This is not a loss, except perhaps of naïveté, but rather a gain in understanding. This is what artists do through and in visual tropes, and thus, why visual metaphors matter in art.

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Figure 4.1 Chapter 4: The Grammar of Visual Metaphor, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 66

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Structures and systems Is there a set of structural rules governing the creation of visual metaphors by artists that parallels the conventions of linguistic grammar? Likewise, is there a rhetoric, of visual tropes, procedures for affecting viewers? Grammar is chiefly a set of rules concerning how language works. These conventions can be regarded either descriptively, depicting how language works, or prescriptively, as rigid directives for speech and writing. Rhetoric is, on the other hand, the theatrical skill of argumentation: knowledge of the cogent use of language to determine and persuade an audience. The two have traditional been linked, even equated, especially in ancient Greece and Rome, as rhetoric has often been the effective use of grammar. Grammar, in addition to being standard prescriptions for correctness, influences styles of creative writing. I agree, however, with Erik Forrest that, “the elements of art and the principles of design have little in common with the rules of grammar. Art, metaphorically, makes statements and conveys information, but an identification of art with language is likely to be misleading.”1 Visual literacy advocate Donis A. Dondis envisages the elements of a visual grammar as parallel to the standard parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. He sees these units of language reflected in the building blocks of visual composition (line, shape, mass, tone, color, space, light, balance, etc.).2 However, this is closer to syntax than grammar, if a comparison to language is desired at all. Syntax is a subsection of grammar, chiefly concerning word order in sentences. Grammar is the entire package of “laws” in a language, how it works. Thus, beyond syntax, grammar also includes inflection, conjugation, declination, aspect, degree, modality, case, gender, number, person, tense, and so on. Line, shape, color and so forth are parts of what art teachers commonly call composition, art appreciation, or even visual literacy, and can be used far more freely than any analogy to syntax implies, especially in modern languages like 67

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English or German, where syntax is necessarily inflexible in order to convey meaning easily. In more ancient languages such as Latin, much of the same work is done by cases and their associated word inflections, thus allowing for almost totally free word order, a boon for creative writing, and the bane of students. Dondis’s conception, while partially factual, would require vast enlargement. While important for learning competence in visual production, these schematic rudiments of composition are guidelines which are far broader and far less authoritative than linguistic rules. They are more pragmatically didactic, heuristic and provisional than grammar is in spoken or written language. As we shall see examined in following chapters, form in art (including the building blocks named, yet also medium, technique, presentation, audience, and much more), is indeed the fundamental substance of creativity and expression, yet it is useful due to its metaphoric and world-building possibilities, not as rules, but rather as malleable materials. Both visual art and language concern thought processes, expression and communication, yet that does not imply that they are matching. Dance too, and music, are forms of cognition and expression, but of entirely different types. My own thoughts are highly visual, most closely resembling imagined, three-dimensional diagrams including pictures, words, several languages, connecting lines and the like. Organization need not necessarily be grammar. Saying that structure in art or visual metaphor is grammar, is itself a trope, an analogy. Visual tropes and visual art do not need precise syntax or set linguistic grammar. Although these may overlap with language due to their bases in embodied experience, they have their own unique, optical and haptic forms of configuration. The extended trope in this chapter is that of the graphic diagram. This conceit makes allusion to the schoolish task of diagramming the grammar of sentences, but also more enjoyably to the drawing of graphs and illustrations which merge visual, pictorial, even representational, elements with text and abstract schematic shapes like arrows, lines and other graphics. These have been aesthetically appreciated by a wide variety of artists from the proto-abstract, mystical art of Hilma af Klint to the political works of Mark Lombardi and the evocatively beautiful, Duchampian paintings and prints of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Comics, or sequential art as scholars are now oft wont to call it, are contemporary visual art and sit between diagrams and traditionally iconic, single-image, art. As Sidonie Smith, a scholar of English and Women’s Studies, writes,

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[Comics] hybridity encodes and routes meaning in multiple directions; their oscillations between conjunctive and competing modes of representation and storytelling (visual and textual) prompt new itineraries of “framing,” “listening,” and “feeling” through the visuality of the written and the discursivity of the depicted; the complexities and densities of language and pattern across frames and gutters energizes opportunities for metacommentary and complex recursiveness.3

Breaking the fourth wall, let me add that I am an incurable lover of diagrams and charts, such as the one in my chapter frontispiece. I enjoy them in theoretical essays, no matter what they are about. Thus, like all the theories I find most pleasing, this book has several diagrams.

Analytic philosophy and metaphor For many years, Analytic Philosophy had little use for metaphor in its considerations, especially in the era when it was dominated by Logical Positivism. Trope was simply not particularly verifiable nor scientific, at least until the rise of cognitive neuroscience. Analytic philosophy now, however, comprehends a far more inclusive array of methods and ideas than ever. Mid-twentieth-century through early twenty-first-century philosophy displays a remarkable expansion of interest in metaphor theories, often those with interdisciplinary inspiration. As applied in this book, cognitive metaphor theory broadens analytic philosophy and even critically revises portions of literary theory, rather than overthrowing them, as parochial adherents may seem to sometimes suggest. Amalgamated, these approaches offer a significant methodology for discovering the implications of visual metaphor creation in art. As is familiar, under Logical Positivism, language was limited to strictly scientific functions. The proponents thought that language had to be precisely literal to be of use. The metaphor scholar Andrew Ortony refers to this kind of conception of language use as non-constructivism.4 Tropes of any variety would in this view be swerves from, and therefore contingent on, “standard” unembellished communication. This left no space on such a philosophical page for verbal, textual, and especially for visual, metaphor. Within the tradition of analytic philosophy, metaphor now has drawn attention precisely because it does not conform to accepted truth-conditional semantics. Tropaic expressions are not concerned with expressing a scientifically verifiable truth. Influential

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philosophers Max Black and Donald Davidson have reconsidered the relationship between truth propositions and metaphors. Their work has been significantly responsible for opening the field beyond the purely mathematically logical.5 Black’s important insight is that truth conditions cannot be quantified for a metaphor. He argues that metaphors are so markedly fluid that they are not actually what linguisticians call referring expressions, and make no up-front, forthright assertions of truth at all.6 Bearing this in mind, it is clear that metaphors are not propositional. This is especially clear in visual tropes. Davidson similarly asserts that a metaphor generates an opportunity that instigates an insight of seeing one object of attention as something else, which is not the appreciation of a trouble-free fact.7 Not only do these two philosophers open analytic philosophy to more complex metaphor theory, their ideas suggest that (especially for visual trope), if metaphors are not fully propositional, they require no rigid grammar. In visual trope, the truth of an expression is in the perceived truth of the observation itself by the artist as perceived by the viewer. We think, and feel, that, yes, depression and the blues are like the uninspired angel and baby in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I engraving.8 This is a resoundingly evocative perception, not an equation, nor a proposition in the strict sense. There is, though, a copula of sorts; this lies in the compositional and stylistic elements. Philosopher of science Ofer Gal asserts that “As logical-positivism and the scientism of early analytic philosophy dissolved, they left behind a conception of science as just-one-certain cultural system among many others, which enabled reciprocal influence; aesthetics and philosophy of science seem, lately, almost to converge.” He even is so bold as to put the question forward, “how much did the philosophy of science actually benefit from the use of terminology originated in discussions of rhetoric and poetic—the linguistics branches of aesthetics?”9 In the same period when analytic philosophy was not incredibly gracious toward metaphor, it was rather dismissive of the philosophy of art as a whole as well. Yet now, in these first decades of the new millennium, dogmatic partisanship appears to have begun to wane. Nevertheless, many authors in that field which is still competitive with analytic philosophy, continental literary theory, even now appear to pay attention and respect to a delimited pantheon of theorists. The various theories comprising this multifarious enterprise include Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Deconstructivism, Hermeneutics, Formalism, several Marxisms, Neo-Freudianism, Reader-Response theory, Feminist criticism, Relational Aesthetics, Performative Aesthetics and a few others. The dominance of “theory” has been so persuasive as to have given rise to an attack against it as

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if it were a single, monolithic entity, as exemplified in Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michael’s essay “Against Theory.”10 Much of postmodern advanced theoretical reflection on literature and art is rooted in poststructuralist French ideological thought and has been polemically used to prod the sleepy beast that much Anglo-American aesthetic theory, and more so art criticism, unfortunately had become. Cultish adherence to this group of Postmodernists can lead to simplistic clannishness or it can manifest academic trendiness; however, the creature of philosophy is certainly now wide awake and frisky (unfortunately not in standard art criticism itself yet). This book has been influenced by selected aspects of postmodern theory. This includes, nevertheless, a skeptical and sometimes even antagonistic response to the sophistry and solipsism of many partisans of theory. Contemporary literary theory has been perceptively termed the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a term introduced by Paul Ricoeur, who felt that all texts are corrupted by societal forces aiming for domination. This is a rather distrustful, totalizing conception of creative works, relegating them to symptoms of illness, and of creators, seeing them merely as minions of the powerful. Nevertheless, literary theory can be intellectually stimulating, particularly as a provocative catalyst to thought. The sundry doctrines of theory expose new insights by subjecting every assumption to recrimination. The light of theory may be actinic, but it throws deficiencies into high relief. Concurrently, and more decisive here, the philosophy of art has assumed an unprecedented prominence in analytic thought. From accusations of “dreariness” by J. Passmore in 1954, aesthetics has developed into an exciting and important realm of inquiry in the hands of such philosophers as Arthur C. Danto, George Dickie, Nelson Goodman, Noël Carroll and Berys Gaut. Nevertheless, more than literary theory, it has tended to stay within its own frame of reference as Lydia Goehr has described. [American aesthetics] continues seriously to investigate its relation to its single parent, philosophy. While it sometimes strives for independence, it never actually breaks free. Instead, it usually finds itself trying to reeducate its parent as a result of its own maturing. Perhaps this constant reeducation is a necessary, albeit unwieldy, component of the continuing rejuvenation of both aesthetics and philosophy.11

While this is true, aesthetics has much to offer artists and critics. The invigorating influence of aesthetics on visual art can be illustrated by looking at Danto’s or David Carrier’s philosophical criticism, and indeed the series this book is in. Danto’s inspiration of Dickie’s institutional theory of the ontology of

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art has had a great impact on the artworld as have his critical reviews and books. Other philosophical problems and solutions beyond the institutional theory could be potentially even more enlightening. Analytic aesthetics has had a greater influence on the speculations in this book than has literary theory. The theory of central visual trope diagrammed and applied in the following chapter bridges several gaps. First, it contains elements of cognitive metaphor theory, literary theory and the analytic philosophy of art, sought out and applied. Second, it accounts for aspects of creativity from the standpoint of the maker, the object, and the viewer, as well as being a critical hypothesis. Third, it focuses on contemporary visual art even if it may imply wider applications. It is inspired by the poetics of metaphor and research discoveries in contemporary cognitive psychology, with additional elements from other theoreticians and of my own creation, within an analytic framework. Since about 1985, what is termed “literary” or “cultural theory” has had a signal, even hegemonic, position within the analytic segments of the field of visual art. Literary theory’s hermeneutics of suspicion and overemphasis on irony dominates contemporary visual art, thus also must be addressed via trope creation. The human gap between expectation and fulfillment, so important to this direction of thought, the basic problem of the mediated nature of our experience, has been a perennial point of trouble which began as a philosophical problem long before “new media” entered the scene. We know nothing but what reaches us through our senses or from information supplied by others. There is no “direct” contact with any concrete reality as such. The epistemological anxiety over this state of affairs, as well as its exploitation in the form of ironic reiteration, is a mainstay of contemporary literary critical theories and the works of art inspired by them. This is Postmodernism’s pride and its folly. Literary criticism accentuates the points where language (in its widest sense) falls apart. This could, at its best, point toward more embodied contact with “reality” and toward the difficulty of the act—the beauty of what we call “stubborn fact.” As exaggerated doubt and hackneyed irony wane, such theory becomes more amicable to other tropes, giving them broader value. This is a revival, it seems, of one of metaphor theory’s founders, Ricoeur’s, insights.12 Following his lead, we can envision visual trope in art as highly cognitively significant. It refreshes our perceptions of lived experience by drawing our attention back to our natural human ability for creatively reflecting upon aspects of reality in new ways. Even if outside of that, he and much literary theory are rather pathologically diagnostic, this endows substantial constructive agency to artists creating new visual tropes.

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Analytic philosophy is hard to pin down; it exists almost without effortlessly identifiable doctrines (“given that Brandom, Kripke, Kaplan, Chisholm, Davidson, Carnap, Austin, Hempel, and Wittgenstein fall under its extension,” as Samuel Wheeler writes).13 Poststructuralist literary theory is even slipperier, containing Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, a.o. Especially interesting is the regard both sides of this exaggerated division have for Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, albeit for quite diverse motives. Nietzsche can be something of a silver screen, upon which readers project much of themselves. Nevertheless, metaphor was central to the philosopher’s thought. An oft-cited quote of his has become so widespread as to be even a popular internet meme. What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.14

He is, of course, talking chiefly about so-called dead metaphors, not the perceptive, creative ones of contemporary authors or artists. Tiziana Andina comprehends Nietzsche uniquely and fruitfully through Danto.15 This opens Nietzsche’s inherent pessimism to more constructive, less nihilistic, systematic philosophy and metaphor theory.16 Her reading of his work also includes a wellreasoned critique of Nietzsche. As she writes, Thus, if we accept Danto’s premises that philosophy has the same nature as science (it is systematic and architectonic) and that therefore every philosophical work must be systematic although it may not appear to be, then we have to conclude that Nietzsche is a systematic thinker. But if we accept the systematic nature of Nietzsche’s philosophy, then we also move to conclude that this systematic nature also characterizes his metaphysical speculation (the theorization that Nietzsche arrives at utilizing scientific knowledge) and that this speculation needs a correspondence theory of truth to work at all . . . In short, Nietzsche tried to reconcile two different views: that of the ordinary person (and of the naïve philosopher), which describes the many things that he sees, and that of the scientist (and the prescriptive philosopher) who constructs theories that can be utilized to describe a world that our senses normally do not perceive. Attempting to synthesize both perspectives (that of the ordinary individual and that of the scientist) in a single theoretical framework is clearly a difficult task—in my opinion an impossible task—even for Nietzsche.17

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For the purposes here, what Andina says of Nietzsche’s theory of truth can be applied to his forays into metaphor and art. They are not an sich antithetical to systems of analyzing trope. In particular, we can see Nietzsche’s movable host of metaphors graphed as an aspect of Danto’s assertion that works of art embody meanings.18 The meanings are embodied in the central visual tropes of the artworks, as this book will demonstrate. Metaphor is a vigorous topic in analytic and continental philosophy. An arena in which the sides often merge within the deliberations of individual thinkers. Cognitive metaphor theory mediates this. In this book, analytic philosophy is conceived of as modus of thought. Carrier writes about his book concerning the painter Lawrence Carroll that it is a philosophical commentary employing the resources of analytic aesthetics, “We philosophical art writers . . . are preoccupied with defining art, explaining why it has a history and telling how to identify its meaning.”19 Here, I am doing much the same, identifying contemporary art’s meaning in visual metaphor. Analytic philosophy and Poststructuralist literary theory are thus both loosely related circles of methods which have emphasized the study of language, concepts and logic. This book emphasizes reasoning and observation, to deal with the visual, not the linguistic. Scholars and other intellectuals operate in landscapes populated with a vast array of competing and overlapping circles of discussion, dialogues both historical and contemporary. However, it can be emphasized that contemporary artists do so as well, both consciously and unconsciously. One’s own thought will reflect these, as one wanders among them seeking insightful inspiration, yet also critiquing them. To make a play on the title of Goethe’s famous novel, these are one’s eclectic affinities, thinkers to whom one’s own thought is linked. Scholars generally emphasize the importance of specific affinities to their own projects. The process is similar for creators, yet they often dramatically foreground their divergence from their discoveries in others. To foreground the chapter conceit (as a simile) of a diagram, this is like looking to where circles overlap, yet not completely, and where connecting vectors adjoin and separate thoughts.

Terminology A reminder concerning terminology. As discussed in the Introduction, we mean trope here, all metaphors, although each is slightly unique (including metaphor, metonymy, simile, synecdoche, litotes, hyperbole, irony, analogy, allegory, symbol, antithesis, parable, metalepsis and so on), and visual applications and variants on

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these. There are various noteworthy and functional dissections, examinations, and classifications of trope, each with its own set of terms. The most renowned are tenor and vehicle from rhetorician I. A. Richards, or target domain and source domain from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. The tenor or target denotes the subject, object, person, or idea commented upon, and the vehicle or source designates the image whose attributes illuminate the comparison. Richards presented his tenor and vehicle vocabulary in his book The Philosophy of Rhetoric.20 Lakoff and Johnson introduced target domain and source domain in their book, Metaphors We Live By.21 There are other terms as well, including metaphrand and metaphier, similar to the above pairs, plus two new concepts for their effects in operation, paraphrand and paraphier, fashioned by psychologist Julian Jaynes.22 All these dissections are useful, yet neglect to an extent something that becomes very important in visual metaphor, sometimes due to its seeming absence, implicitness, or hiddenness: the connector, the copula. Between the tenor and vehicle or target and source is some form of coupling agent to form the evocative comparison. In linguistic metaphors, in most languages, this is usually a conjugated form of the verb to be: “Achilles is a lion.” In similes, it is an open admission of the indication of similarity, by joining to be with like, or the word as: “He fights like a lion,” and “He is busy as a bee.” Adjectival and adverbial tropes, sometimes called synesthetic metaphors, have an implied copula (making them more comparable to visual art as will be seen): “He is a warm-hearted person,” “She speaks musically.” In the latter two examples, the connector is highly important, yet must be read into the comparison. In nominalization, converting a verb or an adjective into a noun, the connector is likewise implied: “The reading took too long.” This is even closer to visual art. In visual art, the connector, vehicle and source are often not as calledout as in language, yet are present in the mere obvious intentionality of the representation, and in juxtaposition, superposition, homospatiality, noncompossibility, style, material handling and more. The more compressed comparisons become, the stronger many turn out to be. In visual metaphors in fine art, the link is typically through physical presence, conceptual and formal technique. Furthermore, presentational or exhibitional particulars are vital, particularly in performance art, installation art, performance-lectures and other forms of very contemporary fine art, but this has bled over into paintings, photography and other object-oriented art. Visual metaphors “must always be studied within their sociopolitical context,” as Elisabeth El Refaie, a scholar of visual and multimodal forms of communication as well as metaphor, writes in

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her excellent essay “Understanding Visual Metaphor: The Example of Newspaper Cartoons.”23 In visual art, such context also includes the venue, the architecture of the site, history, art history and other framing circumstances. As discussed in Chapter 2, it is now quite clear that to many philosophers visual metaphor exists and need not be seen as illustration of, or dependent on, language. Dissenters to this discovery have in the past suggested that visual metaphors are images that must first to be construed as concepts, and such an activity can only be done in language. Above all, cognitive metaphor theory and cognitive neuroscience have put a complete stop to such an assertion. Lakoff and other researchers of cognitive metaphor point to a wider cultural application of metaphor as a thought process, one which underlies even language itself, thus is not dependent on it. Creating and interpreting visual metaphors often builds on conceptual knowledge that is not encoded in linguistic constructions from the outset, neither those in written nor verbal communication, but rather in thought and action, and only subordinately language.24 El Refaie declares that Because of the logo-centric history of the study of metaphor, many researchers still tend to assume that theories from the domain of linguistics can be applied to visual metaphors in a simple and straightforward way. This assumption is often based on the idea that images are fundamentally representational, which would imply that the visual can be seen simply as expressing the same meanings as language, albeit in a more imprecise form.25

She reminds us that, as discussed by Ray Morris, “In fact, visual communication can and often does refer to ‘things’ that have no verbal translation at all.”26 This perception fairly cries out for studies of unique modes of trope in other artforms, including music, comics, graphic logos and others, as proposed by contributors to the book Multimodal Metaphor.27 Some of the insights visual metaphor studies offer may be better instruments than linguistic conceptions for musical, architectural or other embodied metaphor. For instance, musicologist Leonard Meyer has fruitfully disclosed how metaphors can also map experience between two nonlinguistic realms.28 As mentioned at the onset of this chapter, there is a connection but also a disparity between grammar and rhetoric. Rhetoric is the effective, persuasive use of language, not its rules, although it may use grammar to achieve its goals. Visual trope use in contemporary art concerns the dynamic use of embodied visual metaphor, which in certain ways is decidedly rhetorical, even when not fully consciously applied on the part of the artist. Visual artists aim for new and individual metaphors which, nevertheless, are persuasive, comprehensible and

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effective communicators of experience. So, if pressed for a bon mot, a serviceable, if oversimplied one-liner would be that visual metaphor does not have or need a grammar, but does develop a rhetoric, which will be seen in following discussion of specific artworks. Now, let us address the similarities and dissimilarities between linguistic and visual tropes.

Similarities to linguistic metaphor In what ways are there parallels to be drawn? Carroll, the philosophical patron saint of Chapter 2, and perhaps of most of this book, asserts that although they are very dissimilar, there are structural analogies that can be drawn between verbal and visual metaphors. Primarily in the copula, the “grammatical structures that portend identity—such as the “is” of identity or apposition.” Visual metaphors, rather than linguistic grammar, use “pictorial or otherwise visual devices that suggest identity in order to encourage metaphorical insight in viewers.” Mainly, he sees this in a maneuver he has named homospatiality, which appears often in this book.29 As a reminder, homospatiality is the name for the situation when artists create composites of discrete components, yet ones that cohabit in the same space within the artwork, as previously extensively considered in Chapter 2. The copula can be the unification of the visual concepts to be compared within one representational image, or even more imaginatively, their mere presence together within the boundaries of a work of art, whether painting, sculpture, installation or whatever. The style of making also may be the significant, yet subtle, homospatially unifying factor. Since metaphor is a matter of thought first and foremost, then there will inevitably be correspondences among all incarnations of tropes, including linguistic, visual, music, gestural, and multimodal ones. Beyond that maxim, language does dominate much of human experience, therefore becomes a model and springboard for much of our creative and analytic endeavors—yet not exclusively so. Artists have been known to go so far as to deliberately consider the question “what would that linguistic trope be in a purely visual application?” in order to goad themselves into new ideas in their art. This can be seen in the recent, widespread literature on visual metaphors in advertising intended for use by designers.30 Rather close visual parallels can in fact be discovered or created for the major specialized subcategories of linguistic trope, both in general cultural use (such as in advertising), but also in fine art. I have created a chart of ten of them: metaphor, metonymy, simile, synecdoche, litotes, hyperbole, irony,

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allegory, symbol, and metalepsis. This could be expanded with the less familiar, yet also often amusing tropes of catachresis, personification, zeugma, syllepsis, and more. (This could go on and on, although the fundamental ten in the chart are the most significant. Robert DiYanni judges that he has discovered that rhetoricians have classified at least two hundred and fifty different tropes.31) The chart has five columns: the name of the trope, a description of it, a verbal example, a clear example in an image from design or the like, and an example of its use in a work of fine art. For example, the second entry in the chart is metonymy. The description reads, “A trope in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated; describing something indirectly by referring to things around it or from the context.” The verbal example is, “The White House spoke of 77 injured soldiers.” The example image is the well-known UNICEF poster for the 2012 World Food Day, where the head of a fork is altered into a giving hand with the simple shortening of one outside tine, making it resemble a thumb. (A metonymy of elegant genius, created by Saatchi & Saatchi, probably art director Frédéric Nogier). The example from fine art is a Baroque still-life painting by artist Maria van Oosterwijck of 1668. It is a memento mori, most of the elements being metonymies for death and dying. This chart has been instructive and enjoyable for students, but is too large and contains far too many images for this book. Thus, I have placed it online on one of my websites, for those who wish to peruse the whole thing. It can be viewed at .32 Most contemporary artists do not use visualization of linguistic tropes so unequivocally (except perhaps for the overdominance of applications of irony in certain varieties of Postmodernist works). Instead, artists have a habit of imaginatively manipulating inherited tropes by elaborating, composing, extending, questioning, criticizing, transuming, or deliberately misconstruing them. These transformations will be scrutinized in use in specific works in following chapters. Such alterations are employed in order to make tropes of their own, to be more creative, and most of all to fit their initial insights more accurately. Why are there similarities at all between visual and linguistic metaphors, if indeed neither is the illustration of the other? Such resemblances are clearly not manifested in straightforwardly shared features between these two modalities of expression. In his book Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor, philosopher Ted Cohen proposes and then thoroughly illustrates that the aptitude for imagining oneself as another person is a crucial social facility, and that, moreover, this is the same as the talent that lies at the base of understanding tropes. He writes, “what one must do to grasp any of these sentences [of personal

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identification] is to think of one thing as something it plainly is not . . . that, I think, is exactly what one must do to grasp a metaphor.”33 Various physical and imaginative overlaps of lived experience do indeed lay the groundwork for the ability for all people to understand metaphor, even cross-culturally, and to understand one another when comprehending them. Lakoff discusses crosscultural understanding lengthily in his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, ascertaining that it is the construction and mechanics of our physical bodies and senses in the world, shared by all humans, that fosters the opportunity for any type of mutual communication.34 If we were language-based alone, disparate and slippery as languages are claimed to be by Poststructuralists, we could never converse in any way with other cultures new to us. There are important differences, but the similarities are more predominant between us. This comes of the lived reality that we are all brains in bodies in societies in the world. As Lakoff and Johnson write in their first book, Metaphors We Live By, These subjectivist positions all hinge on one basic assumption, namely, that experience has no natural structure and that, therefore, there can be no natural external constraints upon meaning and truth. Our reply follows directly from our account of how our conceptual system is grounded. We have argued that our experience is structured holistically in terms of experiential gestalts. These gestalts have structure that is not arbitrary. Instead, the dimensions that characterize the structure of the gestalts emerge naturally from our experience. This is not to deny the possibility that what something means to me may be based on kinds of experiences that I have had and you have not had and that, therefore, I will not be able to fully and adequately communicate that meaning to you. However, metaphor provides a way of partially communicating unshared experiences, and it is the natural structure of our experience that makes this possible.35

Thus, the similarities between linguistic and visual tropes originate in their equivalent formation owing to our shared physical experiences and the resultant cognitive processes through which we fashion metaphors: blending, plus our reliance on foundational metaphors. Conceptual blending is a theory, created by Mark Turner in collaboration with Gilles Fauconnier, which enhances Lakoff ’s theory of foundational metaphors.36 According to blending theory, elements, structures and associations from distinct circumstances are merged in the mind and in expression. The two, or more, settings to be combined (that of the source and that of the target) are conceived of as mental spaces, much like two discrete, labeled, geometric forms in a diagram. The thought-procedure is to imaginatively fabricate a controlled

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equivalence between the compared scenarios, thereby creating a fresh intermingled, thus blended, new mental space. This is a much wider vision of tenor and vehicle than is customary. Picture the diagrammatic shapes drawn as partially overlapping; the resultant intersectional shape evokes original, emergent features and likenesses between the blended thoughts. It is a very pictorial, and even architectural mode of theory, one quite promising for appreciating visual trope, although it was originally conceived of for elucidating textual metaphors. As a linguistic metaphorical example of blending theory, let us consider one outlined by Joseph E. Grady, Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson. Consider, for example, the well-worn metaphor . . . This surgeon is a butcher. intended as a damning statement about an incompetent practitioner . . . Initially, one detects only two domains, surgery and butchery, with direct projection from source to target, guided by a series of fixed counterpart mappings: “butcher” maps onto “surgeon”; “animal” (cow) maps onto “human being”; “commodity” maps onto “patient”; “cleaver” maps onto “scalpel”; “abattoir” maps onto “operating room”; and “cutting meat” maps onto “cutting flesh.” This analysis of the mapping, however, cannot by itself explain a crucial element of the statement’s meaning: The surgeon is incompetent. A butcher, though less prestigious than a surgeon, is competent at what he does and may be highly respected. Clearly, the notion of incompetence is not being mapped from source to target.37

Blending Theory explains this through its emphasis on input spaces, rather than lists of direct attributes. According to it, in metaphors we exploit some structures from each of the inputs (that is, the target and the source domains) but not all, which are then united in a new, combinatory generic space. We can add to this an insight from Bipin Indurkhya and Amitash Ojha: “In contrast, in a literal comparison statement like ‘Billboards are placards,’ reversing the terms (‘Placards are billboards’) produces a meaning similar to the original one.”38 So-called literal comparisons are not blendings and are not enlightening, but rather statements of mere fact. Visual metaphors are instances of cognitive blending, not literal, and sometimes related to linguistic metaphors, due to our underlying thought processes as described in the Turner and Fauconnier theory, yet usually different in important ways. Many perceptive applications of this theory to art are presented in the book The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity.39 A discerning description of conceptual blending in a visual image is in the paper “Conceptual Integration Theory and Hybrid Visual Metaphor,” by Maria J. Ortiz.

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We analyse the formal structure of the homospatial hybrid image and suggest that it originates in the mental operation defined as Conceptual Integration or Blending . . . by merging two projection spaces in a third space, revealing a hidden relationship between the original spaces. For example, in the graphic publicity of the environmental group Greenpeace . . . the image of a leopard is merged with that of a felled tree, generating a hybrid image that cannot be broken down. This image is the result of a blend: the generic space is that of nature under attack: the felled tree is included within the projection space showing attacks on the plant world while the leopard belongs to the space presenting aggression aimed at the animal world. In the combined space, the felled tree is merged with the decapitated leopard to create a third structure, the “felled leopard” . . . To summarise, projection spaces are merged together in a homospatial hybrid image through the metaphorical blended space.40

Mental spaces are conceptually structured in the imagination out of existing, more elementary, domains, particularly those which Lakoff and Johnson call “foundational metaphors.”41 These are tropes that form the basis on which all ensuing metaphors are formed. They are the deeper, culturally and physically more primal, underpinnings of analogical thought. In both linguistic and visual tropes, foundational metaphors play an important role. Foundational metaphors are, in turn, “grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of a physical and social character.”42 In Chapter 6, we will see how a vocabulary of foundational cognitive metaphors is at work in the formal, technical, and stylistic aspects of the works of artists and other creators. A brief portrayal of foundational metaphors is given in More Than Cool Reason, by Lakoff and Turner. Basic conceptual metaphors are part of the common conceptual apparatus shared by members of a culture. They are systematic in that there is a fixed correspondence between the structure of the domain to be understood (e.g., death) and the structure of the domain in terms of which we are understanding it (e.g., departure). We usually understand them in terms of common experiences. They are largely unconscious, though attention may be drawn to them. Their operation in cognition is mostly automatic. And they are widely conventionalized in language, that is, there are a great number of words and idiomatic expressions in our language whose interpretations depend upon those conceptual metaphors.43

Examples of such core, or foundational, metaphors are “LIFE IS A JOURNEY,”44 or “EMOTIONAL IS DOWN.” These tropes permeate everyday life and culture from its mundane manifestations through to its peaks of creative expression. Lakoff and his co-thinkers postulate a limited number of these basic metaphors,

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forming categories of thought. A foundational metaphor such as “LIFE IS A JOURNEY” can be the footing of creative linguistic works of art such as Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic poem, the Divine Comedy,45 or visual works of art such as Landscape with the Flight into Egypt by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, from 1563.46 A contemporary work of visual fine art poignantly building on this foundational metaphor is Bill Viola’s Tree of Knowledge. In this video installation, viewers walk a narrow, 16-meter-long hallway which ends with a large screen, on which the computer-generated and animated image of a tree is seen. Viewers’ locations are being registered unnoticeably by infrared laser scanners. When visitors enter the passage, the tree is a mere sprout. As they progress forward, the tree grows, unless the viewer halts—when the image of the tree stops growing older. Once viewers come to the end, the tree ages and dies.47 All of these works are striking, allegorical applications of the core foundational trope mentioned. There are, as described, resemblances between linguistic and visual tropes in general, but not because one is an illustration of or dependent on the other. The assertion in this book is that this has to do principally with the fact that each is based in creative uses of underlying conceptual thought processes, comparable materialization arising from conceptual blending and from being rooted in foundational metaphors evolving from our shared physical and social experiences.

Dissimilarities to linguistic metaphor More fascinating than the similarities, however, are the contrasts between visual and textual tropes. Whereas they appear to be generated through the same conceptual thought processes, they diverge in meaningful ways within concrete creation. Ojha empirically studies how the mental processing of visual and linguistic tropes do tend to differ, even in perception. His experiments give credence to assertions of the distinctiveness and value of optically perceived metaphors.48 As El Refaie asserts, “Many of the dissimilarities between verbal metaphor and its visual counterpart result from differences regarding what the two modes are able to express easily and efficiently.”49 Furthermore, degrees of explicitness and levels of implication come into play again. To return to El Refaie, If we compare visual metaphors to verbal ones, then visual fusion in Carroll’s sense would correspond to cases where both the figurative term, or vehicle, and

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the actual referent, or topic, of a metaphor are present, as in explicit nominal metaphors of the form A is B . . . Just as such a high degree of explicitness is actually rather rare in verbal metaphors, so many instances of visual metaphors are also based not on visual fusion but on more implicit forms.50

There are implied tropes in the brushstrokes of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh: building-blocklike stability in the former and flamelike passion in the later. In the paintings by contemporary artist David Reed, his color palette consists of tertiary, quirky, yet rich hues, which feel personally associative yet can be almost inhumanly cool. Reed’s eccentric colors and formats suggest a mannerist antimodernism; his abstract, painterly integration of the technological image and the hand-made one is a buried critical, questioning simile: he is showing how painting is like electronic media images, and yet better. These are more implicit forms of comparison. Unlike in linguistic tropes, visual ones are frequently reciprocal, the tenor and vehicle play both roles, first one direction, then the other. This is seldom true in textual ones. “Juliet is the sun,” for Romeo, but it does not follow that “the sun is Juliet.” Infrequently, this reciprocity may be ever-so-slightly implied in compressed or more tacit metaphors. One possibility for linguistic reciprocity could be in John Milton’s unspoken simile of Satan’s shield in Paradise Lost51. As Harold Bloom describes and analyzes, Milton derives this from Homer’s Achilles in the Illiad52 and Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen’s Radigund.53 Milton anachronistically adds facts to his description of Lucifer’s buckler garnered from Galileo’s telescope: craters.54 The imagined dents and damages in the shield resemble craters of the moon, which is a metaphoric rewrite of an existing metaphor, thus a metalepsis. It is a description in which the simile is presented, yet the tropaic details are not explicit, albeit obvious and enjoyable to knowledgeable readers.55 Satan’s shield is like the moon and like Achille’s, and likewise the moon is like Satan’s shield. Such symmetry between the target and the source is a rarity in comparisons in linguistic metaphors or similes, and might be only suitable to the intriguing subcategory of metalepsis, such as the one described. Carroll’s discovery of the aspects of visual metaphor he terms homospatiality and noncompossibility reveals why this double-directionality is possible and even very likely in visual trope. The philosopher points out that visual tropes are habitually not unidirectional. Visual metaphors proffer unified visual arrays in which the terms of the metaphor of both are perceptually co-present at once. Unlike paradigmatic cases

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A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art of see-as, exemplified by ambiguous switch-images [such as the famous duckrabbit figure], [Claes Oldenburg’s] Typewriter-pie is an image in which we simultaneously, rather than sequentially, apprehend features of typewriters and pies in such a way that these two categories mutually inform each other.56

Language, whether verbal or textual, is plausibly more generalized than art, coarser, as it is a socially-agreed-upon construct, it is communal, or we could not communicate about more practical matters, which is its primary use. Visual artworks are cases of over-specificity, resulting from and in the concreteness of actual, created, sensible, corporeal entities, ones seldom aiming at easy communication. This is likely why as language draws near visual art, in poetry and drama, or mixes with it, as in film or comics, it takes on more and more evocative unidirectionality in its tropes. Another disconcerting disparity between visual and linguistic tropes is that in optical ones, mixed metaphors can be beneficial. They impart more opportunity for polysemy and multidirectionality in construal. In linguistic tropes, mixed metaphors are disapproved of because they create jumbles, hinder understanding, and foreground the sentence and its mistakes rather than the meaning. In practice, they are typically unwitting combinations of clichés and dead metaphors. In visual art, when the mixes are mélanges of sentimental, claptrap clichés, with no personal investment, they produce kitsch. However, in nonbanal, knowing, and meaningful application, they can result in a fusion of effects, stimulating closer reading and interpretation. In Chapter 5, we will see how Vincent van Gogh mapped the image of a flame onto the dot of Impressionist brushwork, fashioning a form of mark-making which could assume the contours of flames. In his paintings the artist makes a progression employing a complex of many tropes. The metonymies “a flame is fire” and “fire is hot” lead directly to the foundational metaphor “PASSION IS HOT.” However, the churning, flame-like trees, churches, and skies can also be interpreted in another visualization as tempests in water, an elemental opposite of fire. This enriches our opportunities for polysemic reading, does not confuse it as it would in text, his stroke is both a flame and a ripple of water.We can travel between the layered trope conglomerates, as if mentally and emotionally perusing and comparing several mappings of the same idea, adding strata to the diagrams of our considerations. Carrier, in his remarkable book The Aesthetics of Comics, sees comics as an inherently impure entity.57 Similarly, visual tropes offer art many possibilities due to their peculiarly mixed, mongrel nature. This can be discovered in artist Sonya Clark’s drawings, installations and performances centered on metaphors

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of weaving and unweaving. Clark deploys this dialectical pairing as a mixed trope. It is a metonymy of African and African American women’s mutual support, and it is a constructive synecdoche of historical rootedness. She has works delighting in the cheerful aspects of abstract patterning in hair weaving, such as her collaborative works with hairdressers in her Hair Craft Project.58 Additionally, Clark has woven variations on Kente flag textiles, created objects fashioned of interlaced hair, and a masterpiece of un-weaving in her work Unraveling in 2015. The artist, with the help of a group of assisting friends, disassembled, unwove, a battle flag of the Confederate States of America, as far as they could in just over an hour. They achieved only about 3 centimeters of the flag, a very apt metaphoric expression of the painfully slow, difficult work to disentangle racism in the United States. It was then displayed on the wall, with an accompanying work titled Unravelled, consisting of three piles of thread sorted into red, white, and blue, from the same activity completed in her studio.59 This is an amazingly powerful, mixed visual metaphor, as well as a synecdoche, a symbol which is dialectic almost to the point of an oxymoron, and it is perhaps even a chiasmus in the combined display of the two pieces. The abstract comics of artist and art historian Andre Molotiu also come to mind. He has been creating such art himself and promoting similar works by other for years, especially in the large volume he edited, Abstract Comics: The Anthology 1958–2008.60 Molotiu recently completed a 200-page graphic novel titled Universe A. His works usually have traditional comic panel borders on the pages, but the images within them are fully abstract, often to the point where any sequentiality is hard to discern. On other pages, the sequentiality is clearer, yet may overlap various borders. These are exciting works and entertaining to read, or is that view? The allusive character of his generally highly linear drawings flirts with hosts of insinuations, yet also seems to aspire to remain emphatically nonrepresentational, without being decorative in the least. Molotiu offers works of art that are not only on the border between reading and seeing, between comics and abstract fine art, but on the borders of several visual tropes. One cannot look at them without seeking metaphoric references, yet this desire is also productively thwarted.61 Astute use of the distinctiveness of visual metaphors in contemporary art is one of the chief tools artists are using to get beyond the cul-de-sac of Late Modernist reductivism as well as the manneristic impasse that too much Postmodernism has become. In his book Idiosyncratic Identities, art historian and psychologist Donald Kuspit formulated three vital necessities for rejuvenating art in our postmodern times, when “the avant-garde [has died]

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from entropic pursuit of novelty.”62 These requirements are: to find the heart of creativity in desire, to embrace idiosyncrasy, and to nourish one’s yearning for healthiness. There is a necessity now to rethink and discuss the invention of fresh artistic techniques, to re-examine the “problems of the artist” with critical eyes and minds: composition, context, presentation, subject matter, content, surface, facture—in short, every element of artistic creation. The conscious examination and application of visual metaphor within contemporary art is one such needed, innovative, vital technique. As depicted here, visual metaphors are even potentially more polysemic than linguistic metaphors, which themselves are highly so. This multivalency is a principal ambition of visual trope making. This complexity sometimes seems to be, but is not, the result of ambiguity. Because art is not straightforward and undemanding, even many artists tend to use this term, ambiguity. Visual polysemy is, though, not hazy, even when it is oblique. It tends toward wild allusiveness without the social constraint of language. Being not strictly communal, visual trope may unavoidably tend to demand what some see as overly challenging interpretation, which can be labelled as ambiguity, whereas linguistic expressions generally try not to be too impenetrable at that level. The latter, of course, are often resolutely, rewardingly rich, but clearly, monogenic, “one strand,” or at most duo-strand, within the single metaphor, even if the whole novel or other written work is multi-strand, to exploit Christian Doelker’s terminology.63 Notable abstract painter William Conger suggests that it is correct to separate verbal and visual ambiguity. The main function of language is to eliminate ambiguity, to narrow meaning to “this” and not “that.” It is not always easy to eliminate ambiguity (ask any lawyer). Of course, language can be purposely used to do the opposite, as in poetry. In our everyday speaking and writing, accidental and purposeful ambiguity is common. The visual is always ambiguous. It cannot be unambiguous. Perhaps certain kinds of diagrams, architectural, engineering, or non-verbal directions can get close to nonambiguity and thus function like language (as symbols), but otherwise any visual thing is essentially always ambiguous. Anything can be regarded as something else, ad infinitum. My notion about the opposite functions of the verbal and the visual are derived from linguist Roy Harris (see Integrationist Linguistics).64

Conger is seeing ambiguity as a positive aspect of visual art, especially abstract art, such as his own. Like many artists, though, he means what we are calling multivalency or polysemy, an openness to varied levels of interpretation and to

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abundant associations of varied aspects of experience. This is not what nonartists think when they read ambiguity; the common meaning is much more akin to vagueness or obscurity, indicating something incomprehensible. Marc De Mey has a virtuosic essay on this topic titled “Mastering Ambiguity.” De Mey perceives the function of art as an extension of the function of the brain, researching the neurobiological foundations of ambiguity in art, as part of his study of aesthetic appreciation. His is a much broader, overriding notion of ambiguity than just outlined here. De Mey is using art to look into general properties of the brain and cognition. His descriptions are masterful of aspects of various artworks which have traditionally been seen as ambiguous by art historians, such as certain representations in Jan van Eyck’s paintings.65 Conger’s use is more in line with what artists, critics and historians themselves mean when they use the word. The painter is well-known for his writing on art as well as his abstract, geometric, yet not-truly-Minimalist paintings. He has an energetic, individual style wherein he deliberately combines suggestions of illusionistic space and light with geometric shapes. As Saul Ostrow has pointed out, Conger successfully evokes metaphorical associations.66 Sue Taylor has written, “William Conger’s masterful abstractions are inextricably bound up with the physical and psychological experience of a particular place.”67 Accordingly, Conger is open to complexity and encourages polysemy and visual metaphor in his art. His subjective and trope-laced approach can be appreciated in the painting Privateer II, finished September of 2020.68 In this oil-on-wood, the geometric composition is dominant, yet undermined delightfully by the slight asymmetries and hints of traditional, representational painting. Typical for Conger, these latter effects could be either references to where he lives, Chicago, or to his respect for old master techniques. This is most obvious in the upper-right quadrant, which could be a reference to a wintery view of Lake Michigan, which one indeed cannot see across due to its size, creating that ocean-like endless horizon, in itself almost abstract. This seems to be under a sky bearing two adjoined, wispy, stratus clouds; or this could be feathery scumbling not so dissimilar from the paint handling of John Constable. This paint handling is repeated in variations in several other major geometric divisions, left and bottom. All these zones, as well as the more flatly painted areas, are bordered by linear elements, one of which in the near-middle wavers gracefully. Several of these thin, linear shapes are modeled from dark to light. There is a sense of light and deep space, nevertheless competing with flat surface space. It is a peaceful, delightful, yet contradictory painting, calling out for associative interpretation,

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while still asserting itself as a Late Modernist object. The near-representational passages are metalepses, semi-representations playing on past artists’ depictions, as well as metonymies of historical painting. The rigid form that is not truly unbending is almost an oxymoron, in the service of an insight about stability and peace being conjugative with openness and enthusiasm. Conger’s work additionally proves that catachresis, a trope where the elements significantly depart from conventional usage, is feasible and even eye-opening in contemporary visual art. The painting is a striking composition of a variety of tropes of surprisingly comforting coincidences of contraries. A final point concerning the differences between visual and linguistic tropes. Even when incarnations of cognitive metaphorical thought in the two different media of visual and linguistic expression are parallel, the types or subdivisions can be dissimilar. This is not withstanding the fact that I made the chart described above to show, and teach, the tropes when similar. In visual metaphor, rhetorical devices can mix, as discussed, yet also merge or, oppositely, divide in ways unique to deployment in visual art. For example, metaphors (in the specific sense), are often identical with similes in visual works. As art has no exact equivalent of the word as, the strength or weakness of a direct comparison is along a sliding scale, from quite obviously specified, thus more like a simile, to surprising or more cryptic comparisons, thus more like metaphors. A simile, of course, is a stated comparison (usually formed with like or as) between two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in common. It is a trope that points out its own activity. “O my luve is like a red, red rose.”69 Pablo Picasso’s Bull’s Head sculpture, a (bronze cast of a united) bicycle seat and bicycle handlebars, is like a bull’s head, indeed like a Picasso-style bull’s head, like many of his drawings made before this sculpture was fashioned.70 The as is visually asserted by the blatant, obvious delight in a witty discovery both by the artist and by any viewer. Contemporary artist Julian Schnabel’s more recent, ever less-painted and ever larger images imitate metaphoric aboutness. The tendency for such ostentatious analogy has become his rule, making it almost dead metaphor. However, when his approach worked best was in the collage paintings that made him famous— the “Broken Plate” works, as they are often termed, as the collaged elements within the thick paint are shards of smashed crockery. These revolved around simile. The plate chips are similar to, are like, large gestural brushstrokes, and simultaneously like mosaic. Both readings cry for appraisal as “epic” if seen as tropes, yet are uniquely, pleasingly inventive if seen as a poor-man’s (which he is no longer) substitute for piles of paint or professional mosaic tiles. The broken china in The Sea from 1981 also substitutes similaically for thick impasto, which

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in itself is a traditional similaic substitution in ocean painting for the froth on the crests of waves.71 Likewise, merged tropes, somewhat dissimilar from mixed ones, can be discovered in other contemporary visual art. Artist Byron Kim merges synecdoche with metonymy and metaphor in his work knowingly titled Synecdoche.72 What could be taken as a grid of nonrepresentational abstract paintings in the tradition of Minimalism, is in fact a representation of the various hues of the skin of thirty-six people. The colors, then, are a synecdoche of humanity. However, they are also a metonymy of race and racism; a metaphor for racism as well as its insane vocabulary limited to black, white, brown, red and yellow (when humans are all actually shades of yellow ochre); and a metonymy of traditional painting. The grid is a synecdoche of Late Modernist, yet also a metaphor for the rigid, false and troublesome divisions of racism. It is a masterful work in many ways, including its use of visual trope. One topic in both visual and linguistic tropes which has been consistently undervalued is playfulness in the use of figurative language and images. Metaphor in language traditionally was thought to be rhetorical decoration at best and frivolousness at worst; playfulness has been viewed even more askance. Playfulness triggers creativity and exploration, consequently innovation in all human activities, including creative writing and especially in visual art. Leon Rosenstein writes, “The kind of activity that the experience of the art object is and the kind of being that the art object has (as compared to others in the everyday or extra-artistic world) most resembles play.”73 This is certainly how most contemporary artists I know regard the process of creating visual art. Passing references to playfulness, the ludic, albeit not with much accompanying consideration, have existed in discussions of art since the 30s. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens is largely the source for any positive assessments of it.74 As he astutely surmises, “Wherever there is a catch-word ending in -ism we are hot on the tracks of a play-community.”75 The crucial, developmental play of children includes painting, drawing, and coloring. Visual artists continue that, often daily, whereas most other adults all but stop, although it could be argued that they continue semi-surreptitiously via card games, sports, theatre clubs, and nowadays some video games. Stochastic, ludic works have had a few successes in multimedia and intermedia work. This approach crops up in surprising ways when successful, usually, for example in the activities of production itself, which are not always immediately visible as such within the finished pieces. Resolved ludic works are typically indebted to the antithetical misprision of Dada performed by John Cage. He was

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the contemporary Emersonian transmitter, and more importantly mis-reader, of Marcel Duchamp. In the future the ludic variety will certainly be an important aspect of virtual, hypertextual art objects. The question will be, how this element can be used, become an integral aspect of a metaphor use, something more than a charming trick. Play, in the processes of fabrication, is primary to visual culture. The study of visual metaphors reveals that the creation and application of new visual tropes is the most important form of ludic activity for contemporary artists. Many struggle vigorously to make their artworks polysemic, to carry a deliberate diversity of meanings open to interpretations by others; often creators encourage playful construal through this. They do so to the point of being roguishly, wantonly allusive. I have lightheartedly coined a term for this in collaboration with writer and theorist Daniel F. Ammann: allusciviousness, or adjectivally, alluscivial. It combines allusive and lascivious, both in form and meaning. The discovery of and play with visual metaphor in contemporary art exhibits allusciviousness frequently and brashly, on both the part of creators and audiences. This polysemous playfulness of new tropes helps rupture encrusted thought, and when broadly applied, supplies an example of a possible, new fullness. This is one of arts desired methods for forming new metaphors to live and create by. Visual metaphors are therefore particularly good tools for creatively expressing this through their reciprocality, specificity, mixedness, impurity and playfulness, in addition to the strengths they share with linguistic metaphor and their derivation from our native cognitive thought processes.

Figure 5.1 Chapter 5: Metaphor(m), Part 1 ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 91

Figure 5.2 Chapter 5: Metaphor(m), Part 2 ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 92

5

Metaphor(m): A Theory of Central Visual Trope

Paint, to paint, a painting, painting The previous chapters discussed overriding questions in the aesthetics of visual trope: what is metaphor, what is visual metaphor, why do visual metaphors matter in art, and the question of a grammar for visual metaphor. Now we will take the philosophical analysis further into detail in art and even farther from linguistic prototypes. As George Lakoff writes, “there are metaphorical ideas everywhere and they affect how we act. Metaphorical thought and the metaphorical understanding of situations arises independent of language.”1 In this chapter, we will investigate a theory of visual trope in contemporary art that describes the material activities of artists embodying the discovery and use of visual metaphors incorporating the concerns presented more foundationally above. The proposition here is that the formal, technical and stylistic aspects of artists’ approaches concretely manifest content in culturally and historically antithetical ways through a uniquely discovered, predominant visual trope: a concept which I call metaphor(m) or the theory of central visual trope. (This metaphor(m) itself may, in certain artists, consist of several meshed visual tropes, and may develop and be modified through the artist’s career.) The elucidation in this chapter will include more than occasional use of the first-person. This is due to the theory’s nature as my own fabrication, albeit one coalesced out of my surveying of useful contemporary philosophy already discussed. Through my research and activities as an artist, art historian, and aesthetician, I became aware of what I was seeking in philosophy: a theoretical apparatus for understanding the struggles of contemporary artists and their achievements, at once both intellectual and tangible, in using visual metaphors. If I may be so bold, this theory of metaphor(m), I believe, is true for all contemporary arts, including literature, visual art, music et al. Perhaps it stretches into history as well, being 93

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applicable it appears to me to art at least since the Renaissance. Yet, my theory centers on and was born of interactions with contemporary visual art and the visual tropes within those works. The human and artistic gap between experience and its interpretation is contemporary art’s foremost focal point. The distance between our desire to connect and the complex impossibility of transparent communication or unmediated perception allows tropaic mistakes of wonderful richness. Thus, the value and joy of visual metaphor. In this chapter, the process of painting as an activity is the embodied conceit. I used painting itself as a conceit in Chapter 2 in a more general fashion, referring to the discipline and the medium. In this case, it appears most often as a simile, due to the fact that I discuss the composition of my theory as being like the making of a painting. To playfully outline the allusive potential of painting as a trope, the section heading above unpacks variations on the word, all of which are parallel in English, but not so in some other languages. “Paint, to Paint, a Painting, Painting” means the material, the action, the object, the activity. In German the phrase would be Farbmittel, malen, ein Bild, die Malerei; in Latin: pigmentum, pingere, tabula, pictura. What is indeed the process of painting? It is actually unique to each painter, although each, of course, thinks their variety is the best. Nevertheless, a short outline of the practice in general is in order, to aid us in our metaphor; elements can be added or subtracted, emphasized or diminished, systematized or extemporized, but the broad sketch remains rather similar among creators. Artists choose their favorite medium, form of paint (oil, acrylic, alkyd, mixed, a.o.) and support (stretched canvas, panel, wall, a.o.). Then they apply and blend paint, both on a palette and on the surface of the work. Generally, it is blended before application to some extent on a palette or in containers, then once again upon application. The most important factor is the orchestration of relationships among the various elements; therefore, this is the source of the continuous changes and adjustments that are made while painting. For example, each color affects the other colors near it. The whole influences each part. The haptic qualities—thick, thin, glossy, matt, glazed, scumbled, flat—must be drawn into careful accord. These are all coordinated in a give-and-take with the intentions of the artist: those aspects planned and those discovered, within the action of thinking-in-things, thinking-within-the process. This is a dialogue that is highly dialectic. What do I want? What can I get the materials to do? What does the evolving object seem to want, or even force, me to do? What can I accept and use of its efficacious energy?

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This is indeed an excellent metaphor for theorization and its embodiment. In fact, painting may productively be seen as a synecdoche of the process of theorization in the service of the interpretation of experience—one particularly rich, embodied application of it. Let us make the comparison explicit. A theoretician or philosopher, or anyone acting in this way (which includes many people, from time to time, not just “professional” thinkers), begins with various givens. These are ideas one finds useful and stimulating in others thoughts, acquired by means of reading, listening, discussing, and (most important for a visual artist such as a painter) viewing. These are the theoretical equivalent of the material tubes of paint (to stretch my chapter conceit almost to the level a Metaphysical poet would do). Undeniably, some artists chose to return to the older method of making their own paint from the base elements of pigment and binder, while, oppositely, others use whatever is readily available, perhaps even purposefully eschewing the deluxe brands, going for commonplace material, as Robert Rauschenberg did (at least in urban legend) with cans of unmarked paint bought randomly in a hardware store. Most artists mix these approaches, using what can be bought and adding various adaptations and self-made elements as needed. Analogously, the thinker will use useful ideas of preeminent or lesserknown philosophers, also sometimes returning to earlier questions and reframing new answers in their own way. Alternately, a theorist might add several completely fresh materials to the tool kit, inventing new terminology, showing fresh acuity. One example of the importance of this last idea is Arthur C. Danto’s “thought experiment” of the problem of artworks indiscernible from real objects.2 Whatever her particular approach is to received, assembled and altered raw materials, the theorist seeks to combine these, applying them to subjects which intrigue her, attempting to apply them in insightfully fresh fashions—as a painter mixes, blends, applies and modifies paints to interpret motifs and content of his own choosing. In both cases, the key is the relationships of all these formal and conceptual elements, one to another, in a dialectic of intention and discovery.

Metaphor and meta-form Let us begin with our palette, in the sense of our chosen range of colors. These hues are the recent discoveries in understanding metaphor within the field of cognitive neuroscience, which can be used to compose a useful understanding of artistic process. In the past, two unproductive viewpoints have seen art as solely a matter of the playing out of formal invention or, contrarily, only the charming

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delivery of important messages. A third, more recent and grave dismissal of visuality and visual art is the “linguistic turn.” This phrase is actually Gustav Bergman’s, given new currency by Richard Rorty.3 This is the postmodern notion that there is no reality outside language, and furthermore, language is itself arbitrary and only self-referential. It can indeed be difficult to perceive the central and creative role of metaphor in any cognition, including the visual, due to the omnipresence of tropaic reasoning in daily life on the one hand and the complexity of its imaginative transformation in the arts on the other. Metaphor may seem either fully transparent or opaque, when in fact it is the translucent essence of transmission, of communication, itself. How this only semitranslucency can fade from view is illustrated by the fact that naïve viewers often discuss representational images in art as if they were the very things they depict (actually, therefore, an elision, perhaps even a form of the trope synecdoche). This is what René Magritte so skillfully and philosophically spoofed in his painting La trahison des images (“The Treachery of Images”) of 1928–29, depicting a pipe and the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”).4 For artists, the verity of images as constructed objects and illusions is always forefront, as they have crafted them. Occasional talk by art historians claiming that painting has been guilelessly confused as a window misses this important point. The maker of any image cannot but see it as a surface upon which she has conjured a vision, whether abstract or representational, when she has sent weeks, months or more putting it together. The creator may wish that the panel be imagined as a metaphor for a window, or that viewers have an experience similar to that of peering through a window, but one would have to be utterly insane to have painstakingly made something and then mistake it for its image; even Pygmalion was yearning, not befuddled. In fact, concentration on the richness of communication’s shifting degrees of opacity is what makes visual art so deep. Trope’s principal industry is to dialectically integrate the misleading oppositions drawn above. Art’s craft is to make the most of them. With the insights into metaphoric thinking now available, we can paint our own, new, cognitive and agonistic theory of central visual trope. This is reflected evocatively in the fact most contemporary artists have all but abandoned the palette as an object. In his book Working Space, Frank Stella writes that abandoning the palette was one of the most important events in contemporary art production. “What we failed to see is that it was the loss of the palette, not the easel, that changed the face of what we see as painting.”5 Most now use a tabletop or similar larger surfaces, or alternately jars and cans, mixing colors in larger fluid quantities, in effect accomplishing the important mixing and combination

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directly on the artwork itself. This is a performative, almost existential placement of the act of mixing, making it a process of operational discovery analogous to the way I suggest artists discover and form their central visual trope and its extensions within the course of action of creating their work, not aforehand. One central trope of form is embedded in the construction, composition, paint handling, color, or other configurative elements of the work. It is hunted, recovered, accepted and (seemingly incongruously) forged in order to allow contemporary artists to express their desires. This is where “intention” exists for a visual artist: not in any, especially any linguistic, prescription. Importantly, these desired meanings include both those willed and those discovered within the central visual trope itself. To come to one’s own tool of vision is the great creative contest. This is one’s brush, yet also metonymically one’s stroke. Contemporary artists have sought a wider range of tools than was traditionally used. This includes Jackson Pollock’s sticks, Max Ernst’s scrapers, Jack Whitten’s oversized squeegees and rakes, and more. Likewise, no matter what the actual instrument, contemporary creators have often pushed tropes to surprising lengths. An artist’s metaphoric vehicle is based in construction, yet is also a trope; hence, it is meta-form but also metaphor (thus my neologism, metaphor(m), which I use interchangeably with the term central trope). Quite often, a central visual trope can be a complex comprised of several metaphors and their variations. That is, the core analogy is often innovatively transmuted by being made more intricate, by being extended, elaborated, composed, questioned, criticized, and/or transumed. These detailed applications of central trope are tools as well as content. To return to my painting metaphor, they are the choice of brush, whether sable or bristle, or stick, or squeegee; the choice of paint fluidity or density; of the paint’s opacity or translucency; and so on. Beyond my conceit, though, the formal aspects embodying metaphor in visual artworks are far more than just choice of paintbrush. Skillful material, presentational and conceptual complexity, in fact, usually prevails in the works of the greatest artists. Moreover, the strongest creators apply their central tropes across the widest range of aspects of their works. A metaphor(m) is many-in-one: a polyvalent concord based on a seminal integer of insight. “Formal aspects” is meant here in the widest possible sense. To enumerate them, I would say these include the ones usually presented in art training: line, shape, form, tone, texture, pattern, color, perspective, surface and composition; yet also broader physical concerns, especially in contemporary art: tools, material, supports, methods, processes of creation, formats, presentational/exhibitional modes, delivery systems, referentiality, and projected audience. I am certain, there are, and will be, ever more.

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Artists exemplifying the use of these elements as visual trope have appeared in previous chapters. Jack Whitten is mentioned above as his creative use of self-made tools is an important location of visual metaphor in his work. He uses the instruments to communicate notions of “diverse elements, opposing forces, dichotomy of means, polarities, [and] portraits of psychological space . . . All are derived from the nature of politics in America with its distinct separation of black and white,” as he has said.6 For example, Whitten placed nylon mesh cloth over wet black and white acrylic paint to create a cloudy, subtle painting, smudging distinctions between them. In fact, it can be said that Whitten’s continuous reinventions of the tools for painting was itself a major metaphor, as well as the implications of each of these tools. His use of Afro-pic combs for paint application is a clearly metonymic delight. The most famous tool he created was called “the developer.” It was made of a wooden two-by-four with attached rubber, creating a kind of huge squeegee, one of which was even on wheels. This allowed the artist to incorporate ideas of both gesture and anti-gesture, not creating an oxymoron, as one would expect, but rather a coincidentia oppositorum with clear sociopolitical metaphoric import. Jessica Stockholder expands the whole idea of the painting support, rather than the tool, to a variety of found objects, such as furniture, plastic buckets, carpets and car doors, rather than the more common stretched canvas. She blurs the divisions between painting, sculpture, assemblage, hand-made and found object. This denial of categorical purity is the source of her many visual tropes, each made more explicit by being grounded in recognizable objects. Process is tropaically important in the art of Sonya Clark, as discussed in Chapter 4. Metaphors of weaving dominate her work, creating metonymies of African American women’s communal collaboration and synecdoches of cultural heritage. A variety of contemporary artists concentrate on how the question of format can carry metaphoric meaning. As will be discussed more completely in the following chapter, format means the precise presentational characteristics of the physical conveyor or container of the artwork, how it interfaces with its audience. These formats can include: an easel, oil painting on canvas; square-bound, trade paper-back book; video DVD; mp3 encoding; a room-filling installation; a handprinted, stone lithograph; a digital photograph online; and so on. Each affects the work of art, and, most desirably, can be consciously, creatively and tropaically integrated into the piece. Situational, contextual and formal specificity are laden with meanings which are inventively exploitable. Comic artists are important among the artists who have carefully employed this insight. These

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formal and metaphorical applications have included perceptibly utilizing the comic magazine’s democratic accessibility, as well as using particulars of the medium’s form: the sequencing of multiple panels, two facing pages as a single unit (called double page spreads), panel alterations, creative lettering effects, color holds, montage and many more. Each, at its best, embodying the central visual and narrative content. Inventive creators in this field have included Harvey Kurtzman and James Steranko. The latter artist, when praised by author and artist James Romberger for the scope of his creative innovations, jokingly replied, “If I’d have stayed in comics longer, I’d have figured out how to use the staples in the center of the book.”7 In contemporary fine art, format has been the locus of visual trope for many creators of artists’ books. It features in the Mail Art-based work of H. R. Fricker. For this Swiss artist, art is best as very personal, one-to-one, correspondence, wherein highly creative, and sometimes quasi-legal, postage stamps with complex references are central. They are a synecdoche of the postal system, and a metonymy of communication in a larger sense. We can also see the importance of format in Buzz Spector’s work. While his media include drawing, painting, constructions and installations, almost all refer to books and our interface with them. His most important artworks are in the genre known as artists’ books. These comprise a medium of artistic expression that employs the form of the book directly or indirectly, yet is more visual and object-oriented than most standard books. They are often quite experimental, single hand-made entities or are printed in limited editions. Spector is not only inspired by the physical form of books, but even more so by the personal, social and political implications of the format. He has notably contrasted our interaction with a book with that of viewing most art. The topography of an open book is explicit in its erotic associations: sumptuous twin paper curves that meet in a recessed seam. Page turning is a series of gentle, sweeping gestures, like the brush of fingers on a naked back. Indeed, the behavior of readers has more in common with the play of intimacy than with the public decorum of art viewing or music listening. Most of us read lying down or seated and most of us read at least partially unclothed. We dress up to go out and look at art; undressed, in bed, we read. We seek greater comfort while reading than the furnishings of museum or concert halls will ever grant us. When we read— the conventional distance between eye and page is around fourteen inches—we often become the lectern that receives the book: chest, arms, lap, or thighs. This proximity is the territory of embrace, of possession; not to be entered without permission.8

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Indeed, Spector’s works exhibit highly sophisticated complexes of visual metaphors revolving around this insight into the format of the book. Innovative presentational modes, that is, new, more complex, forms of exhibition are increasing in contemporary art. This usually involves a variety of installation art, even in painting and photography shows. They may also be joined with pop-up locations or interactive forms. One such instance is Michael Rees’s Synthetic Cells exhibition, a combination of inflatable sculpture, digital media, ink-jet printing and collaboration.9 Besides the physical presence of an exhibition, how else can an artwork reach its viewers, especially new audiences? Delivery systems, the means for gaining or granting access to artworks, are important components of the visual tropes of contemporary artists such as the team of Alex Meszmer and Reto Müller. As mentioned in Chapter 3, this art duo practices a form they call “democratic art.” They try to make each of their events, exhibitions, or other projects as egalitarian as possible. One such manifestation of this vision is Meszmer/Müller’s Transitory Museum of Pfyn, Switzerland.10 Turning a local Heimatmuseum conception into a work of community-based, interactive contemporary art, they have created their own venue, and a traveling one, that delivers their work and that of other artists to ever-widening audiences in new fashions, always including interaction. Their museum becomes a visually tropaic situation, as well as a traveling, yet concrete, one. It is an application of democracy, a metonymy of it, a metaphor in its implications for how the artworld (and world at large) could be, and a critical metalepsis of the existing, conventional metaphor of museum-as-mausoleum. They are the visual artworld’s embodiment of Canadian musician Heather Dale’s call for creators to discover their own, unique “tribe” and go to them, rather than waiting for, or hoping, such a group comes to them.11 What a work of art refers to, in representational imagery, but also in allusions and citations is likewise an important site of visual metaphor creation, as in the art of Kerry James Marshall, delineated in Chapter 3. An ever-increasing number of contemporary artists toil to expand, identify and reach new, personally defined audiences as a central part of their metaphor complexes. For example, Dawoud Bey’s photographic projects discussed in that same chapter, involve specific communities as the center of each body of work. Lakoffian foundational metaphors are important in these portrayals of artistic creativity. They may be envisioned as the principal constitutive underpinning, as their name implies, comparable to basic compositional forms familiar to art viewers, such as the Golden Rectangle of the Renaissance, the grid in Modernist art, the sequentiality of comics, and so on—including my own notion of

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iconosequentiality.12 Undeniably, compositional arrangements are one of the most significant sites for visual metaphor. The tackling of the practical and philosophical problems of composition in art has been an ongoing development and a series of important, impatient, agonistic struggles. This has never been simply in order to form novel conventions, but to move on to fresh, distinctive, organizational structures, embodying new tropes needed and useful for expressing artists’ visions of life, society and art in their time and place. A simile would be to compare them to the support of a painting, the stretched canvas, wall or other object underlying the work, for in these substrata themselves are embedded societal and cultural factors. Examples of such core, or foundational, metaphors are “LIFE IS A JOURNEY” (mentioned in Chapter 4), “TIME MOVES,” or “PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS.” On a more general level there are “GOOD IS UP,” “UNDERSTANDING IS GRASPING,” or “EMOTIONAL IS DOWN.”13 These tropes permeate everyday life and culture from its mundane manifestations through to its peaks of creative expression. Lakoff and his co-thinkers postulate a limited number of these basic metaphors, forming categories of thought. These metaphors are culturally contingent, as the title of Lakoff’s book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things displays. This title is taken from the Australian aboriginal language Dyirbal which truly has a linguistic category including those members.14 Within specific cultural bounds, these tropes and categories of thought form the building material of our cognition, thus of imagination and expression. We use these core tropes to generate specific expressions. Some particular instances of those listed above would include “I’ve traveled this way in love before,” “Christmas is approaching,” and “If you work hard at being a father, you’ll get there.” The more general schemes could be exemplified by “Things are looking up,” “Did you catch his meaning?” or “Let’s not fall to that level in our discussion.” Thus, these foundational metaphors ground individual thoughts, making cognition cohesive. There is one necessary, essential broadening of this idea. There are various forms of tropaic comparison besides strict metaphor, or of perceived correlation even outside trope as normally understood. Metaphor(m)s, certainly run the entire trope gamut: metaphor, simile, metonymy, irony, hyperbole, catachresis, litotes, synecdoche and so on, prominently including mixed forms—thus emphasizing Bloom’s astute valuation of metalepsis in our current time period, whether we are looking at its sub-varieties of Late Modernism, Postmodernism or even Post-Postmodernism. The allowable supports for painting have expanded into anything imaginable or found, largely thanks to Rauschenberg and the current inspiration of Stockholder’s installations as abstract paintings upon

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room-filling hodgepodges of objects. Likewise, the palette as a tool of painting has not been truly abandoned, as suggested above, but rather enlarged. Correspondingly, metaphor(m)s exist in elegant, direct image-mappings, yet also in multifaceted, remarkable expansions or mixtures of tropes. Tool boxes and working spaces for contemporary visual artists are now quite generous, both physically and conceptually. The highly imaginative work of discovering their central visual tropes is often accomplished by artists through what Lakoff and Turner term an “imagemapping.” However, these authors at first undervalued this discovery, describing image-mappings as “more fleeting metaphors.”15 They assert that “the proliferation of detail in the images limits image-mappings to highly specific cases.” By contrast, they find “image-schema mappings” less detailed and more useful in reasoning.”16 Image schemas generally rely on an abstracted sense of space and vision, yet can also be grounded in sound, other senses or even in cross-sensory, synaesthetic perceptions. They can often be described in language with prepositions or simple directionality. Both of these authors have expanded their study of visual mapping in following books. Notably, Lakoff has intensified his investigation of visual art in his pioneering essay “The Neuroscience of Form in Art.”17. Image-mappings are purposefully interwoven by contemporary visual artists into this structure of inferences as well through cognitive integration and blending which is how metaphor(m)s are brought into being. Because of its proliferation of details, image-mapping provides a bonanza of abundance necessary for mining new metaphors, thus making it very consequential in visual art. The operation of image-mapping is simple to describe. A mental picture is projected in the mind’s eye onto another “target” image. For example, envision matching the appearance of a tree to that of a woman as discussed in Chapter 3, or more sensually, that of reading a book to touching a lover, as artist Spector does above. In the first image-mapping, the woman’s suppleness is vividly foregrounded, in the second mapping, the act of page-turning as caressing. Creators structurally and visually pursue this reasoning within the confines—or better said, using the treasury of—their media, genre and its particulars. They find potential meaning in either projecting an image onto a formal element or finding schemas adequate for use which are natural characteristics of a formal element. This is described more precisely in the following chapter, where the creative process of conceiving central visual tropes is delineated in detail. A few examples will suffice for now. Simply whether a sculptural form emphasizes verticality or horizontality is a rich source of possible image schemas or image-mappings. For instance, perhaps the piece is

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vertical and building-like. Therefore, it is more “up” than “down,” linking it to all the foundational metaphors of “UP”: “GOOD IS UP,” “HAPPY IS UP,” etc. Depending on the composition, perhaps the piece is vertical, yet stresses its downward movement. This would elicit metaphors of “DOWN.” Image-mapping thus consists in conducting a kind of “sampling” of the world of experience. “New metaphors are mostly structural,” according to Lakoff and Johnson.18 For artists, the structure of form and the structure of desired meaning (i.e., content) are functions of one another. This is what iconicity in art is: a metaphorical image-mapping in which the structure of the meaning is understood in terms of the structure of the form of the object presenting that meaning. To return to the chapter conceit of painting, here we have reached what painters refer to as their style.19 In some contemporary cases, this becomes more of a modus operandi, as the term is used by police to describe a criminal’s characteristic way of committing a crime, rather than a stable series of representational choices. Creators’ style m.o.s lie in their typical, chosen forms of embodying image-mappings and image schemas in the formal aspects of their works. There are many forms of tropaic reasoning by which technical aspects can be re-envisioned and pressed into service as visual metaphor(m)s. Lakoff and Johnson have listed a few resources for “indirect understanding” of entities, which are also often at work in central visual trope: entity structure, orientational structure, dimensions of experience, experiential gestalts, background, highlighting, interactional properties and prototypes.20

The diagram Like all the theories I find most satisfying, mine has a diagram here. It describes the production of central visual tropes and is noticeably based on Turner and Fauconnier’s diagrams of conceptual blending.21 Let us lay out the diagram in words: A formal element of art-making (the lefthand oval, “Input Space 1” in Turner and Fauconnier’s terms) is seen to be (or is able to be made to be) like an image (the right-hand oval, “Input Space 2”). This cross-space mapping yields two cognitive spaces: first, the “Generic Space” in the authors’ terms, above the two ovals, which I have titled “Mental Space.” This is an imaginary zone which contains what the two inputs have in common, one’s working space. This is pictured in my diagram with a rostrum-like curve at the top. It is that site wherein the blending becomes possible and useable. Turner and Fauconnier’s diagrams of cognitive blending suggest an equality of the two

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inputs which is especially apt for describing central metaphor in visual art. I have turned their Generic Space Oval into an embracing, stage-like form to better illustrate the way in which this space is the background, amphitheater and world of most artists. It is indeed an arena of sorts for artists, representing their art itself, their medium when particularized, and their life as artists when broadened. Most importantly, mapped onto one another, the two inputs blend to produce the metaphor(m), the oval at bottom, the “Blended Space” as Fauconnier and Turner call it. This is the specific visual trope unique to that creator (and often reveals the reason, or drive behind the initial mapping). This trope, by generalization, is based in the foundational metaphors (the larger, vertical oval on the right) with which we all think in the culture under question. This selfdiscovery, or self-construction, of a metaphor(m) is delimiting in that not all core metaphors are then applicable, but is also enriching and constructive, as it permits the artist an integrated access to all the related foundational tropes (thus the larger size of the oval, of which only a section overlaps with the image oval). This metaphor(m) can then be applied to as many aspects of an artist’s process and creations as she desires, or is able to achieve, through extensions and applications of her central trope. This is represented in the diagram by the cascading, overlapping ovals emanating out of the metaphor(m) oval. One goal and measure of artistic success is how completely a creator accomplishes a thorough pervasiveness of the central visual trope throughout the elements of creation: creating many of these offshoot ovals. The entire chain of imagemapping through trope complex to foundational metaphors is exciting to trace in the oeuvre of artists. Such analyses follow below of several creators, sequencing chains of metaphorical reasoning. I suspect creators in their own thoughts place the weight on the initial creative discernment of seeing a trope in a technical or formal quality, for that is the vision that granted them their individual theatre of possibilities, their future. By and large, this visual and tropaic breakthrough is accomplished by artists in the process of creating works, the so called “happy accident” or “aha”-experience. This circles back on our central thesis, showing the inevitable centrality of embodiment and performative, perceptual experience to innovation. I have painted my way into a theory, one that is a doorway, though, not a corner. The proof of any hypothesis, nevertheless, is in the testing. This statement has more to do with painting than most people imagine. Artists who have chosen to be makers of objects do so because we are unremitting believers in a world “out there” beyond a simply conceptualized world, one involving our bodies and reality exterior to us. We believe one cannot truly think without making. This is

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Figure 5.3 The Diagram of Metaphor(m). © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

production which is followed by judgment of the creation, both for its internal qualities and in regard to the external experience to which it refers, which instigates alterations and adaptations, that is, additional making—further painting—and so on, until the object appears to be complete enough to be sent out on its own. This is the dialectic of the fabricated object and palpable experience. Let us now consider something similar with the theory of metaphor(m), by applying it intently to a test case, a Modernist visual artist, for ease in elucidation. In Chapter 7, we will analyze two more complicated contemporary Postmodernist painters, the period at the heart of this book.

Vincent van Gogh Although my emphasis is on contemporary art, this Modernist application serves to straightforwardly clarify the theory of central trope. In effect, I am painting a portrait of the celebrated Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh as seen through the method of this theory, looking for the presence of visual metaphor(m) and the process of its creation within his works. A central visual trope can be demonstrated in his work concisely, yet without oversimplification, typifying the utility of the theory in clarifying the nuts and bolts of creative achievement. Van Gogh was one of my initial inspirations for this theory. In fact, I was contemplating his paintings’ technique and pondering his

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influences when the image of his brushstroke as a small flame struck me. As is well-known, van Gogh’s self-professed goal was to bring the expression of emotion into Modernist painting. He achieved this to such an extent that, since his death, he has served as the paragon of success in the expression of passion in the arts. Granting his personal goal, how did he realize and embody this in his actual objects tropaically? How did he harmonize his influences from various forerunners, none of whom would seem to be an obvious candidate on which to ground an art of passion? This is a crucial point, as the pursuit of a central trope best begins with a close analysis of a creator’s agon. Van Gogh desired to be like both Jean-François Millet and Claude Monet. His interest in Millet sprang from the empathy van Gogh felt for the earlier painter’s subject matter. Millet expressed sympathy for the lives and environments of peasants. Van Gogh’s painting The Potato Eaters of 1885 is a culmination of his immersion in Millet.22 This work, though, in its heavy browns and greens, deep shadows and blocky brushwork reveals that the battle for his own central trope had just begun in earnest at this point. Shortly thereafter, van Gogh began to struggle with the methods of the Impressionists, following his contact with contemporary artists in Paris. At the same time, he discovered certain Japanese prints, including those of the prolific artist known in the West as Katsushika Hokusai. Fusing Millet, Monet, and Hokusai into one composite predecessor figure, van Gogh applied combined elements of their techniques in attempts to convey his personal obsession with emotion. The desire to express passion was the focus of van Gogh’s vision; it was the engine of his endeavors. He struggled with Millet-like subject matter and Monet’s Impressionist paint application, adding a dash of Japanese draftsmanship. From the Impressionists he seized on brilliant color and the small, dash-like paint strokes. Nevertheless, their fascination with the play of light on surfaces did not interest him. Van Gogh’s misprision succeeded when he mapped the image of a flame onto the dot of Impressionist brushwork. This justified and heightened his use of sharp, glowing color and his frenzied draftsmanship. Van Gogh had antithetically become more “primitive” than Millet, while using similar subject matter, hence could envision himself to be “earlier” in a highly Bloomian fashion. He painted more directly, less studiously than the Impressionists. The heavy, segmented strokes of Japanese wood-block outlines offered a thicker, more direct form of mark-making which could assume the contours of flames. In his paintings van Gogh makes a progression employing a complex of many tropes. The metonymies “a flame is fire” and “fire is hot” lead directly to the foundational metaphor “PASSION IS HOT.” This merges easily with “LIFE IS

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FIRE” and “LIFE IS HEAT.” A key synecdoche plays a major role: “the brushstroke is painting.” The artist expanded this chain of reasoning to all elements of his works, even composition, in analogous ways. “Passion is life” is his selfacknowledged central belief. “Brushstroke is flame is painting is passion is life” is his metaphor(m), his true central trope. This can be seen mostly clearly in paintings such as the intense self-portraits of 1889 and 1890 from St. Rémy, the wild sky of the world-famous The Starry Night of 188923 or the flaming trees in Wheatfield with Cypresses24 of the same year. Van Gogh had found his central trope and himself by discovering forms which palpably embodied his perception of the world, which Robert Rosenblum in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition succinctly describes as a “passionate empathy with nature, as almost a direct extension of human emotions”25. He elaborated it in varied, and highly creative forms. In dynamic use, it could elicit perception of the blazing, living, growing soul of nature as in the still lifes of Sunflowers from Arles. Barely restrained from swelling into a conflagration, it carries psychological richness in the swirling blues of his Self Portrait of May 1889.26 Finally, it has become a devouring holocaust in several last works, such as Wheatfield with Crows of 1890.27 Even in an artist commonly believed to have been “spontaneous” in the sense of unpremeditated, we see how thoroughly his metaphor(m) is a function of thought and creative deliberation. It requires a highly developed intellect, focused in a very specific way. It is often the ability to think both consciously and subconsciously. As van Gogh wrote in a letter to Anton Ridder van Rappard concerning his process, “I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real intention and purpose.”28 To create oneself through one’s works is frequently based, as metaphor(m) theory displays, on a simple discovery. Simple in no way means easy, or unsophisticated, but rather oh-so-obvious in retrospect—yet only after the fact, or in critical analysis, which is a scholarly form of reflection. By simple I mean something closer to elegant. A discovery which might even be seen as somewhat mad: the ability to think otherwise, prying loose an evocative tool of self(re)cognition. These simplicities have the naked usefulness of truths. Van Gogh found, and formed, the element through which he could live. For van Gogh, this meant that his discovery of his flame-metaphor(m) allowed him to fully express his burning desire for expression, his conviction concerning the centrality of passion to existence. This is the vicious/visionary circle of the simultaneously invented and discovered central visual trope.

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Expressing this in the diagram, van Gogh’s metaphor(m)al blending could be drawn as follows:

Figure 5.4 The Diagram of Vincent van Gogh’s Metaphor(m). © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

This account of central trope in van Gogh has put the theory to the test and, I believe, substantiated its utility. It also exemplifies the methodic application of this theory and both proposes and evokes ways in which it can be similarly employed in the following chapters to examine other choices of artworks, subjecting them to “thick” or close-analysis. This book focuses on contemporary visual art; however, I analyzed a not-so-contemporary Modernist in order to more plainly illustrate and present my theory. In truth, it appears that Modernist artists’ uses of visual metaphors are by and large more direct, less intricate, than those of Postmodernists. This is true of all aspects of the artworks of each of these two periods of art, not only their tropes. It lies in the nature of the beasts. Contemporary art is less rebellious in intent and far more cognizant of its relationship to the immediate past than High Modernism was. In this book, contemporary artists are the focus, thus mostly Postmodernists, with some Late Modernists. Therefore, a large number of the other example artists discussed feature more elaborate and self-conscious composites of tropes.

Reductivism revised in light of central visual trope Reflecting on the application above and turning our eyes to certain agonistic elements of visual trope creation, it can be perceived that the pervasive use of

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metaphor(m) is one test of the truly forceful artist (akin to Bloom’s “strong poet,” by which I mean those creators who succeed in producing inspired and individual works of art despite the burden of normative influence, regulating culture and the like). In this, we can contribute a new concept of “genius.” Rather than being seen as some kind of transcendentally inspired originality, genius can be correlated with the attainment of enveloping discernment, through the transformational power of the visual metaphor(m). Genius becomes the inspiration to all-pervasiveness, infusing the insight (“genie”) of central trope in the entire thinking-experiential process. In a similar vein of reasoning, “pervasiveness” replaces the inadequate concept of “unity.” The now thread-worn discussions of “unity in diversity” and the like were never sufficient, especially after Modernism, for the lived experience of what artists attempt in the composition of artworks. The idea of “unity” connotes something feeble, almost expended, when seen as a goal and as it is too-often taught in art schools, primarily in those Bauhaus-derived explanations of relational balancing. In the place of such entropy, the theory of central trope suggests a substitution: comprehensiveness, the attempted-for omnipresence of one’s guiding vision, a dynamic fullness. The search for this pervasiveness, tropaic omnipresence, explains a prime form of development and growth in artists. The discovery of one’s own visual metaphor(m) may come in a blinding flash or in gradual steps, but learning to apply it is always a matter of slow work and hard-won experience. Some creators only progress to certain points in this maturational process, winning a few rounds but leaving off the end of the match. Thereby, they may even achieve importance, but not true strength in the Bloomian sense, mentioned above. As an example, the novels of James Joyce can be studied as a step-by-step realization of an ever more pervasive metaphor(m), one carried to an apex seldom reached in the history of literature or art. In an ideally consummated approach, the central trope would inhabit each and every decision by an artist. Continuing this line of discovery, we bring to light another potential revision of a flawed conventional sentiment concerning creativity. “Reduction” has been touted at times as the almost-sacred goal of the arts, especially after Minimalism. Beyond a doubt, as creators mature their works frequently become not only allusively richer, but more concentrated. As comic artists phrase this, it consists in learning what to erase, what to leave out. How do we retain this fine observation concerning reduction, but subtract the level of self-mortification it reached in Late Modernism? Reduction must be recognized not as a goal, but as a path—a means to embodied metaphor(m). Reduction is redefined by the theory of

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central visual trope as an example in use of H. Paul Grice’s “Maxim of Quantity”: “Be as informative as is required and not more so.”29 Lakoff and Turner use this idea to clarify a guiding principle of the creation of new metaphors, explaining their elegance and understandability; however, it also deciphers the issue of reduction in the arts. As creators develop, their use of their metaphor(m)s becomes more encompassing. Concomitantly, as pervasiveness expands, artists become more aware of extraneous elements in their works, i.e., ones which do not assist, or may even be detracting from, the central visual trope. Hence, these are extracted from the mix. This fuller account of reduction denies subtraction for its own sake. Important is the necessary increase in abundance which it indirectly serves. Reduction is the drive to leave out what does not contribute to the metaphor(m).

Considerations of my neologism It might be argued that I do not need to create new coinage, i.e., metaphor(m) and central visual trope. An older expression could merely be expanded. One of these existing literary terms could be broadened in purport: conceit, image, scheme, style, or extended metaphor. Or, one of the terms of more recent coinage could be converted for my use, such as aegis, perruque, or meme. These varieties of other umbrella terms for trope are occasionally quite useful, yet I find each inadequate for my exact purposes. A conceit, for example, is a complex metaphor which runs through the entire body of a single work, such as a metaphysical poem, or in each of my chapters as I use it here. It seldom goes further than this. Besides not being broad enough, a conceit is frequently conspicuously affected, applied for pleasure in my case, and as illustrations of embodied reference. It is often a symbolic, purposefully inorganic measure used to create an imagistic hook on which to hang certain details of a work. In my version, these are selections of vocabulary, chosen for their connotative associations. While conceit is too narrow, the term image encompasses far too much, making it of little use in a theory of trope. It can mean a metaphor itself, a concrete anecdotal reference, a symbol, a recurrent motif, or a specific “snapshot” of everyday experience (as in the literary poetic movement Imagism). In this book it is used in the standard non-literary, visual-art way, meaning a mental picture of something, as well as a visual motif. Scheme has always been difficult to nail down, being intricately intertwined in poetics with figure, trope and meter. Generally, it is used nowadays to describe a

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conceptual structuring of allusion which somewhat resembles the mathematical structuring of syllables called meter. A scheme is an applied order, perhaps a bit forced, used throughout a single work, or a section of a larger work. It has never been seen as extending throughout an entire œuvre. In short, it is a one-shot strategy. Style, which was discussed somewhat in Chapter 3, denotes a broad formal concern. It evokes notions that seem too fortuitous for theoretical use in visual metaphor theory. Stylistics would, of course, include the study of visual metaphor(m)s. However, style is not precise or intentional enough to be descriptively instrumental in the way I wish. It suggests the entire “package of delivery” of some content. It sounds somehow independent of meaning, yet dependent on whims of the personality. This is not true of any important artist’s style and should not be suggested. A rigorously integral and achieved style is the opposite of this; it is precise in its connotations. Due to style’s associations, the word has been avoided as a general term. The phrase extended metaphor comes closest to metaphor(m), yet does not encompass it. An extended metaphor sits, so to speak, on top of a work, not at its root as a central visual trope does. An extended metaphor is generally developed in some detail by an artist or author. It is a more natural conceit. Nevertheless, it remains rather singular, persisting as a technical device typically used in the composition of only a single work or a section of a piece. The fashion in which I have used St. Christopher, painting, installations and diagrams in this book so far can be seen as either conceits or extended metaphors. There is also the newer term aegis, which comes from Norman Bryson. It is his attempt to expand intertextual allusion to an important trope. This is clearly influenced by Bloom, who is an important source here as well. Since we have metalepsis as the name for the specific trope Bloom favors, that of intertextually playing one trope off a former one, there is no gain in rephrasing this. Additionally, such intertextuality is a small part of my visual metaphor theory, not the chief one, which revolves around the formation of a central, pervasive, optical, trope.30 In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau presents his engaging idea of the perruque. This word literally is French for “wig,” but in Certeau’s use, it is idiomatic for stealing work-time for one’s own projects, for example, such as is the situation when producers of small amateur magazines (called zines) photocopy their publications at their workplaces during work hours. Certeau sees this as a trope in which the socially powerless hollow out a somewhat Kristevian loophole for themselves within the conditions which dominate them. This is a discerning assessment of a little-studied phenomenon, one I find very

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attractive, yet a tactic more than a trope, and one which is rather far afield of my theory of artistic visual trope.31 This maneuver could, however, be a fertile ground for the invention of a central trope in an individual artist’s work. The British biologist Richard Dawkins created the word meme in his book on evolution, The Selfish Gene in 1976.32 In his presentation, memes are considered cultural analogues to genes, therefore units of sociocultural ideas which get passed from one person to another. The term has had little actual scientific success—no one has yet been able to clearly isolate an example nor prove its auto-transmitability. Indeed, if such an entity does exist, it resembles a virus more than a gene. Meme is, however, a highly fashionable term on internet, where it is used to describe any spreading of a trendy catch-phrase. Recently, it has become limited to poster-like small images with text on them, made with the hope that they will be endlessly reposted on social media, especially among rightwing people who want to insult or rant and rave, but without truly arguing any point. I find it far too voguish, vague and unproven to be of any use in discussing visual tropes. In summary, all of these standard rhetorical terms describe ideas which are ancillary to, far afield of, or even surface through central trope in the contributing components of an artist’s vision. Many, such as conceits, schemes, style, and extended metaphors, I would claim are instances in application of metaphor(m). While discussing jargon, I would like to make a point concerning a way in which my chief term, trope, has not been used in this book: the manner in which it currently frequently appears in idiomatic use in the artworld. Far too often the word is bandied about in discussions where it is shorthand for referring to a technique or practice within a specific style of art, one which the speaker does not support. The person using the term is thereby, in fact, accusing an artist of having key elements in their work which are the result of unreflected-upon habits and of unconscious, fallacious symbolism. For instance, Neo-Conceptualists are wont to indict Neo-Expressionists for using brushwork as “simply a trope of genius” or the like. Likewise, Neo-Expressionists will accuse Pop-Art-influenced artists of “making iconic tropes out of individual handwriting” and so on. Thus, in artworld abuse, trope becomes no more than a fashionable word for what would be better termed a convention, a cliché or a dead metaphor. This is vaguely reminiscent of some of the archaic definitions of metaphor, but more importantly it is quite commonly a confusion of trope for topos. Topoi in literature are conventional themes, motifs, character-types or style elements that are common within a specific genre. For instance, one topos in horror or so-called Gothic novels is the stormy night in a castle; one in hardboiled detective novels is the alcoholic, yet ethical loner as chief character. Thus, what

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artworld users of the word trope are seeking is most likely topos. The characteristic mark of a brushstroke from the hand of an artist as an indicator of individualism was an original invention of the Action Painters, but could be now viewed as having become codified into a topos. Outsourcing, not producing one’s work with one’s own hands, was a new aesthetic option attempting to incorporate industrial systems into art when the Russian Constructivists first suggested it. The “found object” appeared shockingly anti-humanistic in the hands of the Dadaists. Yet, both of these have turned into very nearly obligatory, Neo-Academicist, procedures in Neo-Conceptualism, symbolizing the content mentioned—thus topoi. Trope is used in this book when figurative language in general is meant, yet more importantly here, visual trope is used when visual metaphors, “figurative images” so-to-speak, are meant, not for topoi and certainly not for clichés.

Synopsis I have now finished painting a portrait of the nature of a theory of central visual trope. In following chapters, it is employed and exemplified. Let us apply a concluding varnish of brief summation to the picture. Optical trope as the basis of human thought, pressed into the tangible stuff and processes of pictorial creativity, constitutes metaphor(m), or the theory of central visual trope. The foremost struggle of strong visual creators is the search for this vital, analogical tool. An important aspect of this agonism is brought about by straining against the confines established by one’s artistic precursors (which is the psychological process of the artist). A further phase of this conflict is the attempt by artists to manifest the discovered central trope pervasively throughout their techniques, works, and total œuvre. The final result is a dialectical integration of content and form (both conceived of in the widest senses). The profile of meaning itself is understood in terms of the anatomy of its delivery—and vice versa. Francis Landy writes of the poetry of the Song of Songs that, independent of whether it involves two earthly erotic lovers or a symbolic love between God and his people, “lovers can communicate only through the world, through metaphor . . . Something happens that is beyond speech, and it enters language only through displacement.”33

Figure 6.1 Chapter 6: Conceiving Visual Metaphors, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 114

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Sketching, blocking, and brainstorming Now that in the last chapter, metaphor(m) has been tendered, a theory of central visual trope discovery and use in contemporary art, it is time to sketch a picture of the realm of technical, formal possibilities available to contemporary artists for discovering and constructing such visual metaphors in general and central visual tropes in particular. In short, how are visual metaphors discovered and created in contemporary fine art. The conceit within this chapter is a specific type of sketch, in which the basic forms of a comic or storyboard are roughed in, often concentrating on the broad masses, without detail; furthermore, in such sketches various possibilities are tried out in a kind of loose brainstorming. Drawing such studies is called blocking out a story or composition, in the sense of laying out the broad masses of the images, not in the sense of obstructing the view of something. Here is an example of a page on which I blocked out the comic sequence introducing this chapter. This term, blocking out, is parallel to, and perhaps derived from, the approximate physical placement of actors for scenes in a theatrical work during rehearsals, which directors similarly term blocking. This chapter blocks out how the visual metaphor(m)al thought process operates through brainstorming arrays of options for various formal features. To cast an eye back to our diagrams in the last chapter, the discussion now focuses on the left-hand oval: what formal aspects are available, and the righthand oval: how an image or image schema might be mapped onto them. Such possibilities are likely infinite. We must keep the goals of such creativity in mind and view the following descriptions as suggestive yet not exhaustive. To continuously widen this vast field has been a mainstay of the activities of creating artworks since at least the advent of Modernism. One of my instructors as an undergraduate was the late sculptor Roger Kotoske. He conducted a very stirring class which was exciting chiefly due to a talent and technique of his: the ability 115

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Figure 6.2 Layout and Blocking for Chapter 6: Conceiving Visual Metaphors (seen above), ink on paper, 2021, 11 × 10 cm, © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

to brainstorm. Whenever we, the students, would bring in a work, discuss a theme for an assignment or look at artwork in slides, he would begin to rattle off additional possibilities for the expansion of the topic or object in other, potential art objects. “What else could we do with this,” he might say, and then brainstorm: turn it upside-down, make it huge, put it outside, change material, intensify details and, and, and. Innovative possibilities would begin to flow forth from us as well. This chapter is very much in his spirit.

Tools of thought What do we want our tropes to do for us, as Harold Bloom asks? He writes, “Rather than ask again: what is a trope? I prefer to ask the pragmatic question: what is it that we want our tropes to do for us?”1 We want our tropes to change the way we think. Through such alteration, we want them to offer us understanding, to help us comprehend the world of our experience, and even, perhaps, to assist us in changing that world. This is a large demand, but

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we should face it in all its hubris, self-contradiction, impossibility and wonder, and not evade it in cloying irony or other self-debasement. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson insist, “If a new metaphor enters the conceptual system that we base our actions on, it will alter that conceptual system and the perceptions and actions that the system gives rise to. Much of cultural change arises from the introduction of new metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones.”2 All the creative arts introduce new metaphorical concepts or surprising re-readings of older ones. This is primarily accomplished by contemporary visual artists through their tropaic use of elements of the physical world, their materials, methods and formats. It can be enlightening when contemplating, or teaching, an idea in visual art, to first step to the side and apply it to another artform, then return to the main discipline. Such analogical employment can focus one’s thoughts. Here, we will discuss literature first, which is generally better understood by many than visual art, roughing out some features which are ripe for tropaic transformation in this artform. With the clearer picture sketched in, we will then proceed to the main target, contemporary visual art. Aspects of textual media where useful metaphors and central trope can be found or built by authors include: style, syntax, figurative language, length, allusion, dialogue, description, meter, poetics, characters, narrator, narrative, reference, internality/externality, genre, time, rhyme, image, motif, plot development, format, repetition, transition, rhythm, setting, symbolism, mood, and others. This shotgun-like sentence, brainstormed in a few minutes, can only hint at the available options. Such inexhaustibility is certainly a reason why authors can continue to be creative, after the vast history of previous writing. Everything has not been done, and in truth can never be done. Authors swim in their own discipline, discovering and manipulating its elements as they glide through them. Analytically, one must use a different, somewhat falsifying tactic. The artform is conceptually disassembled, imagining the parts one-by-one. Such a process could create a false impression of what I claim creators do. Yes, they are critically analytic, but in an operative, holistic fashion, thinking through objects in the swirl of creation. To be manageable in a theoretical study, the parts must be pointed out one-by-one and out of context; but like a vehicle, the separate parts of a creative work do not function much at all, however when properly assembled they take one almost anywhere. We can start with the physical building blocks of a text: letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, lines, paragraphs, pages, chapters, books, volumes. All can and have been manipulated metaphorically. The process of creation is also a fruitful ground: handwriting, typewriting, individual sheets, one long sheet, the

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computer, rewriting, not rewriting, cutting and pasting, predetermined formulas, chance. Elements of construction come into play: sentence length, syntax, grammar, vocabulary, spelling, capitalization, graphic design, typographic conventions. Broader structures may be key: genre, period style, traditions, type, structure. Narrative features often are used: style and amount of description, persona, dialogue, flashbacks, speed of action, narrative perspective, reported thought. Decisive use of tropes is important: which one (simile or irony, etc.), how far-fetched the metaphors are intended to be, how frequently tropes are used, whether they appear in dialogue or only in description. There are many, many more aspects to disassemble: characterization, overt philosophizing, levels of transparency or self-referentiality, the intended public, levels of difficulty of the text, and so on. My theory of central trope delimits this through one hypothesis: creators generally take only a severely limited number of chosen features in hand in order to achieve their metaphor(m)s. Most often it is only one such aspect of form. The insight gained through tropaically using this one element is then widened throughout the other important components of their oeuvre, yet the prime integer remains paramount. For the purposes of investigation, the discussion of an artist’s or writer’s works centers on her chosen or discovered key metaphoric, formal element. The challenge is to locate this momentous kernel of insight without drowning by under or over-estimating it. The description of a central trope must not become simply a witty one-liner, limiting a significant perception to a quick dismissal. Alternately, one cannot be guided by the global, expansive claims of creators themselves. They concentrate on the pervasive, adept adaptation and expansion of their vision. Hence, many would deny the very existence of any central trope, seeing it as delimitation of their powers and originality. In the next chapter of this book, metaphor(m) is sought out in the works of specific creators to better appreciate the achievements of visual artists. In “On the Sublime of Self-Disgust” Charles Altieri has expressed the necessity for applying theory to actual objects. Theory leads us to demarcating limits. In order to see beyond those boundaries, I think we have to turn to concrete works of art, especially if we are to challenge the very forms of self-congratulation that may be basic to the entire enterprise of theorizing about the arts.3 Nevertheless, another one of the joys of thinking with the theory of central visual trope comes in fantasizing for oneself the possibilities of creating one. This is, in a way, to try out the position that each and every creator must occupy. As a thought experiment, take any element of literature above, imagine a significant vision of some aspect of life, then try to discover an appropriate

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image or image-schema mapping which would be a useful tool for embodying this. Then, see if that matches to any authors of whom you are knowledgeable, or fantasize how you would use it as a creator. For instance, let us take words. If we image-match a word to a tree, it has hidden roots, with branches above growing and changing yet mirroring the root system below, without exactly repeating it. In writing, one could exploit this to achieve a lively version of language including history (the roots, or etymology, of words), yet also foregrounding its vital blossoming in use. Already we have stumbled on a fruitful version of language. How could this concretely be achieved? The initial insight is usually significant, but in tangible actualization is where genius comes into its own. That is what makes the artist or author. As Larry Briskman astutely writes, The artist must build up his painting gradually, stroke by stroke; while the theoretician must build up his conjectural explanation bit by bit (even though he may have got his explanatory “core idea” in a flash). But if this is the case, then it is highly likely that the very thought processes of the artist or scientist will themselves be affected by the work done so far. In other words, the creator, in his very process of creation, is constantly interacting with his own prior products; and this interaction is one of genuine feedback.4

Possibilities, obviously not all equally creative, could include writing only with words of a predetermined origin, or using words which have inverted or clearly evolved far from their original base. The meaning would dominate the form, yet the metaphor(m) could be pointed in many different, perhaps even opposite, directions. A concern with roots in words could be liberating, expressing pride in one’s heritage; it could be fascist, seeing words in imaginary racial terms; it could be critical of the misuse of words. Authors who come quickly to mind who have considered the individuality of words as an important part of their creative efforts include Emily Dickinson, Anthony Burgess, Jack Kerouac, and most importantly James Joyce in Finnegans Wake.5 Was this their central trope, a part of it, or a result of it? Each would have to be studied in depth and in detail to discover and discuss the answer to these questions. The theory of central visual trope contends that each and every component of an artform can be and often has been considered in this way, especially in contemporary visual art. For the purposes of criticism, such thoughts must be discovered in the novels, poems and plays of contemporary authors, and in the paintings, sculpture and installations of contemporary artists. For creative use, such imaginings must be tested against the inner drive—what does this

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allow me to express, what does it force me to admit, what can I twist it into saying, what truth can I show with this possible metaphor(m)? Can I question it as well as use it? How fecund will it be in elaboration, extension, composition, questioning, criticism, transumption, or deliberate misconstrual? Writer and media theorist Daniel F. Ammann has a theory, originally created for analyzing new aspects of literature, that is equally important for locating formal aspects that can be and have been manipulated metaphorically in contemporary visual art. He has an inventive critical achievement in his identification of format as an important, intrinsic element of the formal and significative structure in all media. Format is only one segment of his analytical Lesekompass (“reading/interaction compass”) in his essay “Pfade, Knoten, Leerstellen: Leserstimulation und textuelle Mitarbeit.”6 Ammann predicates three levels of orientation in interfaces with communicative texts, or for our uses here, visual art objects: the Instanzebene (“level of activation”), the Manifestationsebene (“level of manifestation”), and the Implikationsebene (“level of implication). The second of these levels has a subdivision of its own, Format, which consists of the package of details of the particular data-carrier, the singular vehicle bearing that text or other inscription—magnetic-tape cassette sound recording; middle-sized, easel, oil painting on canvas; square-bound, trade paper-back book; home, video DVD; mp3 encoding; and so on.7 This is the aspect so promising for use in developing new visual metaphors in contemporary art. The term format has several meanings outside Ammann’s theory. Format often refers to computer discs, CDs, vinyl LPs, radio waves, projected slides, billboards, TV show genres, museum installations, and other such entities. While the listed examples are mostly media, according to Ammann’s system, they are commonly discussed under the rubric of format because it is recognized that their importance as vehicles lies in one or more of their specific characteristics, especially as these vary from earlier or more standard media forms. Format is truly these technical properties as pointed out by Ammann, not the medium in its entirety. The qualities which comprise format are those such as size, weight, scale, proportion, design, volume, duration, etc. Format describes first and foremost the way in which information is stored or displayed on a data carrier, or how the content is constituted in a medium or through a specific piece of playback equipment.8 Ammann’s insight, which I find most applicable to visual art, is that the three elements of sign, medium and format are invariably present and inextricably intertwined. Furthermore, format as a concept had not previously been recognized

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for its importance and had not been extracted for analysis. Ammann’s idea functions best as a re-reading of the relationship between the elements in those arts featuring what is often termed the type/token distinction, based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s idea. Pierce first introduced the notion in his paper “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism.”9 The idea has been ontologically very useful in understanding a variety of forms of visual art objects, and thus has been expanded and particularized by many art theorists, such as Richard Wollheim.10 The visual image behind the type/token trope is a very concrete, yet rich one. Most appealing is the thought of a rectangular or cylindrical block of metal which one uses to either cover in ink and print a letter, or hit with a hammer upon another piece of metal to mint a token such as a coin. Artworks of this family are, or can be, prints, poetry, novels, multiples, and the like: ones which exist as abstract matrices (types) which are then employed to “stamp out” specific instances of the work (tokens). Ammann radically and almost counter-intuitively suggests that each token’s potentialities reflectively leave tracks on the type itself. As an example, in the philosophy of art the term “work of phonography” has begun to appear to describe those pieces of music which exist solely or chiefly as manipulated studio effects, through multi-tracking and the like.11 In his book Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Theodore Gracyk finds the definition of Rock music in its dedication to the priority of the recording; he maintains that live performances of this music generally nowadays imitate the studio-created version as closely as possible, thus displaying its preeminence.12 Additionally, though, Ammann’s theory of format is useful in reconsidering aspects of form in other sorts of art, such as those Noël Carroll calls template works (films, videos, etc.),13 or allographic works (such as a symphony or dance) and even one-of-a-kind, autographic works (paintings, drawings, direct sculpture), thus it is valuable for us here. A traditional singular stone sculpture, for instance, is made of a specific marble (material) carved in particular ways (technique). However, it also possesses a certain size and scale in relation to viewers, and perhaps is intended for a specific location (site and cultural context) and makes use of anticipated light conditions (physical context). Examples of format becoming a chief element in artworks include Ad Reinhardt’s black-on-black works which concentrate on aspects of painting which are unphotographable, Glen Gould’s collage-like combinations of various recorded piano concert performances to make one track, David Mazzuchelli’s drawings for comic books where the reproduction technology is anticipated (and where there is in fact no “original” outside of his layered production technique)—or, negatively, the occasional, unscrupulous practice of gluing drawings by famous artists on stretched canvas and claiming them to be paintings in order to demand higher

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prices. The last is a blatant misuse of format. It is a genuine Marc Rothko, say, but a forged “painting.” Those seemingly incidental aspects of form which constitute the format of pieces of art must also be taken into account in any creation or appreciation of a work. This serves as a reminder that they are not transparent as is often assumed. Essential, then, to understanding a created object is whether it is envisioned for broadcast, internet, to hang in a specific light situation, has a particular size or scale, will exist in several formats simultaneously, was intended for a certain context, utilizes aspects of its own reproduction, etc., or denies any of these. Thus, format is an aspect of form, with a newly discovered prominence. Like others mentioned (material, size, handling, brushstroke, and so on), it becomes fodder for tropaic development. Considerations of format display how all formal and technical components, even those yet unrecognized, can be either used to produce a metaphor, or integrated into a creator’s trope under the rubric of pervasiveness. Other aspects of optical media where central trope can be found, or built, include: facture, composition, tools, presentation, amount of decision, amount of handwork, shape, quantity, materials, color, subject matter, iconography, reference, allusion, technique, light, space, abstraction, representation, accident, amount of preconception, scale, sensuality, methods, process, delivery system, envisioned viewers, and more. This is a rather daunting, if far from exhaustive, list. The application of insight about lived experience to insight into one’s means of expression is more of a discovery than a transference. It involves the essential tropological quality of understanding itself. It may seem confining to have to search both through one’s tools and through one’s experience with the tools. It sounds like a blind man tapping out his path with his stick, while having to simultaneously search for his stick itself. This is the situation, but it is an interaction which brings an expansion of knowledge. Such application of visual metaphor to experience is a primary instance of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion that understanding lies in application in its largest sense. In particular, this involves the testing of our pre-judgment of a situation against the experienced fact of it. Joel Weinsheimer has discussed this idea in his book concerning Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer argues that genuine application (which does justice to the particularity of the particular) not only increases what one knows but additionally expands one’s categories, what one can know. Genuine application therefore cannot be conceived as the ex post facto use of an understanding one already has, precisely because in applying one comes to understand. Application is an element of understanding itself.14

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Finding one’s central trope in visual art is thus quite the opposite of restriction. It offers an artist the equipment needed to gain knowledge, while expanding the field of obtainable knowledge with each usage. Once again, we are allowed to glimpse the vast sea of unlimited possibilities, boundless horizons, in creative production. After having outlined the broad implications and significance of central tropes, let us continue our blocked-out account with a few specific, imaginative examples of image-mapping and image schema-mapping and the creation of visual metaphors and optical metaphor(m)s. The brushstroke was discussed closely in the section of Chapter 5 concerning Vincent van Gogh, color and geometric composition will be considered below in the chapter detailing a painting by Charles Boetschi. Instead of such real-life examples, at first fancy will reign for a few paragraphs in order to better serve as illustration of the invention of visual trope. Let us randomly choose a single formal, technical ingredient of art, improvise a somewhat whimsical image-mapping, and see where this leads our visual thoughts. One of the aspects of video art installations that seems the most unquestioned, hence most clichéd, is the placement of the monitor. In many museums or galleries, it seemed, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, inevitably to be positioned on the floor, without any base. The unacknowledged and unconscious derivation of this from Brancusi’s and Minimalism’s enlightened questioning of the base in sculpture is momentarily beyond the focus of this discussion. It is sufficient to note the fact in order to draw a bead on this constituent of form as a potential location for forming a visual metaphor(m). The television cabinet itself has been creatively utilized by many artists, especially Nam June Paik. Now and again, the placement of a monitor has contributed significantly to the meaning of a work. Bill Viola’s Heaven and Earth pairs two horizontal monitors, one hanging above and facing the other below it. Each is stripped of everything but its cathode-tube screen. This is an integral complement of the video images the monitors play: one, of a newborn child, Viola’s son; the other, displays a close-up image of an old woman, the artist’s mother, who lies in a coma in the last week of her life.15 Where else could monitors be placed, beyond sitting on standard pedestals or the floor? They could be on or sunk into the wall (both painting-like); they could be hung in the corner (as in a bar); monitors could be buried in the floor, swung on cables, buried in other materials, carried by animals, mounted on the museum guards, worn as hats, replace door knobs, be distorted into odd shapes, wander about the room robotically, be mounted on huge springs, sail by on boats, bounce on trampolines, float about with helium balloons, show through the zipper of a

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pair of pants, fill desk drawers, spin on turntables, float in magnetic fields, be put in living-rooms, be mounted in surveillance-room rows and banks, and many other possible situations. Each of these suggests a wealth of promising tropes. This general approach to the positioning of the monitor has been very central to the art of Swiss artist Stefan Rohner. He has placed videos, and sometimes photographs, in suitcases, snow globes, bottles, shirts, wheel barrows, broom brushes, table-tops and more. Each location is integral to the meaning and effect of the work in a metaphorical fashion. The objects range from an underwater scene on a monitor sunk into the door of a refrigerator, to a video of a silhouette of a dancer mounted in a living cactus. One of his most evocative works is a cube which slowly revolves on its stand and pedestal. Each side of the piece, titled Wolken (“Clouds”), carries a back-lit transparency of clouds in a beautiful blue sky.16 The images here are photo-transparencies of gently traveling clouds (in most other works these would be videos), on a cube which is gently turning. The movement of the support apparatus is a repetition of the implied cloud movement. The former mechanical and geometric, the latter natural and organic. Opposites are united yet also parallel. This a very soothing, yet strikingly witty merger of metonymy (the movement as part of the context), simile (the movement of a machine is like the movement of nature), antithesis (the contrasts of the mechanical and the natural), and metaphor (the suggestion that the somewhat peaceful feeling one gets from watching clouds and this sculptural object are “mere metaphors”). Rohner is merging all these tropes while also questioning and criticizing them. He found his visual metaphor(m) in a deadpan, personal comprehension of the synthesis of the video, monitor and pedestal, or analogously, the photograph and frame. Rohner’s central visual trope is “The video support (video plus monitor with pedestal, is not ignorable), it = a quotidian object, which = profound drollness = life/art.” The videos and photos themselves, of course, are significant in the works, performing similar insights with dry wit within the confines of the filmed or photographed subject matter, mapping everyday objects to himself or other artistic motifs. They create a mutually supportive marriage with their object supports. What further images or image schemas could be mapped onto other such seemingly anomalous placements in order to achieve a visual metaphor(m), making the location eloquent rather than simply arbitrary? The idea noted in the list above of putting monitors on large springs could be used to call up the image of a jack-in-the-box. Envision typical household-sized televisions appearing to have leaped from Minimalist-like boxes, atop human-scaled springs. This could be a powerful, almost frightening presence, calling forth various associations

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and tropes. The boxes become a critical metonymy of the museum/gallery world, as well as a hyperbole of the toy on which it is based. The “idiot box” assumes the position of the slightly horrific jester’s head, an ironic conceptual pun. The whole piece plays with time in two interesting ways. It would seem to ask, “Is this what the avant-garde has evolved (or sprung) into?” It also would seem to imply that the basis of all such new media work lies in the childish desire for ever newer toys. This analytical, yet anachronistic combination of forces in time—one moving forward, one back—could be a delightful metalepsis, both because of its temporal play and its reinterpretation of the metaphors behind Minimalism and video art. Beyond artworld concerns, the piece also suggests that we should question how an overblown toy has become “king of the living room” in most homes. What appears on the monitor would have to be a contributing force to this central trope. The metaphor(m) summed up would be the equation: “Base is an enlarged toy,” thus yielding “television and (certain) art are linked to childishness.” This is reliant on several foundational metaphors including: “GENERIC IS SPECIFIC” (a particular toy, a jack-in-the-box, is childishness), “IMPORTANT IS BIG” (the human and TV-sized toy which is ordinarily handsized), “IDEAS ARE PERCEPTIONS” (notice the similarity of a video monitor, and Minimal art, to toys), and probably most important, “STATES ARE LOCATIONS” (the positioning of the monitor examines a condition in society). Another idea would be to place monitors outside a space such as a museum, mounting them on brackets outside each window, facing inward. They would be perceivable only through the windows, thus emphasizing their presence outside. This would metaphorically mimic the positions of old-fashioned air-conditioning units in many cities, but more importantly would allow development of visual metaphors from image schemas based on OUT. In an application of “STATES ARE LOCATIONS,” the location of the monitors becomes a significant state, or at least evocative of important states of art, the artworld, electronic media and society. This state is a schema of OUT LOOKING IN. This image schema could be correlated with other tropes through the relationship between “out” and “location” as concepts. Thereby one would be able to point the metaphor(m) of “location outside” in evocative directions. Since “EXISTENCE IS A LOCATION (HERE),” then these monitors would be perceived as not having existence in the same way that viewers have it. Viewing them through closed museum windows would have the effect of highlighting the monitors’ presence as not here, rather over there, ostracized. Likewise, as “EMOTIONS ARE LOCATIONS,” the televisions and their contents would be seen as outside, where it is uncomfortable, unprotected, “out in the cold,” perhaps

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even mistreated. If the videotaped imagery on the screens were of exotic scenery, the first interpretation would be strengthened. On the other hand, if the images shown were of fragile objects, the second inference would hold sway. Playing videos featuring such marginal figures as the homeless would combine the two perceptions. In contrast, the images might represent enemies attacking. These evocations would vie for power with a perception of the televisions as replacing natural landscape scenery, augmenting the impact.

Meaning and form Lakoff and Johnson suggest that spatialization is very important to textual metaphors.17 Contemporary art spatializes even more so, yet also makes formal structure visible, haptic, and iconic in order to embody metaphors, and thereby content. Metaphor(m) subsumes this idea under a broader rendition of the interaction of form, trope, reasoning and creativity. With the aid of such explications of trope in language, I have attempted to parallel, and thereby illuminate, visual metaphor formation. However, make no mistake, those were simply analogies for understanding. I am decidedly not saying visual metaphor or visual art is language. I would assert that Poststructuralists who do this are mistaking their analogies and metaphors for ontologies, and the tools for the construction. I also compared visual trope formation briefly to music recording and could have made even more analogies with music, or perhaps architecture, or even dance. This chapter has roughed-out a portion of the potential which visual metaphors offer their creators when made flesh in meta-forms. Central tropes were displayed in action by imagining model specimens of image and imageschema mappings. This small sample of applications displays how tropes offer us opportunities for the comprehension of our experiences and how they can lend a hand in changing how we perceive “reality,” and thus in, perhaps, transforming life. Art is essential because it originates new metaphorical concepts or devises critical interrogations of those taken for granted, through the visual, pragmatic, tropaic use of form.

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Figure 7.1 Chapter 7: Visual Metaphor in Criticism, ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 128

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Visual Metaphor in Criticism: Two Contemporary Painters’ Works

In Chapter 5 we considered a general theory of central visual trope discovery, followed by Chapter 6, where we saw the essentials of visual metaphor in use to make such breakthroughs in contemporary art’s technical, formal, presentational and procedural possibilities. Now, let us trace the significance of realized visual metaphor(m)s in thorough, critical detail by studying a single painting by Charles Boetschi and a recent body of paintings by Leonard Bullock, two contemporary artists. The overarching conceit in this chapter is meta-referential; it is a trope of itself: an analytic essay viewing essays as a metaphor. This conceit will manifest itself in choices of adjectives, verbs, references, and so on, pertaining to analysis, research, logic, and exploration. In this chapter, we assay the chain of cognitive, visually metaphoric reasoning behind specific contemporary artworks.

A single painting: Charles Boetschi’s Color Unit 24.1 The artist Charles Boetschi, who passed away on the 4th of April, 2006 at the age of only 48, was a friend of mine and a partner I treasured in discussions concerning art, especially painting; therefore, many of my perceptions here are informed by long personal conversation. Boetschi’s paintings, including the one under discussion here, Color Unit 24.1, are both idiosyncratic and revelatory. They are idiosyncratic in that they disregard the pressures of many current artworld trends, but also in their very compositional reasoning. As George Lakoff and Mark Turner have observed, “Idiosyncratic thought requires idiosyncratic language.”1 Each work is a subtle and sophisticated combination of tropes critically utilized in a unique way—one which points viewers toward possible personal revelations of vision. 129

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Boetschi displays unadulterated and courageous antithetical awareness. His paintings make clear reference to the Minimalism of Donald Judd and the geometric abstraction of the Formalist hard-edge and art concret painters. Nonetheless, he denies and inverts several of their key premises. In his paintings, he acknowledges geometric art’s tradition, but also shows that he has taken postmodern doubt to heart. Boetschi extends the metaphors of this style, sometimes by “backing-up,” sometimes by leaping forward. For instance, he paints, a method Judd abandoned to go into a three-dimensional form falling between painting and sculpture which he termed the “specific object.”2 Yet, Boetschi’s surfaces are immaculately smooth. The only evidence of the object being hand-painted is the infinitesimally raised edges due to paint thickness where fields of color meet. The choices of hue are unique and playful, not primary and pedantically balanced as in art concret. The artist forswears both the utopian aspirations of hard-edged purist painting and the Dada-fathered theatricality of presence in Minimalism. Therein, he is able to reestablish an activity important to early geometric painters such as Piet Mondrian, yet scorned by Postmodernists—the nisus for integrity. He becomes technically, by choice of medium, and ethically, through his aim, agonistically “prior” to his composite of predecessors. Boetschi uses a heavily intellectualized compositional strategy based on a grid formed of eight rectangular subdivisions. Generally, his compositions within his chosen constraints violate the standard rules of design as learned in art school. The paintings accentuate skewed arrangements and peculiar color. Strangely irritating yet attractive “off-hues” are adjoined in a seemingly random fashion. There are rarely primaries or even secondaries. Personal, emotional and anecdotal associations accrue to the various tints. Boetschi’s works are intelligent, complex and precariously dissident. Color is a happily difficult entity for trope and for theory in general. It is seldom mapped from the source domain of vision in fundamental metaphors in general speech utterances. This may be because particular colors are so insistently real, so sensual. Although it may be forced into a symbolic role, color does not mimetically represent anything in itself and it cannot be abstracted.3 It is always a sample of itself. Nonetheless, in many visual artists there is a mix of metonymy and metaphor in their central trope, which thereby allows the incorporation of color. A piece of something, a sample of color, may be utilized as either synecdoche or metonymy (yet almost never as symbolism as in High Modernism). This trope may then be further manipulated as a metaphor or other trope leading to foundational metaphors. As a simple example, one might exactly match

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several of the multitude of colors of “white” people’s skin—none of which one can in any fashion describe as actually white. The various yellows, browns and pinks are a synecdoche of humanity, become a metonymy of societal division, and are a clear metaphor for the falsity of racial definition. As was shown, this has indeed been done in the outstanding work by Byron Kim discussed above in Chapter 4. Beyond synecdochical use, obviously, color must come into play in almost all visual art. Much of painting throughout history has revolved around color-formed space. Light and color are inextricably linked for visual artists. Foundational metaphors of light are thus often intricately manifested in color. Let us explore tropaic color at work in the acrylic painting, Color Unit 24.1 of 1998. Boetschi’s works are so centered on unique color, that it would be a bit ineffectual to only reproduce one here in grey tones. Thus, I have put the one discussed here up on one of my websites, so that readers can see the incredible hues, even if in their digital rather than physical form. The link is .4 The 200 by 200-centimeter piece may be viewed tropaically on two primary levels. First, there is the irregular/regular aspect pairing in the “J”-formed composition. Second, there are the individual, seemingly associative colors used where one would expect strong primaries. There are many additional elements convincingly integrated into the metaphor(m). These include the large size of the paintings, their scale in relationship to humans, the raised edges of the paint and the depth of the stretcher frames. However, these are of somewhat auxiliary importance, primarily displaying the artist’s strength of reasoning in the pervasiveness of his central trope. Lakoff and Turner describe several prime methods for creatively applying foundational metaphors: extending (developing implications of the tropes), elaborating (adding in details), questioning (casting them into doubt), and composing (bringing two or more together).5 I have added to this list: criticizing (disapproving of them, such as war metaphors), transuming (subsuming them within a more comprehensive vision), and misprising (purposefully creatively misunderstanding them). Boetschi is conducting several of these operations in this work, but most importantly he is composing tropes into surprises of opposition, REGULAR/IRREGULAR, thereby throwing their identity into question. His central trope is a productive model of visual thought, in that in Boetschi’s visual metaphor(m) the action of composing and fusing tropes becomes the act of questioning them. There are several ways in which a tropaic path may be established in a visual artwork. In a poem or novel, this is relatively straightforward. These textual

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Figure 7.2 Charles Boetschi, Color Unit 24.1, 1998, acrylic on canvas, 200 × 200 cm © 1998 Charles Boetschi (for color see ).

works tend to unfold as one reads, left-to-right, top-to-bottom, in Western languages. Thus, the phenomenological experience of the reader is the sequential path along which the tropes are laid out. Most visual artworks, here paintings, have an at-once far simpler and far more complex presence. The viewer simultaneously experiences the work as a whole and as a sequence, usually the path one’s eye follows through the work, as determined by the composition— what attracts attention first, second and so on. Planning and controlling such consecutive visual paths is one of the staples of the education of artists in art schools and universities. A walk through a single work becomes quite involved. The painting is always being viewed metaphorically on three levels: the whole, the sequence, and the interaction of these two. Although literature, especially

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poetry, does this to an extent too, it is not as foregrounded or inherently important to the basic construction of textual works as it is to visual works. The speed of the insistent interaction in a painting compels flickering attention, a dialectic, almost split-consciousness. In this way, Color Unit 24.1 must be viewed metaphorically as a spatial and temporal experience and as an entire entity, including its “internal” (e.g., arrangement, figure and ground) and “external” relationships (such as scale and the history of art). Boetschi is making several analogous and complementary mappings in his paintings. The aspects of form he utilizes in his metaphor(m) are color and geometric composition, through which he plays regularity against irregularity, typifying understanding and learning. His chief foundational metaphor is one common to our culture, if currently theoretically in dispute: “UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING,” (“I saw the light!”). Kin to this is the famous “IDEAS ARE PERCEPTIONS.” Boetschi’s personal creative extension is “perceptions are surprising.” Furthermore, philosophically important to his art are the two foundational metaphors “IMPERFECT IS IRREGULAR” and “PERFECT IS REGULAR.” His mapping proceeds as follows. “Thinking is seeing,” metaleptically then, it is “painting.” Light becomes color (in Boetschi this is paint, but without obvious stroking, so more of an ocular than a physical presence). His choice of quirky color is the source mapped on the target “IRREGULARITY.” Furthermore, this yields the target “imperfect,” which in turn yields “discovery” or “surprise” by steps. In an inspired turn of elaboration and extension, the geometry of his compositions is matched to “REGULARITY,” yet contrarily the arrangement of those forms is matched to “IRREGULARITY.” Geometric-yet-irregular composition and eccentric, allusive colors are manifested very particularly in Color Unit 24.1. The eight rectangular units have pleasing proportions, their length being twice the distance of their width. Any sense of stability this could contribute to the composition is undermined, however, by the fact that they are arranged both horizontally and vertically in a rather willful, non-serial fashion. A classic shape feels highly conditional. They do not line up in an obvious manner. This plays on our expectations rooted in the foundational metaphor “COHERENT IS ALIGNED” (“I couldn’t get the facts to line up”). Boetschi is hinting at incoherence and clearly manifesting disparity. “DISPARITY IS CHANGE” is an important foundational metaphor (“His books are getting shorter”). By bringing these two together, his central trope is thus particularized to suggest that a change in what we perceive as coherent is necessary. Since seeing is a form of cognition and ideas are models, his insight invites broadening to perception and life in general.

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Boetschi’s rectangular units are contained within the overall square of the painting’s form. This is an inversion of the expectation one has from the history of compositions based on the Golden Rectangle. The famous Minimalist Agnes Martin also often inscribed rectangular segments within square paintings. She described the effect so: “The little rectangle contradicts the square. And the square is authoritative.”6 Although Martin uses much smaller rectangles, the point made by both artists is similar. Stability and authority are both presented and denied. “THEORETICAL DEBATE IS COMPETITION” (“They have rival theories”), read in reverse, is united with “STATES ARE SHAPES” (“He refuses to fit in”), together questioning all our metaphors based on coherence, stability, and (thereby) authority. The central figure in the work is a short-capped, long-based “J.” It can be read as a tri-colored figure on a butterscotch ground. This, too, is highly provisional. The “J” seems to be formed of pixels which are much too large; it calls to mind the random doodles on graph paper of a distracted science student. Additionally, it is too top-heavy and lopsided to the left. A viewer’s eyes begin at the top, travel down the shaft and then turn rapidly to the left where they wish to zoom off the edge of the painting. Boetschi presents this so self-assuredly, however, that many a design fundamentals teacher would break his theoretical neck justifying this composition in standard terms. However, the painting vigorously denies such a reading, which is an important aspect of Boetschi’s metaphor(m). “Importance is central” and “EMOTIONAL STABILITY IS BALANCE” are blatantly negated. Color Unit 24.1’s geometric structure displays a composite of elaborations and variations on foundational metaphors concerning regularity and irregularity. This composite is then utilized by the artist as a self-interrogating metaphor which causes us to mistrust our definitions of these concepts. As potent as this formal composition is in its own right, it acts to present color in an even more unique and overwhelming way. Boetschi frequently professed that color was the raison d’être of his work.7 That is, color itself—not color theory or color therapy, which many mistake for color as experience. There are hardly ever any primaries in this artist’s work. In fact, there are seldom secondaries or tertiaries. The choice to work with only red, yellow and blue, familiar from so much hard-edge painting, is revealed to be a conceptual act negating color by relegating it to formulaic, arithmetical permutation. In contradistinction, Boetschi’s hues are so specific, yet so unnamable, that one feels drawn to refer to personal associations. Their suggestiveness is precarious, though, by being adamantly referentially indeterminate. Color refers directly to life outside the

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confines of Formalism, yet retains its individual integrity by refusing to be a symbol. The “background” hue in Color Unit 24.1, that is the one to the left and right, is an acrid butterscotch, equally attractive and repellant. The almost-white at the painting’s top is exactly poised between white, grey, and lilac. Or is it simply assuming these guises because of the surrounding tints? The yellow recalls Johannes Vermeer’s pearlescent highlights on gold, yet it is colder, like the sun on a beautiful winter morning. The grayed lilac below seems paradoxically both tasteful and tasteless, were it a fashion or interior design choice. It is as friendly as the butterscotch is discordant. Boetschi’s color references, while often metonymic, are all additionally similes, more so than metaphors, each foregrounding its own conditional like or as (to once again refer to the differences between visual and linguistic metaphors discussed in Chapter 4). These colors are decidedly not balanced, yet masterfully composed. The size of the work at 200 by 200 cm allows the viewer to swim in the colors, fully reveling in the stream of associative perceptions. In color, Boetschi most clearly particularizes his central trope. “UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING” is driven home with quiet force—color is not allowed to become a color name, seeing is not allowed to drop to mere verbalization, understanding is both a sensual and rational experience. Imperfection becomes perfection. REGULARITY metaphors are not only played off against IRREGULARITY tropes, rather IRREGULARITY proves REGULARITY to be a misconception, overwhelming and replacing it sensually. Since “OPPORTUNITIES ARE OPEN PATHS” (“Her new job offers her better paths of development”) and “IDEAS ARE LOCATIONS” (“He’s always jumping to conclusions”), Boetschi’s painting offers a new, more open possibility for envisioning and finding better perceptions. Color Unit 24.1 is also an instance of what Daniel Ammann has termed “the allusive game.” He discusses this in his work on the novels of English writer David Lodge. I turn to intertextuality on a wider scale. Just as lexical repetition, collocating vocabulary or alliterative and assonantal patterns often yield persistent clusters of theme and imagery in an intratextual, stylistic approach to the text, so intertextual references may be integrated into a meaningful reading when they permeate the language of a novel.8

In Color Unit 24.1 one sees the potential for such highly complex, “wider scale,” creative, yet refined metaphoric structure in painting. Boetschi’s metaphor(m) is multilayered, allusive, interpictorial (to mimic the word

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Figure 7.3 The Diagram of Charles Boetschi’s Metaphor(m). © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

intertextual), and permeates every element of the painting—most of all color and geometric composition. Let us graph his central trope in a blending diagram. His personal central message is that unbalanced surprises in color and composition show the contradictory truth of experience. Boetschi maps geometric composition on abstraction (and its associations of regularity, nonrepresentationalism, even coldness) and simultaneously oppositionally blends the colors of the geometric forms with referentiality and evocativeness. Thus, his metaphor can be stated in several fashions, including: “Geometric forms are nonrepresentational, yet their colors are referential.” His central equation is: “Composition and color are visually irregular,” thus yielding “surprising perception,” which imparts “new ideas,” which supply “understanding.” The postmodern complexity in this metaphor(m) is the fact that his image-mapping relies on our expectations from the history of the forms with which he works. Significantly, this painting is both idiosyncratic and global in implication.

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Leonard Bullock: “Venetian” heterogeneity and eidophor Let us now proceed to another contemporary painter, Leonard Bullock. The blending in his central trope is much more direct than that of Charles Boetschi, yet nonetheless quite rich in its affects. Bullock’s works are highly, consciously visual, rather than, say conceptual. This calls to mind Paul Ricoeur’s suggestion, that “If semantics meets its limits here, a phenomenology of imagination . . . could perhaps take over from psycholinguistics and extend its functioning to realms where the verbal is vassal to the non-verbal.”9 The artist’s opulent and engaging paintings present subtle developments in contemporary art which entice an historical analogy as well as two newly minted concepts. It could be said that Bullock is a “Venetian” among contemporary painters, because his art offers an alternative to Neo-Conceptual trends, intellectually being highly of the moment but far more visceral. As has been much described by art historians, Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, and other Venetian artists created sensuous, painterly works emphasizing color, light, and space, thus supplying a clear alternative to the dominant rationality of much of the art of their day, particularly that of Rome. Bullock’s work occupies a similar position within the contemporary artworld. Heterogeneity is a noun describing the situation of being composed of vastly varied, dissimilar elements. Indeed, swirling structures of incongruous elements form the emotional and compositional heart of Bullock’s approach. The parts themselves, however visually disparate they might be, nevertheless are fundamentally ideationally related. Each is an eidophor.10 This neologism comes directly from the artist, self-coined to identify his creation of visual tropes through nodules of painterly activity, each of which contains a compressed collection of references and allusions. The painter is sensually and cerebrally thinking with paint—thinking through painting, in particular the stroke. Bullock’s paintings embody “Venetian” heterogeneity and eidophor. These are united rather purposefully catachrestically, almost to the point of being strained. Karsten Harries has written, “ Catachresis must help where established usage fails.”11 The painter’s work is sensual, yet not truly expressionist, erudite yet anti-academicist. Bullock’s paintings come alive through the vicissitudes of making—what James Elkins describes in his book What Painting Is as “ ‘pushing paint,’ breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing.”12 Important to understanding this work is the question another historian, Yves-Alain Bois (paraphrasing Hubert Damisch), has so pointedly

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asked, “What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?”13 As certain contemporary, Postmodernist art has illustrated, art which refuses its various historical pasts and ignores the present as embodied in its own making seems mired in an delusorily timeless “now,” as if it cannot reach to the future. That is, art-out-of-time is condemned to be academicist and mannered. In opposition to this, Bullock’s work lives in an expanded and positive sense of time, which is his Bloomian agon. Bullock struggles with current conceptions by reaching back to a now commonly deprecated virtuosic sensuality, one which, furthermore, he displays in allusions ranging from de Kooning through Manet back to Titian. The Postmodernist twist lies in his dissonant merger of these citations with direct, indexical mark-making. He thus proves his art to be both more historically aware and yet more candidly personal than his contemporaries’ works. It becomes metaleptical in several fashions: through the paradoxical transgression of levels of depiction, by becoming a record of a series of “nows,” and by troping on his forerunner’s trope of the brushstroke. Bullock has been placed among the group of so-called “Conceptual Abstract Painters.” This term became fairly common after an important exhibition with a similar title in 2012 in New York, although the term had been used sporadically before that.14 It has been applied to that group of artists who in a post-endgame creative endeavour, produce paintings which hover between abstraction and representation; manipulate both “high” culture and popular imagery; acknowledge art’s past, yet reject reductivism; their works stem from certain conceptual thought processes, but are clearly handmade. Practitioners include artists Jonathan Lasker, David Reed, David Diao, and Julie Mehretu. This term is clumsy and insufficient, but serves to connect Bullock to a larger movement. In mentioning Renaissance Venice, by no means do I wish to suggest that Bullock is “quoting the Venetian,” even in the rich, complimentary sense Mieke Bal deploys a similar insight in her wonderful book Quoting Caravaggio. I do wish to flirt with a Balian sense of entanglement as a form of art analysis.15 To understand Bullock’s work one must grasp each painting not as a single condensed and reduced moment, but as a map of combinations of ribbon-like strokes built of allusions, memories, ruminations, and struggles. The Venetians’ great contribution to art was the integration of line and color in the painterly stroke, thus fusing disegno and colore. Bullock is pursuing a similar integration on a contemporary level. Analyzing how this is achieved through his metaphor(m) is what makes his work interesting for this book. Bullock’s most dynamic conception is his use of “heterogeneity,” a word he uses frequently. Let us approach this key element of his painting in a roundabout

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manner. Postmodernism has been highly theoretical in an extremely ideological fashion. Ideology deprives any phenomenon of its heterogeneity. It generally presumes only something very abridged. Kim Atkins has written that Ricoeur is the opposite of such one-dimensionality, by being heterogeneous. He weaves together heterogeneous concepts and discourses to form a composite discourse in which new meanings are created without diminishing the specificity and difference of the constitutive terms . . . Besides the metaphysical complexity and heterogeneity of the human situation, one of Ricoeur’s deepest concerns is the tentative, even fragile status of the coherence of a life.16

This word heterogeneity has its own past. It is often closely associated with the nineteenth-century evolution-theorist and Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. He thought both nature and society, through evolution, were in a continuous “change from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity to a state of relatively definite, coherent, heterogeneity.”17 Spencer believed that there was a cultural process wherein time would metamorphose something strictly utilitarian into something beautiful. Bullock seems to be taking Spencer at his word, even borrowing his word. In actuality, Bullock seized the word “heterogeneity” on his own, with no thought of Spencer, and made of it a tool to assault the very division Spencer wishes to reify. While not dealing with the “abject” as such, except in direct combination with its contrary “beauty,” Bullock’s notion of “heterogeneity” has more in common with Julia Kristeva’s definition of abjection than Spencer’s definition of heterogeneity. In Bullock’s idea we witness a dream of transgression through manifold variety. Bullock’s conception is closely allied with the word heterodox: to depart from or oppose standard doctrines, even leaning toward heresy. Other contemporary artists are at work on this problem as well. Gerhard Richter’s painting manifests to some critics a perplexing heterogeneity, yet in style-leap to style-leap from series to series, much like a doubting Picasso. Nevertheless, within each body of work, an identifiable, even marketable, style still prevails. (However, please note that style is not identical with metaphor(m). Thus an artist may change styles, but generally not their central trope.) Bullock attempts to push this approach to within the boundaries of each stroke itself. While telescoping formal elements, Bullock is also pressing them outward in the range of their allusiveness. Bullock’s thought is rather more Emersonian and Whitmanesque than Joycean: it reflects the heterogeneity of world populations, the rich diversity and clash of cultures and imaginations that conjoin to form our increasingly mongrel civilizations, a mélange which

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politicians frequently attempt to disguise with jingoism, or divide to exploit. The poet Walt Whitman wrote at the close of Leaves of Grass, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then . . .. I contradict myself; / I am large . . . I contain multitudes.”18 Bullock manifests heterogeneity in his materials, handling, compositions, and supports—yet most of all in the bands of elements traveling through each painting which are a strange hybrid of accumulation, montage, and brushstroke. At first glance, one of his pieces might even appear to be a wild grab bag of painterly events, of visual information. However, all details are subsumed within an atmospheric space which is predominantly white, like a luminous deep sky too bright to allow quick impressions of color. The artist achieves this effect through numerous layers of overpainting, with oil glazes, alkyd transparencies, encaustic scumblings, and nebulous clouds of spray. Within this mist float approximately four or five major visual incidents, creating a partially veiled optical net. Nevertheless, surprises pop forth now and again, such as hard-edged forms, vivid colors, or even completely naturalistic images such as, in one case, an almost photographically rendered grey skull, or a child and a tree in The Donor/der Spender.19 The longer one contemplates a Bullock painting, the more complicated and richer it becomes. The hazy atmosphere slowly reveals an unanticipated large variety of hues. Forms appear ever crisper. Of central importance are Bullock’s ribbons and nodules of form, which take the place of more traditional, large paint-strokes. These grow into variformed paths, leading one’s eyes across the surface in a range of journeys. In this, he offers a new answer to the important question of where a rectangular image can go after Jackson Pollock’s “over-all” compositional breakthrough or Willem de Kooning’s loadedpaint-stroke interpretations of the same. That is, where two-dimensional composition can go without resorting to a retreat to jejune relational balance, and without avoiding the conflict through appropriation or other evasion. Bullock’s heterogeneity appears as well in his wide range and mixture of painting mediums and supports. In the work Seinpost, what at first appears to be luminous oil on some strange support turns out to be oil, encaustic, Venetian turpentine, enamel spray, acrylic spray, neon paint, and alkyd on linen. Bullock’s unusual support-surface materials have included silk, milky polystyrene, and translucent, buttery fiberglass. He is even able to make ordinary linen seem unexpected. This is reminiscent of the contemporary German painter Sigmar Polke, who created pieces on various common fabrics—sheets, towels, or the like. This is a light-hearted play with the self-importance of the support in “fine art canvases.” Polke’s supports are metonymically derived from canvas—both are after all only different types of good cloth. Bullock makes metaphors out of

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Figure 7.4 Leonard Bullock, Seinpost, 2001-2002, oil, encaustic, and spray on linen, 63 × 58 cm (for color see ) © 2001 Leonard Bullock.

purely factual effects of odd or “new” materials, referring playfully and synecdochically to elements of traditional, painterly space creation. He achieves a unity of real and illusory space. The creamy, translucent polystyrene paintings, for example, sport shallow Modernist space next to sections of built-up, Pollockinspired strata of layered paint. The back of the polystyrene is painted on as well, emphasizing the real spatial difference between front and back due to the thickness of the material. This simultaneously suggests a vast, atmospheric, virtual depth because of the fogginess of the translucent plastic. Bullock thereby also integrates the wall behind the work, allowing it to show through in spots,

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revealing cast shadows from the brushwork. Qualities of light, handling, and material establish a blend of real and illusionary spaces, at once deeply atmospheric and assertively flat. What, then, ties his work together? The answer is situated in one simple yet effective discovery, which Bullock christens with his self-invented appellation, the eidophor. In this, together with his heterogeneity, lies his central visual trope, his metaphor(m). Bullock manifests this idea most clearly in the quirky, complex nodules of activity which are scattered over each work. These passages are “accretions of eidetic memory” (to use the artist’s own words), coupled with catachrestic portmanteaus of visual observations.20 They form areas of concentration which just might be a possible replacement for the “missing” human figure Frank Stella so perspicaciously has wished for in abstraction.21 Some painters use bold, condensed iconic motifs for this purpose. Bullock achieves this similarly but more messily, particularly in the layering and melting of elements of mark-making into capricious trails which seemingly signify adventures. While the notion of eidophor may be applied to the entire surface of one of Bullock’s paintings, it is most pivotally present in these passages uniting the haphazard with the emblematic in this expanded conception of the brushstroke. Therefore, we can willfully delimit the term eidophor to refer solely to these elements. Whereas painters such as de Kooning or the French Tachists created compositional movement through swooping single strokes of paint, Bullock builds strings of compilations of effects, effectively assembling an expanded substitute for the single virtuosic stroke. These tropaically become paths of disparate experiences, which is significant for his central visual trope. In the painting Seinpost, we can see three primary eidophoric configurations. Top center is a collision of a mottled, red-outlined conduit shape with a compact, flame-like green-blue splotch. Traveling obliquely across the lower right quadrant of the work is an intricate, linear conglomerate. From lower left to upper right, this diagonal consists of: a scumbled and glazed neon-orange smudge, reminiscent of Rembrandt; a sumptuous magenta see-through curlicue; a driedblood-colored version of the same, ambling up next to a partially removed marine blue S-swirl; finally capped with a Velázquez-like loaded brushstroke, which agglomerates all the preceding forms and colors in itself. A translucent cyan blue brushstroke from the first eidophor leads the eye to the third, in the lower left. This is a glowing area of powder blue on which a small, almost upright, fluorescent orange stroke issues a halo of deep violet and tumbles over what appears to be a piece of applied manila masking tape. Appearances can be deceiving. This “tape” is a carefully applied, raised area of oil paint—a bas-relief

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trompe-l’œil. These three eidophors float in the surrounding creamy white field, which is itself marked by comb-scrapped ridges revealing a wide variety of underpainted hues. The configurations collapse connotations of figures with evocations of their movements and momentary events affecting them. Most of all, they appear to encourage quasi-sequential readings, each area narratively following the other, forming bands of traversed ground. They seem sensuous, physical, voluptuous, yet somehow amusing. The artist uses witty visual foils to remind us of this. In one painting, a “racing stripe” similar to that on an automobile is scratched through an expressive, Manet-like brushstroke, making it even faster. “Shoddy chic” is parodied in such illusions as that of the applied “tape.” There are small, almost invisible lines of wavering text in that now disappearing technology of pressed-on lettering called Letraset or Presstype. These phrases proclaim philosophical and personal invectives: text as textural draughtsmanship. Bullock can combine visceral sensibility with a self-irony that is not cynical. They form meandering sentences, reminding the viewer of the metaphor of streets or paths, much like his semi-sequential eidophor ribbons. While contemplating Bullock’s coinage, I discovered that the term eidophor had been used once before, unbeknownst to the painter. A patent was applied for in 1939 by Fritz Fischer for a light-modulation-based TV image projector. For his machine, Fischer also coined the name Eidophor, “from two Greek words meaning Image Bearer.” Although this name for such a device was better than those available today (such as television, Fernseher, video projector, etc.), it has disappeared from use in production.22 For the painter, it is a cross between metaphor and eido. The term metaphor is as a union of meta-, meaning “over, trans, beyond”—or through analogy in nonce coinage, meaning “transcending or sub/self-referential,” such as metacriticism, with -phor from pherein, meaning “to carry or bear.” Thus, metaphor is an implied analogy in which one thing is imaginatively compared to another, where qualities are “carried over.” His second root word is the Greek eiådov which in its Latin form becomes eidos. This term means form, figure, or shape, that is, the external or outward appearance of something. It becomes incredibly rich in extended application and usage. Euripides, the tragedian of classical Athens, has a character originally named this in his play Helen.23 In the King James version of the Bible, it is translated into English by several words, including appearance, fashion, shape, and sight. One of the most famous instances of its use is in Luke 3:22. “And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape (eidos) like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said,

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‘Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.’ ” This instance bears a complex of meanings: “in the form of,” “the appearance of,” “in one’s sight as,” or “in the fashion of ” a dove. The combinatory form of this word is eido, which is a treasure house of wonderful combinations of the ideas “to see,” “to understand” and “to know.” Again, in the Bible it is translated by a variety of terms, my favorite being “to behold.” Much of Bullock’s painting has a visual equivalent to the proclamation “behold!”: “Behold and follow the divergent paths I have taken.” The most famous use of the word eidos which does not apply to Bullock’s work is that in Plato. For this philosopher, material forms are imperfect realizations of ideal forms, which are the true realities. Bullock’s thought is completely opposite. Expansion, multiplicity, and flux become central. Sundry artists, painters as well as artists of other media, are pressing in similar directions. The collagist, printmaker, and painter Tony Fitzpatrick is heterogenous almost to point of having a medieval horror vacui. However, his is not fear of emptiness, but rather an utter joy in filling the space of a work with complex heterogenous detailing. Although his art is representational, not abstract as most of Bullock’s is, they share an eddying opulence. Fitzpatrick’s pieces usually feature one large, dominant, central figure, which may be a bird, dog, building, Chicago denizen, or imaginary, surrealist combinations of those and more. The artist, who is also a successful poet, playwright, and actor, fills his compositions, like his life, with evocative visual adventures and images around the iconic center. He energetically creates optical tropes celebrating the tenacity of the never-truly down-and-out. To name two others close to Bullock’s heterogenous approach: Jonathan Lasker proves art’s histories to be plural and David Reed is able to locate massmedia references embedded in paint. In many ways Bullock is a close fellowtraveller of Reed’s, but far more painterly. Granted, Bullock is more Action Painter than Pop Art influenced, but his work has a popular cultural feel, only more solidly rooted, like Jazz. And the precursor figurehead to both battle and embrace at this moment in visual culture for many artists is still a triumvirate of Action Painting, Dada, and Pop—with perhaps a sidelong squint at Minimalism, though generally that is in more academicist art. Bullock is openly working through his own personal agon with past art practices, and attempting to persuade the future. Bullock has often repeated a favorite de Kooning quotation, “Style is fraud.”24 In Bullock’s art, style is expansive, exclusivity is deception. The aspect of form Bullock utilizes in his metaphor(m) is the brushstroke. Therein he returns us to the discussion of Vincent van Gogh presented earlier in this book, yet Bullock’s interpretation of this element is utterly unlike van Gogh’s. Bullock breaks the unity of the stroke into an assemblage of parts and then

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blends them with the likeness of an ever-changing path in an iconic imagemapping. This allows him access to his chief foundational metaphor, one of the most common and vital in our culture: “LIFE IS A JOURNEY.” This is sometimes seen as a correlate of “LONGTERM PURPOSEFUL CHANGE IS A JOURNEY,” which is particularly close to Bullock’s notion, as he emphasizes the transformations from one subsection to the next within each painterly trail. Furthermore, a subordinate instance of this trope is important in Bullock’s reasoning: “Stages of life are routes you have to travel on.” A related metaphor is “PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITIES ARE JOURNEYS.” The “purposeful activity” clearly being painting, as the practice of art-making is conflated with the endeavor of leading his life for Bullock, as well as for most artists. Important to the construction of his bands of painterly activity is the trope “CHANGE OF STATE IS CHANGE OF DIRECTION,” for Bullock’s eidophor-routes consist of sequences of course modifications, some of which can be quite jarring. These clearly serve as metaphors for the shifting circumstances and predicaments of life. The alterations can be seen as progress, perhaps growth in self-knowledge (because “DISPARITY IS CHANGE,” “CHANGE IS MOTION,” and “THE PROGRESS OF EXTERNAL EVENTS IS FORWARD MOTION”). His mapping proceeds as follows. “Life is painting” and “painting is the brushstroke,” both synecdoches. Each brushstroke itself becomes a compendium of personal variations and historically associative ones, thus a metalepsis. This is mapped onto the image-schema of the path, yet a variegated one with many stops and alterations, false starts, restarts, and changes of surface. This is a seemingly slight, yet highly original, variation on the image of the “road of life” achieved by both the elaboration and extension of the cultural mainstay, “LIFE IS A JOURNEY.” This yields Bullock’s metaphor(m): “The brushstroke is a variegated path.” The cognitive blending diagram of Bullock’s metaphor(m) can thus be drawn as follows: Bullock’s works concretize this central visual trope into a collection of painterly expressions of quandaries with which visual metaphor, and metaphor(m) in particular, is concerned: How do we know and express anything within a physical artistic form? How do we impel brute reality to manifest our conceptual desires? Antithetically merged with these is the further epistemological question: How does interaction with material form allow us to discover our visions, and can we, through art, know at all? He addresses how our lives are informed by the historic past (his haptic allusions to art history), our own pasts (the changes in the strokes), how we have tranquil, stirring, and more thorny

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Figure 7.5 The Diagram of Leonard Bullock’s Metaphor(m). © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

experiences (the various subsections and surface treatments)—and how a large number of such collections of experience begin to map our life as a whole. In this chapter, close appraisals of works of art by Charles Boetschi and Leonard Bullock (as well as the various other artists mentioned more parenthetically) display the significance of dissecting realized visual metaphor as a part of philosophical criticism. This assists us in carefully examining and explaining the art of our day through appreciating the complex, sophisticated, and creative deliberation contemporary artists put into their use of embodied, optical tropes.

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Figure 8.1 Chapter 8: Art History Timelines are Visual Metaphors ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl. 148

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A metaphoric model of timelines In addition to studying the visual metaphors of various contemporary artists and artworks, a further question arises: how could the notion of embodied visual trope also be employed to consider broader questions in contemporary art? In this chapter, we consider one of these possibilities and address the subject of what a model of art history itself could look like if we would treat the standard timeline as a tropaic artwork of sorts, and attempt to create a new one which would embody a central visual trope incorporating a contemporary conception of history while retaining some form of heuristic or illustrational use as a learning device: in short, a model suitable for contemporary visual artists. The hubris of challenging traditional and current models of art history and endeavoring to construct a new one is highly agonistic. While this is once again Harold Bloomian, it is certainly not Oedipal, and most of all not a burden of the past in the fashion suggested by Walter Jackson Bate.1 My aim is most notably not to utterly dismiss having any timeline, as some have done, and as discussed below, but to design a new image of one, diagrammatically. (Noted art historian James Elkins once inscribed a book dedication to me, “ To a fellow compulsive diagrammer.”)2 Utterly abandoning all such visualizations is, in truth, impossible anyway. If we attempt to iconoclastically do that and exist with none, we simply will have one clandestinely. Due to our human need to picture thought, one mental image will still be influential on us, just an unacknowledged or even repressed one. Therefore, it is best to bring the issue out into the open, critique what bothers us in existing ones, and then try to create a new one. In a dialogical fashion, this is answering back to the calls of the models of art history now in use, trying to improve upon them by shaping a new and better visual trope for understanding the discipline. As I am acting as some sort of merged art historian, philosopher and artist in this chapter, there will be more first-person voice. This is also a part of this chapter’s conceit, which is that of an internal debate amalgamated with a 149

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slide lecture. This chapter is a meta-model, a demonstration of thinking through and arriving at a new visually metaphoric thought-model by agonistically arguing with existing ones under the light of analytic philosophy, under which I, perhaps uncommonly, include cognitive metaphor theory. I tested this exemplar many times while conceiving of it, including in teaching art history classes, in my “Dr Great Art” performance-lectures, and in a presentation of the idea at the annual conference of the CAA (the College Art Association, the US national art historians’ organization) in Chicago in a session titled “Comics in Art History” organized by art historian, professor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, Patricia Mainardi and artist and art historian of Rococo and the art of comics, Andrei Molotiu.3 Thus, this chapter is metaphorically an intertwining of presentation, discussion, and internal dialogue which is how it actually came into being.

Models are not master narratives Master narratives are all-enveloping stories, usually single strand or monogenic as discussed in Chapter 4, which, in a rather straightforward (appearing) fashion, try to relate a series of events that offer a comprehensive explanation of historical or philosophical events or knowledge. A master narrative is a grand story that “masters,” dominates, other stories, generally by ignoring them. The basic notion was seemingly first suggested, as we now use it, by Jean-François Lyotard in 1979.4 Explaining all the aspects of the problems and abuses resulting from master narratives, or “dominant discourses” as they have also been termed, has been much of the livelihood of Postmodernist critics. In short, master narratives habitually delimit thought, sustain oppressive systems, and purport to be the truth, allowing no exceptions. On the other hand, the stringent critique of master narratives has sometimes led the less inventive to fall into simple nihilism. In the name of “decentering the discourse” or the like, some art historians, for example, do nothing innovative, allowing their fear of potential incorrectness to lead them into an unproductive scenario, a decent into a consensus-correct, fruitless morass of avoidance. Yes, thank God, the wide acceptance of the Western canon as self-evidently universal (even in non-Western regions) is slowly in the process of ending; yet just when it should be significantly enlarged, and has begun to be so with the inclusion of women artists, it has in some hands instead become a shrunken paucity of visual-aids to solipsistic fear. Heuristically, such a vision of art history is unserviceable.

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Models are provisional representations of complex circumstances. Conceptual models are images of some complexity mocking-up real-world states of affairs in a fashion that helps us analyze them. A model at best is testable, open to questioning, and suggests new insights. A good one forms the foundation for discussions of the concepts involved. It is vital, when creating one, to incorporate into the model the observation that it is not the real world but merely a human construct to help us better understand real world experiences. The map is not the landscape, yet it can help us appreciate various aspects of the landscape as we walk through it. The best models are clearly open to critique and suggest their own fallibility, while still serving as significant instruments of thought. We all use models, whether consciously or not. Being conscious of them and attempting to metaphorically improve them could assist in stopping any slide into master narrative. Some examples of visual, conceptual models: imagining electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom as similar to planets orbiting a sun (the Bohr model, now known to be false, yet as-of-yet not adequately replaced in public imagination); flowcharts of boxes and arrows seen as representing actions in a series; structures such as groups, fields, or even the universes of set theory to visualize mathematical logic; and so on. Clearly, most models are metaphors or combinations of tropes, indeed visual ones, even in fields largely non-visual. Scientific, philosophical and theoretical models are all about discussion and include the expressed aim of improving each model continuously. In his essay “Let the Fresh Air In: Graduate Studies in the Humanities,” Ihab Hassan has made a good point about the place of theory in the study of literature in general, which holds for contemporary art and art history as well. Despite my objections and objurgations, I believe that theory has a place in the curriculum: a skeptical place. I mean that it must be approached with skepticism, and that it is itself a form of skepticism. Etymologically, theory derives from the Greek theoria, viewing or contemplation. But the intelligent eye also questions what it sees. At its best, then—as in the best of Derrida—theory is a mode of sustained interrogation. Interrogation does not mean deconstruction only; interrogation can proceed by models and metaphors, ways of probing reality by constructions of counter-reality. At its best, theory becomes a kind of quizzical poesis.5

What do we artists want our optical tropes to do for us? We want our visual metaphors to change the way we envision reality. Through such alteration, we want them to offer us understanding, to help us comprehend the world of our experience, and even, perhaps, to assist us in changing that world. This is a large

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demand, but we should face it in all its hubris, self-contradiction, impossibility, and wonder, and not evade it in cloying irony or other self-debasement. All the creative arts introduce new metaphorical concepts or surprising re-readings of older ones. Models are not necessarily master narratives when at their best—not in form, use, implication or application. Models are tools of and for thought, as described, with more than a dash of openness to interpretation and critique, and need not dictate understanding, just contribute to it. I believe I have discovered a useful visual metaphor(m) in the image of a braided rope: a simple, yet evocative image which allows one to illustrate art history as a developmental succession, yet avoid teleological inferences; to retain a core focus, yet eclipse the illusion of exclusivity; to clearly indicate that there is a wealth of art not being immediately presented in the standard survey, yet maintain a pragmatically serviceable picture. I began my considerations originally by searching for an adequate model of a timeline with which to teach the history of comics and sequential art. Thus in this chapter, I present and scrutinize the handful of models of both art history and comic history I located and identified as the most widespread ones, comparing and contrasting them, evaluating each for strengths and weaknesses. Some of these models are openly proclaimed by their advocates, some are unacknowledged, even unrecognized by their proponents, yet they ring true to actual use, as I assessed a wide variety of publications, panel discussions, teachers, and interviews. Finally, I present my own visual trope for the timeline and explain why I believe it is an improvement. Art history, like anything else, has its own history, as well as the history of teaching it. Art history has been practiced and taught as the scholarly study of works of art through their historical development and in their stylistic and geographic contexts. Until recently, this was accomplished primarily in three sub-disciplines. As the famed art historian Ernst Gombrich declared, “the field of art history [is] much like Caesar’s Gaul, divided in three parts inhabited by three different, though not necessarily hostile tribes: (i) the connoisseurs, (ii) the critics, and (iii) the academic art historians.”6 This has dramatically changed recently: connoisseurs are, regrettably, almost gone; critics are sliding steadily farther and farther down the slope into insignificance. Historians remain, yet are under the pressure of several new cohorts or competitors: art theorists, curators, and increasingly creative philosophers of art. (It is notable that no one seems to mention collectors or artists in discussions of artworld power, two glaring omissions, but that is another story.) The relationships among this crew can be more strained than Gombrich observed in his day, and have affected the

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conceptions and thus the teaching of art history. Instructors of art history have increasingly found arguments for why the presentation of the small standard canon is inadequate—quite rightly, when one contemplates the sexism, racism, classism, geographical chauvinism, even ageism in it. Much of art history had unfortunately become limited to discussions of the traditional, overly narrow canon.Yet, almost worse, is the approach of some contemporary Poststructuralistinfluenced teaching, wherein abstract conceptualization about so-called conditions for judgment are all that is instructed, treating artworks as mere stand-ins for particular ideologies. The problems with the first option are obvious and have been widely criticized. The second, however, is no better; it is a pathological, symptomatic vision of art. The avoidance of any model is pernicious; it is an active impediment above all for beginning students when learning about and appreciating art. Erwin Schrödinger insightfully demanded that we need mental pictures, not just abstract mathematical formulas, to truly grasp, not just know, physics.7 Equally, we need visual, conceptual depictions of models, to grasp art and art history, not solely theorized doubt. How are we to teach art history, avoiding both the Scylla and Charybdis mentioned? As both an instructor of art history and a practicing artist, I began struggling with this, while simultaneously contemplating additional opportunities I had to teach the history of comics. Comics, with their creatively “impurist” blending of diverse traits and very short yet multifarious history, led me to a new visualization of art history: one with convolution, expansiveness, and development. I had already created my own versions of the Scylla, the “standard” survey timeline, more-or-less, with rather superficial and exaggeratedly simple dating, all for the introductory students. I drew by hand the reference images for each epoch, period or movement. This originated from the fact that the first three such lists I made (an overview from Prehistory through Postmodern, an outline of just Modernism movements and one of Postmodernism) were at first artworks by me for a one-person exhibition in Switzerland. These three sheets can be viewed online in English and German. I posted them there by request for the use of other art historians, artists, and students. (The link is )8 I then used them with the students and they proved to be more popular than the original versions I had made which bore actual photos of the art objects, ones which they could view in their texts anyway. My students expressed to me that these images made the references more personal, less authoritarian in feel, and insinuated they could see them in their own way too. As part of instruction, I therefore had the art academy students produce their own timelines containing

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their own drawings of exemplary artworks, using my versions as a springboard. These are, of course, variations on the standard Eurocentric master narrative, or what I call “the customary core-strand timeline;” the reason for this phrase will become clearer below. This, I and my students openly criticized within my classes almost immediately upon presentation, through discussion of the blatant exaggerations in the timelines (including the dating which mixes peaks of public interest in some instances with beginnings of critical attention in others), and through additional timelines featuring parts of what is missing. The critiques are then my potential Charybdis. These critical presentations and discussions inspired my next artworks, which also became teaching aids. One of the main supplementary ones features the same linear flow-of-time, however with all of the examples being only art by women, from prehistory through now. I drew that and a similar one as prints for and exhibition, as well as teaching. The second one is a variation on the standard art history narrative, as described. Each are rough grids of around 65 images each (I continue to expand them regularly). They are to be viewed top left to bottom right, yet bear no text whatsoever, making them purely pictorial timelines. These are also online, so that they may be widely viewed and used. (The link for those is .)9 I am in the midst of finishing a couple more such critical “additives” to the timeline: one of workingclass artists, another focusing on art of the African continent.

A plurogenic view of art history While I still find these “crash course” timelines useful as heuristic oversimplifications and students enjoy having them as starting points, I wanted a more truthful overall timeline image to refer to simultaneously while also looking at those timelines just described: one with a better visual trope. I particularly desired one critiquing the whole hypothesis of a naïve, singlestranded procession. I first drew a large timeline about 3.5 meters long and hung it on the wall, next to where I had printouts of the artwork-timelines, and near the screen area where the images are projected during class or my performancelectures. I wanted it for casual reference whenever anyone desired. A rather standard one, it ran left to right, along a straight line, travelling through all the major epochs, periods, and movements, with additions. It was much like those seen in well-known art history textbooks, but with less hard-and-fast edges to periods and epochs. I added political and other cultural events above the time

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line to give a certain amount of context. However, whenever I looked at it, the basic image of a straight line disturbed me. It was not tropaically evocative in any way of how I saw history. It did not display a creative visual metaphor(m). Searching to remedy this, I began sketching various images as potential timeline substitutes, including doing so with students and other audiences, inspired by James Elkins’s first chapter in his book Stories of Art.10 Working with others concocting our own page-filling images was an enlightening experience and I can recommend it. Nonetheless, it offered no new form useful for general instruction. In particular, I wanted to address an existing instructional condition which I find notably harmful. In various schools of which I am aware, there is a tendency to teach no timeline whatsoever due to the aforementioned postmodern fear of the limitations of the canon. Oppositely, several art historians I know teach only two or three artists in a year-long Introduction to Art History class; they delve into these few in depth, which purportedly gives students tools for dealing with all of art history. I find that preposterous. Finally, certain others teach thematically—e.g., a survey of how differing artists dealt with fire, or the like, over the run of history. This is too much like superficial art appreciation classes and far too vapid. Weighing heavily on my mind was the fact that practicing artists with completed degrees, who were not my students had begun at that time approaching me, requesting that I conduct some sort of remedial continuing education class in general art history for them. The word had initially spread that I would be right for this, after I had jokingly summarized the survey in several panel discussions, to alleviate fears that it was unlearnable. They were hungry for some sort of skeleton on which to base their own personal study of art history, a traditional desire perhaps, yet also paedagogically a proven one. Most importantly, the artists and students with whom I spoke were also open to critical questioning of that very timeline. The two desires are not mutually exclusive; in fact, I would assert that one requires the former to conduct the latter. I created a purposefully entertaining, yet completely straightforward, hour-and-a-half-long lecture wherein I explain the entire history of art from Prehistoric times through Postmodernism, with several divergences from the standard model. By its mere speed alone, it becomes amusing, yet viewers have told me that it is also edifying. Titled “A Blitz Crash Course in Art History,” it is somewhere between lecture and performance art. I have done it now in both English and German rather frequently. I further developed it into the year-long and two-year-long courses I taught at the Kunstschule in Liechtenstein and the Höhere Fachschule in St. Gallen, Switzerland. This idea has now been expanded into an entire continuing

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body of artwork, with multiple themes and problems in art history, which I call “Dr Great Art Performance-Lectures.” In them I take viewers inside visual art and art history, hopefully entertainingly, yet educationally and aesthetically. I sometimes analyze the reasons why a single work of art is remarkable, yet more often I go through entire eras, or indeed through the entirety of art history, look at specific themes through the lens of art history, or present alternative timelines. This includes teaching yet criticizing standard views of art history as described. The lectures generally take place with hand-painted background projection screens and even in my room-filling painting-installations.11 Yet, I had still not solved my self-posed problem of how to present a concise, understandable visually metaphoric image of the entire history of art which also clearly exhibited the accurate, to my mind, criticisms of the standard ones. At the same time as I was struggling with this problem, I was offered the opportunity to teach classes in comics and sequential art. I wished to begin the courses with a short overview of the history of that artistic form. My musings on how to present the history of comics finally showed me the way to a new image of the entire art history timeline. Before I review various conceptions of the timeline and reveal my own, let me be a bit coquettish with the attention of readers. What are the apparent differences between the history of fine art and the history of comic (or sequential) art? First, almost the entire history of comics occurs in what is known in the culture-atlarge as Modernism, the most recent part in Postmodernism. Modernism in visual art began approximately in the late 1840s; comics, as we know them, began in the 1830s. In the world of fans of comics there is an unfortunate abridgment of this history into the Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, and the fully misnamed “Modern Age,” meaning comics from the mid-1980s until the present day, as CGC (Certified Guaranty Company), the commercial comic grading company, and the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide maintain.12 This last designation is nonsensical and separates comics’ terminology naively from the rest of culture. Even in stylistic terms alone, The Watchmen comic,13 Maus,14 and Andrei Molotiu’s Abstract Comics: The Anthology15 are clearly “after Modernism,” thus postmodern. (As a reminder, in this book I am differentiating between postmodern and Postmodern(ism). The time we are in now is after the modern thus postmodern. The stylistic movement which accentuates certain strategies such as irony, appropriation, and the overestimation of language is capitalized Postmodern.) Second, comics have a comparatively clear beginning with Rodolphe Toepffer and his stories such as the Histoire de M. Jabot created and published between 1831 and 1846.16 The history of what we now call fine art, in

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comparison, begins somewhere in the mists of prehistory as a mix of art, handicraft, religion, and magic, perhaps as long ago as 100,000 bce .17 Third, the history of comics is exceedingly “compressed.” It passes through phases fairly analogous to the epochs of fine art, yet within only about 110 years total: from simple, “primitive” beginnings; through foundational, illustrational handicraft; traditionalist sophistication; various experimental stages; unique Renaissances; avant-garde expansion; through to Postmodernism. Fourth, and most edifying, comics have always contained a considerable and obvious breadth. A wide variety of intertwined genres and approaches exist simultaneously, contrasting with, complementing, and influencing one another. One example would be the 1960s, with its barrage of mainstream superheroes, humorous cartoon animals, mystery comics, war stories, science fiction, horror comics, parodies, film adaptations, underground comix, pornography, religious tracts, and much more. All of these characteristics have much to teach us about the true nature of art history, but chiefly the last-named trait of plurality.

Timelines Let us now take a short look at the eight prominent visions of the timeline I find most dominant, within fine art history. I have drawn diagrams of them and describe them, each in turn, largely disapprovingly. This is followed by a parallel, corresponding series of comics history timelines. I also critique them, highlighting the problems with each. Finally, I present my own experimental diagram of the history of fine art (and comics). Figure 8.2 is an image of all the eight historically predominant timeline models in the instruction of art history, as I see them. Let us progress through this figure, one timeline at a time.

The standard art history timeline According to customary presentation, art fades into existence in history, its origin uncertain, treks on, and does not end: the well-established notion of a general march of history. This is tolerable, simply not evocative nor truthful enough. It does not reflect the multifariousness of actual history, in fact, it suggests exactly the opposite: a tidy, hierarchically clear, perhaps even evolutionary chain of events. I call this the standard timeline, as in my drawn image at the top of Figure 8.2.

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Figure 8.2 Art History Timeline Models. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

Vasari’s timeline model Giorgio Vasari was the Mannerist painter and architect whose book The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (in the original Italian, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori) started art history.18 The Vite, as it is nicknamed among art historians, is spotty, anecdotal, full of rumors, conjecture, folk etymology of names, incorrect “facts”—and is downright entertaining. Vasari believes, as many people of his time did, that the arts began in the mists of history, steadily improved, reaching a pinnacle in Ancient Greece, then declined, only to reach a new and higher peak in the Renaissance. What happens after that is not entirely clear in Vasari’s theory. It appears that he believed art could, at best, stay at this level of achievement. This was to be accomplished by emulating the great geniuses of the Renaissance, especially Michelangelo. His writing concentrates on the individual lives of those artists he chooses to discuss; at points, it reads like a scattershot soap opera. I

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thus envision his timeline as a simple line, with two crests, the first Ancient Greece and Rome, the second, the Renaissance, the one he minutely describes. In the second image in Figure 8.2, I therefore drew a magnifying glass with enlarged points, the dots representing the artists in his Vite. If you yourself are not a Renaissance or Mannerist artist or historian, this timeline model is useless.

The Hegelian timeline model Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s conception of history is the quintessence of the teleological philosophies of history and began the tendency in art toward eschatology in that field, so common elsewhere in our culture. This philosopher argued that history is a constant process of dialectic clash and that it progresses through this. I agree with the “clash” assertion, and guardedly grant the idea of development, albeit not one that I would call progress. Hegel’s teleology is passively, perhaps even innocently, accepted by many nowadays. Outside art history, a teleological view of political history was recently actively taken up anew by Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man.19 According to Hegel, “Art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest possibilities, a thing of the past.”20 He may be overinterpreted, and was himself rather vague about what exactly he felt about art from his own time, but he has long been seen as believing that true beauty and perfection in art ended in ancient Greece. Thus, several of my students came up with the image of the famous Greek Discobolus sculpture holding back any further advance in a straight timeline for the third image in Figure 8.2.21 Hegel’s idea is primarily based in two teleological fallacies: first, he is attributing agency and a goal to the flow of time and, second, even if there were a goal, it would not necessarily be perfection, or even perfection according to a Greek understanding of it.

Wölfflin’s timeline model Heinrich Wölfflin in 1915 in Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (“Principles of Art History”), formulated five pairs of opposed or contrary precepts in the form and style of art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which demonstrated a shift in the nature of artistic vision between the two periods.22 This has been expanded, on occasion, by other historians into a permanent state of shifting

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swings of the pendulum, or waves of ebb and flow.23 The most famous of these, and for many years the dominant philosophy of Modernist art history’s timeline, was Clement Greenberg’s teleological vision of the progress of art through back-and-forth discoveries of types of “significant form,” a term he borrowed (and altered somewhat) from Clive Bell. Greenberg’s theory is Hegelian in that he believes in evolution and improvement in art, yet it is also a very Oedipal version of Wölfflin’s pendulum: linear art in one period, oppositional painterliness the next, etc.24 Therefore, the fourth image in Figure 8.2 is of alternating bands, one solid for classical styles, the other filled loosely representing painterly ones. This model is clearly too limited. Such agonistic, dialectical struggle does occur, but it is neither the only option nor the only struggle. Art sometimes advances through homage or through wholly new pressures and skirmishes. Moreover, history appears to have stronger and weaker periods, “peaks and valleys,” not just equally important alternating ones. It needs to be viewed as far more than one set of contrasting-yet-parallel waves, at the very least.

Gombrich’s timeline model Ernst Gombrich offers a timeline highly similar to Hegel’s, but ending with Realism, rather than the Antique. For him, a motivation toward illusionism is the explanation of all of art history. Following Arthur C. Danto’s criticism, we can see that Gombrich fails to account for the evolution of Modernist and contemporary art away from standard representational naturalism.25 Accordingly, Gombrich’s theory is unable to encompass Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, in fact almost all artists after about 1845. In his wonderfully written, but thus inadequate, book The Story of Art, Gombrich does seem to flounder after Courbet.26 Therefore, in the fifth image from Figure 8.2, I have drawn Gombrich’s timeline quite like the illustration of Hegel’s, but being called to a stop by the figure of Courbet himself from his painting Bonjour Monsieur Courbet.27 Criticisms can be made of Gombrich’s eschatological and teleological timeline comparable to those discussed concerning Hegel’s, thus we need not reiterate them.

Danto’s timeline model Arthur C. Danto’s theory of art history is probably the most widely accepted at this moment, although he has been simplistically misinterpreted by much of the

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artworld. In the chapter titled “The End of Art” in his book The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, Danto clearly describes the end of art history, rather than of art itself: “When one direction is as good as another.”28 According to this model, linear progress existed in art history up until the found object, or foundobject-like art. Danto thanks Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes for his insight: an art object that is indiscernible from a real non-art object.29 Consequently, I drew the sixth image in Figure 8.2 as a standard timeline ending with an appropriately Pop-Art-like explosion containing a Brillo box. According to Danto, after the end of this linear progress, anything goes. Art has become its own philosophy and progress has disappeared. Pluralism reigns. There is much to discuss here, but I will limit myself to my own re-historization of pluralism and indeed progress itself as concepts, which again, I derive from the brief yet multifaceted history of comics. There might be a more dynamic version of pluralism, were we to follow Diana L. Eck of The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, who suggests that pluralism is or could be “not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity.”30 Unfortunately, I do not find this to be true of the current use of the idea in the artworld. Moreover, pluralism is not unique to our time. It has been used to describe many art periods in the past. Let me quickly historicize it: there are at least 7 periods of time in art history before our own which have been claimed to be pluralistic. Here are a few scholars who have described the pluralism of various periods of art history. Franklin Einspruch explained late Antique Greek art, Hellenism, in terms of pluralism.31 This is so pervasive a description of this period that it has been used the other way round. Tim Muldoon claims that “we are living amidst a kind of postmodern Hellenism” now.32 Francesca Tronchin, discussing Late Roman culture writes: “As the pluralism of Roman art itself rises in stock among scholars, however, such additive or syncretistic systems are now being paid fresh attention.”33 Susan von Daum Tholl in her entry on Carolingian art in the Encyclopedia of Medieval Germany states, “Historians of the period have repeatedly uncovered a pluralism.”34 Judith Steinhoff demonstrates that Siena’s Trecento, Mannerist, artistic culture of the mid- and late fourteenth century, was intentionally pluralistic in her book Sienese Painting After the Black Death: Artistic Pluralism, Politics, and the New Art Market.35 Franklin Toker claims that the period to most strongly evidence pluralism with “different and even opposing art movements was the eighteenth century . . . in France and Germany with the Rococo movement.”36 Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr, in his book Art in Crisis: The Lost Center, claims pluralism for all the architecture of Historicism, the period(s) which painters know better as Romanticism and Neo-Classicism.37

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Corinne Robins’s book The Pluralist Era; American Art, 1968–1981 claimed the exclusive application of the term Pluralist, as a movement, to the art of the 1970s and early 1980s, before the explosions of Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Conceptualism occurred. This was a common claim at that time, though Pluralism was actually often denigrated in order to promote either of the two named Neos. This was true until very recently, when the term Pluralism was shortly co-opted by the Neo-Conceptualists themselves.38 Jim Auer’s 1995 review “Seductive and Sensational: Art Museum Exhibit Embraces Pluralism” claims Pluralism for that time period of the 90s as well.39 To summarize, pluralism is nothing new. It has historically arisen within and/ or been used to describe the cultural experimentation and fumbling-about after any given “strong” period of art history and before the next one arose. At this art historical moment, the shadow of High Modernism hangs over us, much as that of the Renaissance did over the Mannerists. In place of Donatello, Leonardo, Raphael, etc.—and most of all Michelangelo—we have the School of Paris, the Action Painters, Pop Art, the Conceptualists, Minimalists, etc.—and most of all Duchamp; or, in comics, the shadow of Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, and Harvey Kurzman. Pluralism is a standard condition of transitional periods and is most often taken to be an end point, yet never was at any of these points in time. As New York painter David Reed once said, “We must get over trying to be the first or thinking we are the last. We are in the midst of a long line of artists. There are those before us and there will be many after us.”40 I have heard it contended that this time there has been a “sea change,” as the saying goes. This new period of Pluralism, has changed everything. This is both true and false. Every change in art history has made this claim, and in fact every change has transformed everything afterwards. That itself is, thus, not exclusively true. Most importantly, there will be other such “sea changes” in the future.

The Postmodernist timeline Post-Modernism was originally a hyphenated term when it appeared in wide use in English in the 1980s. The trendier it became, the less frequently the hyphen appeared, in emulation of French usage. The 80s conception of art history, particularly embraced by the Neo-Expressionists, but some Neo-Conceptualists and others as well, is one I refer to as the “shopping mall” theory of history, or simply Postmodern. The idea that all styles of the past are equal, equally dead,

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and free for reuse as one wishes: just pick and choose, as at a shopping center, or from a huge cabinet of curiosities. Spontaneous emotion and/or supposed irony were seen as enough to cover for rootless plagiarism. A student of mine, Carmen Diener, helped concretize my notion in this image of a timeline which is not a line at all, in the seventh image in Figure 8.2. Rather than a shopping mall, she wittily conceived of it as a visual metaphor of a chest of drawers with dusty old artifacts in no particular order, which are free to be sorted through and selected with no thought of history or content.

The non-hegemonic or symptomatic timeline model The last of the fine art history timelines and timeline substitutes we shall analyze is one I call the non-hegemonic or when less magnanimous, the symptomatic timeline. This might also be called an anti- or non-model, an anti-canon. Such an approach is often coupled with a Deconstructivist, quasi-Freudian perception of art as no more than a symptom of some social sickness, one in need of some all-knowing theorist’s interpretive cure. Understanding and knowledge are not being significantly enlarged in such a model. Instead, such partial history becomes an emaciated collection of illustrations for critical theory. This is why I drew the model as a mixed visual metaphor of a scattered array of fractured details, whose lack of heartbeats are being studied through a doctor’s stethoscope.

Table 8.1 Equivalences in Timelines, Fine Art and Comic Art History. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl FINE ART HISTORY

COMICS ART HISTORY

Standard Vasari Hegel Wölfflin Gombrich

Homogeneous Lump (No Standard) Erratic Originless Steady State Peaks and Valleys Superheroes Alternative Pluralistic Denouement Sectarian (separate from other history) Disputes about Canon Building Braid

Danto Postmodern Symptomatic Braid

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Comics timelines Let us now take a short look, analogous to the discussion above, at nine prominent timeline models for comics history. As a start, here is a table displaying how the timeline models for fine art and for comics parallel one another quite closely, surprisingly. Equivalences: Figure 8.3 is an image of drawings illustrating all the comic art timeline models. This is followed in the text by a short analysis of each of the visual metaphors. Dissecting them was the activity that helped guide me in attempting to form a new,

Figure 8.3 Comics History Timeline Models. © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

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visually tropaic model for art history as a whole, one informed by analytic philosophy, cognitive metaphor theory, and my idea of visual metaphor(m).

Homogenous lump timeline The standard timeline of comics is . . . none! In the world at large, particularly the popular press, comics is seen not as an artform (the ninth art, as the comics-friendly French have it), but rather as an undifferentiated mass, a pop fad. The form is seen as having only a rather mute presence and little to no development. Thus, I have envisioned this view at the top of Figure 8.3 as a picture of a homogeneous lump (with a suitable, cartoon-starburst background). What we can we learn from this is that art history, fine or comic, can indeed appear to many to be one large glob when the standard timeline is presented over-reverently and flatly, or when not taught at all as in the case of the symptomatic art history approach, or due to the lack of survey courses about history, whether comics or fine art. Unmistakably, it is of no use as a visually metaphoric model.

The erratic timeline Erratic is my term for the kind of spotty, limited sense of history which autodidactic artists (or those who studied under the Symptomatic approach) often reveal. They have knowledge of their one or two private influences and not much more. This generally limits them to being hacks in comics or followers of recent fashion in fine art.41 For instance, in many interviews with comic artists, one hears the same few names: Noel Sickles, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, among the older generations, later Jack Kirby, now “manga” (often without the speaker even having heard of Osamu Tezuka’s Mighty Atom/Astro Boy begun in 1951 or Machiko Hasegawa’s Sazae-san begun in 1946, the two bases for the manga style). These are all great, important, and indeed canonical, artists, but there are many more, and a familiarity with a wider range and the contexts from which they arose can result in far more individualistic art and history. Choosing your own influences in a knowledgeable way is a large part of independence. This is why in the second image in Figure 8.3, I have illustrated the model with a zig-zagged line featuring a prominent close-up of a few spots representing the

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limited pool of creators mentioned. What is the lesson to be considered for a general timeline model? Art history instruction must not be too prescriptively reverential, but also should not be left to the vagaries of what one accidentally stumbles over. A solid skeleton of history, even if limited, offers developing artists something upon which to hang their independently gained knowledge, something upon which to build, something to critique, and wider opportunities for discovering their own choice of precursors. This is especially true when the timeline is presented with supplementary criticism and attempts at expansion. An adequate model must somehow offer clear structure, yet also already in itself visually suggest its own state of oversimplification.

The originless steady state timeline This model is in fact a combination of several erroneous beliefs: that comics history has no beginning, that it has no development and that it is therefore some sort of simple presence, not therefore much different than the popular media notion of comics as a lump. I depicted this as a slightly truncated and pinched standard band for the third image in Figure 8.3. Generally, people who follow this view do not believe there is a teleological end to comics history, as their counterparts in fine art do, yet they believe there is no real beginning to it. In an endless regression based on the continuum fallacy (also called the fallacy of the beard in logic), they find comics stretching back to prehistoric cave paintings or the like. The continuum fallacy is when someone believes that two conditions, or in our case periods or artforms, cannot be considered distinct, or to even exist at all, because there exists a continuum of states between them, or because their “edges” are fuzzy. This may be true of painting and sculpture to a small extent, but think how ludicrous it would sound applied to film or photography, two modern artforms historically analogous in many ways to comics, in that their origins are known. In short, beware of “fishing expeditions.” If one searches hard enough, there is almost always something earlier that is somewhat similar but that fact may simply be a coincidence, not truly, essentially linked to the object of study, or indeed linked, yet only a distant ancestor. The latter situation is why we have the prefix proto- in our languages and the idea of precursors in our cultures. For instance, ancestors of comics include Japanese scrolls, Trajan’s Column, and the work of William Hogarth, yet none of these are comics in the sense the term is used today. Scott McCloud, in his justifiably praised book Understanding Comics, incorrectly tries to push the origin of comics back to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

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This is indeed a fishing expedition in which he mistakenly collapses linguistic pictographs with visual sequentiality as art.42 As example of what the “Steady State” model supporters need to know is the origin of their beloved artform. The medium as we know it today began to take form in the nineteenth century, among European and American artists after the consolidation and creation of foundationally essential characteristics by the man entitled to be lauded as the creator of comics, Rodolphe Toepffer. Toepffer was born in Switzerland in 1799. He became a teacher of French, rather than a painter like his father, yet he had an amazing artistic idea which manifested itself in his books published in the 1830s and 40s.43 These were the first true comics. What made his works different from previous narrative images was his invention of panels, closure, and the interdependence of the acts of reading and viewing. Furthermore, he knew what he had accomplished, writing about it in theoretical articles and even sending copies of his comics to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who, incidentally, loved them, encouraging Toepffer to produce more.44 In 1843, Rodolphe Toepffer formalized his thoughts on these picture stories in his Essay on Physiognomics.45 Thus, we have the necessary and sufficient conditions and self-awareness of his innovation which are essential for identifying him as the initiator of a new form. David Carrier, in his book The Aesthetics of Comics, suggests that comics may have not had genuine progress, in the way that fine art has had. That is, “all of these changes in comics’ content have not been accompanied by any dramatic developments in their visual technology.”46 I respectfully disagree and would point out the ever-increasing discussions in journals and books on comics concerning history (Golden Age, Silver Age, Underground Period, etc.), and formal innovation (narrative techniques, “camera” angles, James Steranko’s panel inventiveness, and the originalities of Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Frank King, etc.) Carrier, though, does not wish to denigrate comics, but rather highlight his belief that fine art as well no longer has, perhaps never exclusively had, a single historical tale solely based on sensational stylistic evolution. This I can heartily endorse. His two assertions, though, need not be combined. The sense of an historical development is of utmost importance in a timeline model, albeit this must be one without a teleological goal. The fact of not having one clear goal and a straight line to it does not mean that no clear historical fruition has occurred. Additionally, although it is difficult to represent this in an illustration, it is important when teaching and presenting a representation of art history to explain the logic behind definitions and designations, including imparting the comprehension that epochs, periods, movements, and the like have overlapping, blurry edges. Philosophical

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conceptions such as fuzzy categories, paradigmatic categories, and so on must somehow have room within an accurate, visually metaphoric model.

The peaks and valleys timeline This model of comic history is not held to be true by many comic historians. Nonetheless, it is important to describe, as quite a few fans of comics believe it. These are primarily the same people who also hold to one of the two following models. Their belief is that there were better and worse periods for comics, due to dominant genres. It is much like the pendulum of Wölfflin, but more judgmental. Of course, if you hold to the belief that superheroes or alternative autobiographical comics are the epitome of the artform, then periods are qualitatively rubbish in any time such as the 1950s, with few superheroes, or before the 1970s, with virtually no autobiographies. This is plainly a harshly restricted view of any artform, but it has a kernel of truth in it. There do appear to be stronger and weaker periods of art, when one considers quality on the average at a given time, even if individual artists can be stronger or weaker in any timeframe. However, at the highest quality level of achievement, no artist is truly better than another: e.g., Picasso is not better than Michelangelo. Nevertheless, for example, the Renaissance, Baroque, Modernism, the High Classical period of ancient Greek art, all appear much more creative and self-confident than Mannerism, Rococo, Postmodernism, and Hellenism. Likewise, popular music from 1960 to 1968 appears more resourceful and confident than, say, that from 1974 to 1980. Or the Marvel Comics “age” in the 60s can be, and has been, so lauded in contrast with comics of the 50s at DC. A useful model of a fine art or comic art history timeline needs to suggest this variability of average quality, yet allow for open disagreement about value judgments based on superficial categorical concerns. This timeline model is represented in the fourth image in Figure 8.3 as a repetitive, uphill-downhill series of slopes, not much different than the Wölfflin drawing in Figure 8.2.

The superheroes timeline The superheroes timeline and the following alternative comics timeline models are philosophically the same, yet end with two opposed destinations.

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The first is a version of the history of comics which focuses only on heroic fiction, envisioning superheroes as the end and epitome of comic art. The fifth image in Figure 8.3 reflects this with a drawing of a rising band of history, ending with a caped, flying hero. While it is true that superheroes may be one of the few genres completely original to comics, it is only one of many possibilities, and as it is a highly popular subgenre, it has often been far too mediocre. People who support this version of comic history often conflate the comic book industry and the medium (an erroneous metonymy). Instead of Toepffer, their histories usually begin with adventure pulp magazines in the United States. The most important and influential creator of superheroes was Jack Kirby, who holds a position within comics comparable to a combination of Michelangelo and Picasso in fine art. However, he did far more than superheroes. Such a notion restricts the medium, keeping it in one or two self-made ghettos. Some of the earliest books on comics promoted the superhero timeline. These include two of my childhood favorites, The Steranko History of Comics by James Steranko,47 and The Penguin Book of Comics by George Perry and Alan Aldridge.48 The most notorious magazine catering exclusively to fans of superheroes and such a timeline model was the now defunct Wizard Magazine.49

The alternative comics timeline This model is favored by a comics public similar to the superhero cadre, yet the two are avowed foes. The notions are so similar, that I have drawn the sixth image in Figure 8.3 as a duplicate of the previous model, however, ending with a seemingly troubled, coffee-drinking self-portrait. Alternative comics means nonmainstream comics from smaller publishers, yet has in many minds come to be identified almost solely with autobiographical works such as the fine graphic novel David Chelsea in Love.50 As Wikipedia wittily describe this phenomenon, by the 1990s “the autobiographical genre had turned into English-speaking alternative comics subculture’s ‘signature genre’ in much the way that superhero stories dominated the American mainstream comic books, the stereotypical example recounting the awkward moment which followed when, the cartoonist sitting alone in a coffee shop, his ex-girlfriend walks in.”51 Thus, this model culminates in autobiographical graphic novels, many of which are indeed of very high quality. This timeline matches so closely to that of the superhero idea above, that they form a philosophical pair, which together mirror the vision of art history Gombrich had, as discussed. The chief proponent of this worldview

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is The Comics Journal magazine, from Fantagraphics, which, however, publishes a far wider range of creative works than this.52 The truth is that in addition to superheroes, comic books have traditionally featured a great variety of storytelling genres. There have been comics about crime, cowboys, romance, horror, war, funny animals, magic, science fiction, true adventures, sports, teenagers, pornography, religious comics, biography, TV and film adaptations, and so on. Varieties of alternative comics include, besides autobiographical books, also underground, hippie, punk, social criticism, music adaptations, thrillers, drama, African American themes, fantasy, abstract comics and more. Both of these cases, the superhero and the alternative comics models, are significant to consider when envisioning a potentially new timeline metaphor. In them, we see the falsity of any teleological goal in art history. In truth, there has been an extraordinary variety of artistic approaches existing concurrently in comics and fine art, and this does not always result in falling into some feared pluralistic chaos; however, this multiplicity is often straightjacketed into one or the other false teleology.

The pluralistic denouement timeline This model of comics history is almost a duplicate of the Dantoesque fine art timeline, also ending in pluralism. Hence, the seventh image in Figure 8.3 is a drawing with various shadings representing the handful of comic art periods, and ending with a similar disintegration of its supposed teleology, but without a key work birthing this. There is nothing in comics in influence akin to Warhol’s Brill Box or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Rather, it appears more probable that this idea simply solidified in emulation of the fine art notion. The comic aficionados who favor this conception, believe that there were several periods, each with distinct tendencies, but this has ended and now comics are an aesthetic free-for-all. I have discussed the difficulties with this view well enough already above in the fine art section on pluralism. Let me add, though, that akin to the 7 examples I described of pluralist periods throughout fine art history, there have been at least 4 times when pluralism appeared to rule the history of comics: at the end of the Golden Age, at the end of Silver Age, during the so-called Blackand-White-Explosion, and now. Obviously, since their inception, comics have been multi-genre, multi-style, multifaceted, diversified, and yet do not lack certain strands of development. Hence pluralist and yet not, at all times.

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The sectarian timeline This is a solipsistic conception of history peculiar to comics, yet perhaps most akin in spirit to the Postmodernist fine art one. There are those who suggest that comics should ignore larger art and cultural history and simply concentrate on itself, as a unique entity. I refer to this model of comics history as Sectarian, as it promotes a rather stand-offish separation of comics from mainstream culture. Jason Ramos offers the most cogent argument for this position that I have read, although I do not agree. He writes: I would offer that those who are as intrigued by the idea of trying to make sense of the overall historical/theoretical narrative of comics (like me), should try to begin to create new language for it. Comics continually come off as an “insecure” medium, forever seeking the validation and attention of the art-world discourse. There are models for mediums that hold their own with their own history, language, and legitimacy, Venn-diagramming into the fine art world to varying degrees (photography, architecture, film).53

Ramos is, of course, mistaken about architecture, which has long been an integral part of standard art history, and somewhat about photography, which has been incorporated into art history for a few decades. He is right to an extent about film, but this has not always been advantageous for the medium. I do, though, heartily agree with him that there is “an advantage to be gained, artistically, from comics retaining something of its culturally illegitimate status.”54 Also, comics scholarship does need to develop its own vocabulary for elements peculiar to the form. Nevertheless, neither comics’ cultural status nor new vocabulary precludes envisioning a more complete timeline for comics, for art history and for the integration of the two. Therefore, I have illustrated this timeline model with two parts in the eighth image in Figure 8.3. The top line is the standard timeline model from fine art and culture, with a separate and smaller one below that for comics.

Disputes about the canon/building the timeline There is no “symptomatic” conception of history in comics yet, as seen in fine art. The scene has not been invaded by Poststructuralist doubt. The comics canon is not age-old, it has just begun to be consolidated, for better and worse. Perhaps the most important attempt at beginning this was Art Spiegelman’s exhibition

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“Masters of American Comics” of 2006–7. It included in-depth presentations of fifteen influential artists: Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, E. C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Charles M. Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware. This, happily, immediately elicited extensive discussion about who was missing, including an entire exhibition “Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics” in 2008–9. Curated by John Jennings and Damian Duffy, this exhibition showcased, as they said, “areas of sequential art that might otherwise be overlooked or underappreciated. These areas include the work of “women, small press, independent, gay and lesbian, self-published, mini, underground, web and/or gallery comics creators.”55 It explored alternate histories of US comics and suggested “some of the infinite possibilities of the comics medium.”56 Artist and historian Trina Robbins likewise presented cogent criticism of the lack of women comic artists in the “Masters” show in a series of lectures, and indeed she had already provided several major publication the organizers of the show should have referred to, including especially her book A Century of Women Cartoonists.57 Instead of maintaining a rigid canon or rejecting the idea in toto, comics currently has the enviable position of having a canon in a constant state of dialogical construction. I therefore label this tropaic model (or more exactly stated, this model-building activity), “Disputes about the canon/building the timeline.” In the ninth image in Figure 8.3, I drew this as a suggestion of an uncompleted line of construction blocks.

The braided rope timeline model Following the study, analysis and debate just outlined, both with others and myself, came the real work: proposing a solution for the problems critiqued above. This contemplation of models for the history of comics and the concomitant comparison of them to those in the history of fine art brought up the question, what kind of model could be created? What visual form would this take if it incorporated history as I have described it: characterized by ruptures; simultaneous paths; aspects coming in and out of focus; hidden roads; ignored elements; mainstream currents; discontinuities where a path ends, yet begins again later; non-, even anti-teleological arrangement—and yet with forms of development, not a static mass; where there is indeed historical change, movement, and direction. I took my clues from comics, and my terminology

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from mass-media theorist Christian Doelker. When first developing this conception, I published two essays in 2001 and 2003 on Carrier’s book The Aesthetics of Comics suggesting it.58 I found his book very intellectually stimulating, as was my long email exchange with Carrier about all his work in which I further honed my notions. Carrier’s book is a promising crossover among art history, philosophy, and comics. Furthermore, in it he presents a direct struggle with the Danto-Dickie Institutional Theory of the ontology of art now so dominant, which I have touched on in several parts of this book. My own response to this model, in short, is that I do not feel that we now have an end of either art or art history. It is the death of one Western, reductivist master narrative: that single, simple march-of-history idea which was taken for granted until recently. Carrier writes, “unlike Danto, I think that there is more than one way to tell the story of art’s history.” While this would seemingly call for multiple histories, Carrier terms such a position “posthistorical.”59 Numerous and divers stories are not necessarily “post-story,” they simply embody the amendment of one dominant tale into many narratives. The art of comics, with its history of addition and variation rather than reduction, has inspired me to a new model. Art history could have many narratives or even narrative climaxes other than perfection, realism, ontology or formal reduction; and multiple ones at that. The future of both fine and comic art might not be posthistorical, but rather polyhistorical. As mentioned above, while most literary theorists use the term text to prejudicially favor reading over seeing, Doelker traces the term back to its root in weaving or a cable. (texo, texere: to braid, weave).60 This is a highly evocative image which also instigated my new metaphor for the timeline. I picture an interwoven mass of filaments, some longer, some shorter, each a “history,” each independent to an extent, yet touching on various others, some ending only to begin again farther on, all travelling nonetheless in a certain concert. We could have a visual trope of art history which is plurogenic as opposed to Greenberg’s or Danto’s monogenic conceptions. This is an image of history as a cable of integrated stories; we have simply focused far too long on only one strand. At first, I indeed visualised a cable. I modified this when I stumbled in internet across someone with a similar idea, the late art critic John Perreault. He and I discussed and hybridized our two streams of thought. Perrault had asked a class he taught, “What if the current rigidity and defeatism were not caused by the critics, the curators, and the historians but by their image of history?” After first flirting with an image resembling the DNA double helix, Perrault settled on the braid. He writes, “But isn’t the braid too difficult to use? The heuristic braid

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diagram is the visual equivalent of multitasking and polyphony, and no more difficult than these . . . If you can follow a fugue or the various voices in jazz, then you can braid.”61 Crossing that with my vision of the cable, we achieved the new model: a braided rope. A rope can be made of various intertwining plaits of strands, sometimes even in opposite rotations, it can have strands of various thicknesses, and even have some frayed filaments, yet retain much of its tensile strength. Most of us have bodily experiences of working with thick ropes, know how they are linear, yet can be coiled, knotted, and so on. All of these properties are visually and haptically metaphorically useful for a promising model of art history. I drew this quite large for hanging in the classroom and in presentations. Above the braid, a variety of societal, political, and cultural events were added. A strand in the middle bore all the customary epochs and periods of art history from my survey class as mentioned above (and viewable online, as stated).62 This braid was a little over 2 meters in length and about 80 cm high. It was drawn on a smooth plastic support, so that students (or participants in my performancelectures) and I can alter it with whiteboard markers. Thus, even now, it continues to grow, especially in detail, as various facts and events are added, or changed, on appropriate strands, recently filling in comics’ history, Chinese art history, Sub-Saharan African art history, more information about women artists and others. After many and constant revisions, I had the braided rope timeline model I desired. I drew it and printed it as a very large work of art of my own. It is presented in one split, black-and-white version in the main word balloon in the chapter frontispiece comic above. There should be one image of the timeline in this book at this point, but it is far too large, colorful, and changing to really present in any book. More visually appropriate, it can best be inspected online on a page I created for it on one of my websites: .63

A new metaphor(m) for the timeline Let me list what I feel are a few of the strengths this metaphoric model of the braided rope adds to the teaching and study of art history. First, it allows us to access a variety of cultural metaphors to focus on, yet critically regard, concerning our subject. We retain something of the “CAUSES AND EFFECTS ARE LINKED OBJECTS” which dominates most standard timeline models, but it becomes only one helpful trope among many, not the central one. Metaphors of weaving and

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construction become more important. “IDEAS ARE CONSTRUCTED OBJECTS” comes to the fore, with its important corollaries, “The mind is a builder” and “Thinking is building/forming/shaping.” Viewers of it become keenly aware that our idea of art history is an object built by us, thus one that is not beyond reproach (or praise) and can be altered at any time. A braid is generally felt to be a very handmade object as well, reestablishing tropaically the personal body-based experiences and embodied reasoning that most artists feel is too absent from art history instruction. The braid metaphor thus helps to humanize a trope that sometimes appears all too predetermined. The various strands that form the braid are also path-like, giving us access to those foundational metaphors and their implications. “Reasoning is following a path” is one such trope. “Arguments are paths on which thought travels” is another. Both assist the viewer of such a timeline to conceive of following the strands, jumping between them, looking for hidden ones and so on, as actions involving working out history itself in one’s mind, placing the emphasis on personal interpretation rather than simple memorization. The braided-rope timeline still has a “mainstream” core strand, which helps anchor the survey students’ knowledge as they first learn facts. Oppositely, it helps to draw attention to the fact that much is occurring outside the tradition Eurocentric and Americanocentric area of focus, such as the long history of Chinese art, which we could, and later should, study in depth as well. The braided strands display how very much is taking place simultaneously in a variety of locations. They highlight the existence of long, unbroken lines of tradition in areas and fields that appear to have come and gone in the normal timeline, such as icon painting and folk art. The additions being brought by students and other viewers, make it, for example, clearer that Africa is not just a site for so-called primitive art, that it has long and often sophisticated traditions, but also ruptures due to colonialism and wars. Supplementary strands focusing on handicrafts, folk, popular and vernacular culture can be and are being added. Transformations can be displayed, such as that from handicraft into design. It becomes clear that ideas continue on past their peaks of influence, disappearing temporarily, perhaps even ending, only to start up again in a new fashion later. Crossovers and mergers can be shown, such as that of women into the mainstream of artists, or popular elements into fine art. Ideas of highpoints and low points in visual art culture are visually proposed, but this can then be concentrated on and criticized. It is, nevertheless, too complicated at first sight to be immediately useful for beginning students or a non-professional public, which is why I teased about it in the chapter frontispiece. Yet, it is a great background reference image to help put the more simplistic

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handouts and art history books into perspective. After a bit of use, it is a learnable, understandably heuristic, yet most of all, inspirational image that frankly exhibits that art history is also a question of where one is focusing one’s attention. The simplistic, almost standard timelines I continue to use as part of instruction are still important, as they are easier to learn as a basis, yet they are “put in their place.” I believe I have discovered a useful visual metaphor(m) in the image of a braided rope: a simple, yet evocative image which allows one to teach art history as a developmental succession, yet critique teleological inferences; to retain a core focus, yet eclipse the illusion of exclusivity; to clearly indicate that there is a wealth of art not being immediately presented in the standard survey, yet maintain a pragmatically serviceable image. This chapter confirms the usefulness of visual metaphor at all levels of contemporary art, when it is scrutinized philosophically. The aim of applying analytic philosophy, including cognitive metaphor theory, to visual tropes is to serve as a truth and corrective to certain deficiencies of the current theoretical and critical visual art landscape. Most of all, however, studying visual metaphor assists us in understanding works of art and the creative thought processes embodied in them. It is valuable for a fuller understanding and assessment of the works before us, including the historical contexts of which the artists and artworks are a part.

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Figure 9.1 Conclusion ink on paper, 2021, 42 × 29.7 cm © 2023 Mark Staff Brandl.

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Theories are pictures of the world, one way to think about reality, a suggested method for seeing lived experience in that way. They suggest both is and is not, and even, I assert, should be and should not be. This frequently works reversed: pictures are embodiments of theory. Artists can picture life particularly well, thus many are implicitly theorists. Small changes in the images with which we think, in our visually metaphoric base, the stuff of the creative arts, have major importance. The operations of extending, elaborating, composing, questioning, criticizing, transuming, and deliberately misconstruing metaphors may seem slight tools, yet they can build impressive edifices of understanding. Trope-asreasoning links theorization and creativity to everyday thought on the one hand, and to revelatory ideation in visual art on the other. My book has asserted the preeminence of the search for meaning in contemporary art through visually metaphoric creativity. This is not an attempt to restore some imagined, missing hint of a purport preceding the created object. It is an affirmation of the quest for meaning as the central struggle in creativity. It is not viable to seek to discover some imagined intention of meaning—the artwork is the achieved meaning, through its visual metaphors. Each artwork is a complex of multiple meanings performatively embodied. Historical and sociopolitical fact is a necessary and enlightening frame of reference to anchor finer associations; nevertheless, what a creator principally intended is always for that specific object to exist. What all creators try to do can likewise be plainly described: they try to tell truths—with emphasis placed on the verb and the plural noun ending. Yet these simple-sounding essentials are the bases for immeasurably rich creations. A great danger for historians and theorists is that we can create situations wherein works of art are arbitrarily expurgated from any living process and from all contexts, be they cognitive, historical, economic, or various others. As a practicing artist and art historian with strong analytic proclivities and the penchant to cerebrate, I have attempted to construct a philosophy in resistance to this, an anti-theory of sorts, if you will: one which 179

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emphasizes living process, personal struggle, cognition, agency, and context, all within the creation of visual tropes. If this or any other hypothetical analysis of the arts is worthy of any serious consideration, it is in its usefulness for fuller understanding and criticism of art, as creators, as perceivers, and as creative perceivers. Interpretation should seek the transformative through two important questions. What does the act of interacting with this work allow me to discover in life? How does this change and improve experience, i.e., “reality”? Visual metaphor use in art does this, while emphasizing allusiveness within concrete perception, linking striven-for content, discovered form, historical and critical cultural awareness. Philosophical theory has been implemented in this book in order to better grasp contemporary art and its use of visual metaphor. We investigated how meaning is embodied in contemporary, specifically Postmodern, visual creativity. My fundamental proposition is that the formal, technical, and stylistic aspects of creators’ styles concretely embody content in new, culturally and historically antithetical visual metaphors. Tropes are pursued and located by artists within manifestation of form, ‘form’ being comprehended in the broadest sense. These visual metaphors, being both metaphoric and meta-formal, thus my term metaphor(m), allow artists to convey their expressive aspirations, both those willed and those discovered within their optical tropes. Furthermore, said visual analogies can be aggregates of various metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, litotes, hyperboles, metalepses, and so on; yet most grippingly, they often exist in other visual figurative expressions beyond or between such linguistic divisions. Visual metaphors have their own structures, strengths, and uses. Visual thinking is truly sophisticated reflection, and prevailingly practiced by contemporary artists, even those who cannot articulate this well in words. Applying the issues of aesthetic philosophy and metaphor theory to contemporary art endows us with a fecund and empowering theoretical perspective for a deeper understanding and criticism of the works before us. Aesthetics has much to offer working artists, critics, curators, and art historians. Philosophical scrutiny of contemporary art could help give rise to healthy rejuvenation and proliferation of creative practices.

Notes Introduction 1 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London & New York: Routledge, 1978). 2 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1982). 3 Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 4 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 5 Susanna Kulli, personal communication, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2003. 6 Denis Dutton, “Delusions of Postmodernism,” Literature and Aesthetics 2 (1992): 23–35. 7 Donald Kuspit, Email to author, Dec. 2004. 8 Philip Ursprung, Grenzen der Kunst: Allan Kaprow und das Happening, Robert Smithson und die Land Art. Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 2003. 9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, revised trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Seabury Press, 1989). 10 Gary Saul Morson, ed., Bakhtin, Essays and Dialogues on His Work (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986). 11 Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 12 John Lechte, Julia Kristeva. (London: Routledge, 1990). 13 Cornel West, Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America. (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993). 14 R. A. Sharpe, Contemporary Aesthetics: A Philosophical Analysis. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). 15 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980; paperback, 1981). 16 Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989). 17 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 18 David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics (University Park, PA: Penn. State Univ. Press, 2000).

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19 Idem, Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). 20 Idem, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006). 21 Noël Carroll, On Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). 22 Idem, Beyond Aesthetic:Philosophical Essays (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2001). 23 Héliane Ventura, “An Interview with Frank Davey,” Sources, Revue d’études anglophones 17 (August 2004), p. 74. 24 Barry Schwabsky, “Jonathan Lasker—Brief Article,” ArtForum (September 2000), p. 175. 25 These activities of modification are an expansion of the initial list by Lakoff and Turner (extending, elaborating, questioning and composing), in Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989). pp. 67–72. 26 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; paperback, 1983), pp. vii–ix. 27 Artist Jeff Hoke in the online comments and discussion of my dissertation perceptively reminded me that these precursors may not be limited to earlier artists, but also may include scientists, poets, and others depending on the individual creator’s interests. This is certainly true of my own work, as well of Hoke’s, which includes an imaginary museum in website and book form in which he unites many arts, philosophy, sciences and proto-sciences. See Jeff Hoke, The Museum of Lost Wonder, http://www.lostwonder.org/. 28 William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 87: Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,” Poetry Foundation website, , last accessed 10 April, 2021. 29 Bloom, Anxiety, pp. xii–xiii. 30 It works so well I consider it, only partially tongue-in-cheek, to belong to me as a trademark: Metaphor(m)™, as seen in many of my Covers paintings bearing text. This is not because of a wish to discourage anyone else from using this theory or term, if they are so inclined. In fact, I rather encourage it. However, a trademark allows control of how it is used, if need be. Additionally, most powerful terms in our postmodern culture seem to have that small tm after them. I have joined the club. Finally, this little symbol pleasingly fits the comic/show-card style of those paintings. 31 Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: New Left Books, Verso, 2002; paperback, 2007). 32 Harold Bloom introduced and developed this exciting contention in his trilogy of books on the subject: The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford

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University Press, 1975; Oxford University Press Paperbacks, 1980), and Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Kathleen Morner and Ralph Rausch, NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms (Lincolnwood, Illinois: NTC Publishing Group, 1996), p. 131. Gerald L. Bruns, “Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1987; paperback, 1990), p. 638. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. (Original published 1914 in German as Über das Geistige in der Kunst), trans. by M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover Publications, 1977). George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987; paperback, 1990), p. 157.

1 What is Metaphor? 1 American Heritage Dictionary, 5th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), s.v. “Metaphor.” 2 George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 202. 3 Mary Therese Descamp, Metaphor and Ideology: Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum and Literary Methods Through a Cognitive Lens (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007), p. 19. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 55. 5 Andreas T. Zanker, “Chapter 8: The Classical Metaphors for Metaphor,” in Greek and Latin Expressions of Meaning (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2016), pp. 164–90. 6 “Christopher,” Behind the Name, 29 May 2020, , last accessed 20 February 2021. 7 George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 113. 8 Leslie Ross, Medieval Art: A Topical Dictionary (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 50. 9 R. A. Sharpe, Contemporary Aesthetics: A Philosophical Analysis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983) p. 158. 10 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), p. 68). 11 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 79.

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12 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 13 George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” p. 202. 14 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980; paperback, 1981), p. 153. 15 W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 11–16. 16 Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 45. 17 Horst W. Janson, Anthony Janson, History of Art (6th ed.). (New York: Abrams Books, 2001), p. 613. 18 Noël Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 347–68. 19 “Visual Tropes Chart,” Dr Great Art website, , last accessed 23 March 2021.

2 What is Visual Metaphor? 1 Charles J. Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, eds., Multimodal Metaphor (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009.) 2 Alison Gibbons, book review of Multimodal Metaphor by Forceville and UriosAparisi, eds. Language and Literature 20, no. 1 (February 2011): 78. 3 Noël Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; orig. publ. 1994), p. 365. 4 Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” pp. 347–8. 5 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 175. 6 Claes Oldenburg, Typewriter Pie, 1972, offset lithograph, 25.4 x 20.3 cm, edition 100, published by Petersburg Press, London. 7 See the bibliography for reference information concerning each of these publications. The elements of Doelker’s extended text analysis used in this book have been assembled from a conflation of all these sources, including an English translation of Ein Bild ist mehr als ein Bild in manuscript. Endnote references will be made only when specific quotations are used. 8 Kerry James Marshall, Watts 1963, 1995, acrylic and collage on canvas, 293.1 × 345.1 cm, St Louis, Missouri, USA, St. Louis Art Museum. 9 Kerry James Marshall, Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Super Model, 1994, acrylic and collage on board, 63.5 × 63.5 cm, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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10 Barbara J. Phillips, “Understanding Visual Metaphor in Advertising,” in Persuasive Imagery, ed. L. M. Scott and R. Batra. (Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 2003), p. 305. 11 Noël Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” p. 347. 12 Gaëlle Villedary, Vertige: avec Saxifrage, 2012, 6 circular glass mirrors around trees, each 30 cm Ø, Château de Mangé, Pays Vallée du Loir, France. Image available at . 13 Villedary, “About,” biographical statement on her personal website, , last accessed 25 March 2020. 14 Aviva Rahmani, Blued Trees Overture Installation, 2015–16, pigment on trees, circa 1.6 km, Brush Mountain, Virginia. 15 [Aviva Rahmani?] “The Blued Trees Defense,” project description on a fundraising page, Indiegogo, , last accessed 5 March 2021. 16 Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” pp. 359–60. 17 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; paperback, 1983), p. 31. 18 These ideas resound throughout all Jameson’s work, such as Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate,” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge, London: Longman, 1988, pp. 372–83. 19 Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 151. 20 Lawrence Weiner, A SQUARE REMOVAL FROM A RUG IN USE, Statement Nr. 054, 1969. Collection of Wolfgang Hahn, exhibited, a.o., at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, 15 November 2007–10 February 2008. 21 Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” p. 348. 22 Ibid., p. 360. 23 Elisabeth El Refaie, “Understanding Visual Metaphor: The Example of Newspaper Cartoons,” Visual Communication 2, no. 1 (2003): p. 76. 24 Cristina Sampaio, “Greta Thunberg,” editorial cartoon, Courrier international, nr. 1520, 19 December through 8 January 2020, Section “Septembre,” unpaginated. 25 Robert N. St. Clair, “Visual Metaphor, Cultural Knowledge, and the New Rhetoric,” in Learn in Beauty: Indigenous Education for a New Century, edited by Jon Reyhner, Joseph Martin, Louise Lockard, and W. Sakiestewa Gilbert (Flagstaff, Arizona: Northern Arizona University, 2000), pp. 85–101. 26 Ibid., p. 85. 27 Titus Kaphar, “Making Space for Black History,” press release from The Clark Art Institute, December 4, 2017, , last accessed 3 March 2021.

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28 William Proweller, “Picasso’s Guernica: A Study in Visual Metaphor,” The Art Journal, vol. 30, n0. 3 (Spring, 1971): 240–8. 29 Daniel Serig, “A Conceptual Structure of Visual Metaphor,” Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research, vol. 47, no. 3 (2006): 229. Serig expands on this in his book Visual Metaphor and the Contemporary; Ways of Thinking and Making (Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM, 2008). 30 Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” p. 347. 31 Ibid., p. 349. 32 Ibid., p. 363. 33 John Brockman, “ ‘Philosophy in The Flesh,’ A Talk with George Lakoff,” The Third Culture, 9 March, 1999, , last accessed 5 March 2021. 34 Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 35 Francis F. Steen, “Grasping Philosophy by the Roots,” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 24, no. 1 (2000): 198–9. 36 Elizabeth Hart, “Cognitive Linguistics: The Experiential Dynamics of Metaphor,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 28, no. 1 (March 1995): 1–23, 3. 37 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 38 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981). 39 Avrum Stroll, “Reminiscences,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (Spring 1993): p. 282. 40 Gordon Epperson, “Reminiscences,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 284. 41 Image Schema, also called image schemata, are discussed in depth in various books including Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987 and George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; paperback, 1990. 42 Thomas Hermann, “Quite a Little About Painters”: Art and Artists in Hemingway’s Life and Work. Swiss Studies in English, no. 123. (Tübingen: Francke, 1997).

3 Why Visual Metaphors Matter 1 George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 157.

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2 James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012), p 2. 3 Geary, I is an Other, p. 5. 4 Tiziana Andina, “Embodied Meanings and Normativity: For a New Concept of Art,” Law as Culture, lecture at the Universität Bonn, 17 September 2015, posted online 29 Aug 2017, YouTube video, 1:06:31, quotation at 12:26-35, , last accessed 10 March 2021. 5 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 172. 6 Andina, The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to PostDantian Theories, trans. Natalia Iacobelli (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 166. 7 Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “Understand,” , last accessed 5 May, 2021. 8 Geary, I is an Other, p. 13. 9 A collection of presentation papers from the seminar is published as the book What do Artists Know?, ed. James Elkins (Penn State University Press, 2012). 10 Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 11 Idem., Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (New York: Routledge, 2001). 12 Geary, I is an Other, p. 9. 13 Ibid., p 19. 14 Richard Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York: EP. Dutton, 1968, p. 399. 15 Matthew O. Peterson, “Aspects of Visual Metaphor: An Operational Typology of Visual Rhetoric for Research in Advertising,” International Journal of Advertising, vol. 38, no. 1 (2019): 67–96, Published online: 23 Apr 2018, , last accessed 23 September 2020. 16 Andina, Embodied Meanings and Normativity. Video 1:06:31, quotation at 30:43. 17 David Carrier, Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll, Aesthetics and Contemporary Art (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 31. Quoting from Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 197. Furthermore, I had the joy of discussing my metaphor(m) and embodiment ideas, albeit quickly, with Danto himself in Boston on the 22nd of February 2006 at the College Art Association Annual Conference, where we were both speakers. 18 Karsten Harries, “Metaphor and Transcendence,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 87–8. 19 Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 195. 20 Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 312.

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21 Mark Johnson, an idea pervading the book The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 22 Carrier, Aesthetic Theory. 23 See Dan Ramirez, art website, . Last accessed October 4, 2020. 24 Richard Shiff, “A Minimalist Romance,” in the catalogue Certainty and Doubt: Paintings by Dan Ramirez (Madison, Wisconsin: Chazen Museum of Art, 2017), p. 7. 25 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961). 26 Dan Ramirez with Julie Karabenick, “An Interview with Artist Dan Ramirez,” Geoform website, June 2014, , last accessed 27 Oct. 2020. 27 Ibid. 28 Dan Ramirez, TL-P 6.432, 1977, graphite on heavy wove paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm, Chicago, Illinois, The Smart Museum of Art. 29 Dan Ramirez, TL-P 6.421, 1976–1977, acrylic on canvas, 242.3 × 305.3 × 6.4 cm, Chicago, Illinois, the Museum of Contemporary Art. 30 Jeff Hoke, The Museum of Lost Wonder (San Francisco: Red Wheel/Weiser Books, 2006). Website: , last accessed 8 March 2021. 31 Lisa Lipinski, René Magritte and the Art of Thinking (New York: Routledge, 2019). 32 Petra von Morstein, “Magritte: Artistic and Conceptual Representation,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 41, no. 4 (1983): 369–74. 33 René Magritte, Les affinités électives, 1933, oil on canvas, 41 x 33 cm, private collection. 34 Randa Dubnick “Visible Poetry: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Paintings of René Magritte,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 21, no. 3, Art and Literature (Summer, 1980): 407–19. 35 Marshall’s art can be seen on “Kerry James Marshall,” David Zwirner Gallery website, . Last Accessed 9 March 2021. 36 Ken Johnson, “Social Satire and Metaphor in a Multimedia Exhibition,” The New York Times, 17 December, 2004, section E, p. 42. Read online , last accessed 9 March 2021. 37 Monique Boutin, “Somaesthetics and Aesthetic Transactions: Art and Phenomenology Today” (honors thesis, University of Maine, Honors College. 2014). Read online . Last Accessed 9 March, 2021. An excellent thesis, where Boutin closely considers Pollock as influenced, albeit indirectly, by phenomenology and John Dewey.

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38 Leora Maltz-Leca, William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018). 39 Kentridge’s art can be seen on “William Kentridge,” Goodman Gallery website, , last accessed 9 March 2021. 40 Julia Friedman, “Cézanne and the Poetics of Metonymy,” Word & Image, vol. 23, no. 3 (2007): 312–21. 41 Bridget Alsdorf, “Interior Landscapes: Metaphor and Meaning in Cézanne’s Late Still Lifes,” Word & Image, vol. 26, no. 4 (2010): 314–23. 42 Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002; paperback, 2003). 43 Matt Ballou, wheneverWHEN (Michigan),2017, gouache, acrylic, ink and colored pencil on paper mounted on panel, 38 x 28 cm, collection the artist. Image available at . 44 *Mark G. Taber, The Physible Universe (Morrisville, North Carolina: Lulu Press, 2021). 45 Ken Lum, art website, . Last accessed 9 March, 2021. 46 Dawoud Bey, Seeing Deeply (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018). 47 Carrier, Aesthetic Theory. He discusses Lawrence Carroll’s art philosophically; my addition to his approach is the notion of visual metaphor. 48 A neologism by the author, first created around 2015. One presentation is in a podcast, Dr Great Art, “Episode 20: Mongrel Art and Democratic Art,” 27 August 2017, , last accessed 9 March, 2021. 49 Christa Donner, art website, , last accessed 9 March, 2021. 50 The Worm Farm Institute website, , last accessed 22 March 2021. 51 Damian Duffy, Damian Duffy website, . John Jennings, John Jennings Studio website, , both last accessed 7 April, 2021. 52 Colectivo Binni Cubi, Facebook, , last accessed 9 March, 2021. 53 There is some confusion concerning the actual authorship of the various texts often attributed to Bakhtin. Several are signed by others, yet seem to be presentations of Bakhtin’s notions. Whether Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov served as “covers” for Bakhtin because of his difficulties under Stalin, or actually contributed to the works is in doubt. I discuss all his ideas, as is common, as those of Bakhtin. All the ideas are present in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Bakhtin Reader, ed Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994).

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54 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 243.9 x 233.7 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art. 55 Dennis Oppenheim, Early Morning Blues, 1977, mixed media room installation, dimensions variable (153 cm diameter aluminum record player, 305 cm diameter neon hotplate), Winnipeg, Manitoba, Winnipeg Art Gallery. 56 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin 2004). 57 Raman Selden, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 2d ed. (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989), p. 18. 58 Gary Saul Morson, “Tolstoy’s Absolute Language,” in Bakhtin, Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 130. 59 Mira Schor, art website, , last accessed 9 March, 2021. 60 Julia Kristeva’s thought is well presented in John Lechte, Julia Kristeva. (London: Routledge, 1990). 61 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, revised trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Seabury Press, 1989). 62 Alex Meszmer and Reto Müller, art website, , last accessed 9 March 2021. 63 John Dewey’s “double loop of learning” is productively explained and expanded on in Chris Argyris and David A. Schön, Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974). 64 Raoul Deal, art and professor webpage, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, , last accessed 10 March, 2021. Webpage concerning the UMOS project, “New Mural to Tell Migrant Workers’ Milwaukee Stories,” University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 18 August 2016, , last accessed 10 March 2021. 65 Titus Kaphar, art website, , last accesssed 10 March, 2021. 66 Cornel West, Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism, vol. 2 (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993). 67 Cornel West, interview with Anders Stephanson in Art and Philosophy, ed. Giancarlo Politi (Milan, Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1991), p. 161. 68 West, Prophetic Reflections, vol. 2, pp. 4–5. 69 West and Stephanson, Art and Philosophy, p. 168. 70 R. A. Sharpe, Contemporary Aesthetics: A Philosophical Analysis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983) pg. 158. 71 Th. Emil Homerin, “Echoes of a Thirsty Owl: Death and Afterlife in Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 44, no. 2 (1985), p. 174.

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72 Idem., From Arab Poet to Muslim Saint: Ibn al-Fārid, His Verse, and His Shrine, Studies in Comparative Religion (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), p. 96. Homerin embodies this perception well in his books Umar Ibn al-Farid, Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 2001) and Aisha al-Ba’uniyya: A Life in Praise of Love, Makers of the Muslim World (London: Oneworld, 2019).

4 The Grammar of Visual Metaphor 1 Erik Forrest, “Art Education and the Language of Art,” Studies in Art Education, vol. 26, no. 1 (1984): 27. 2 Donis A. Dondis, A Primer of Visual Literacy (Massachusetts: MIT Press 1973). 3 Sidonie Smith, “Human Rights and Comics, “in Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, ed. Michael A. Chaney (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), pp. 67–8. 4 Andrew Ortony, Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5 Max Black, “XII-Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n. s. vol. 55 (1954–5): 273–94. Viewed online: . Last Accessed 18 March 2021. 6 Black, Models and Metaphors, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962. 7 Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 8 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, engraving, 24 cm × 18.5 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 9 Ofer Gal, “Hesse and Rorty on Metaphor: Rhetoric in Contemporary Philosophy.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 2 (1995): 125. 10 Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985): pp. 11–30. 11 Lydia Goehr, “Institutionalization of a Discipline,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (Spring 1993): p. 119. 12 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 13 Samuel Wheeler, review of A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy, ed. C. G. Pardo (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2003), in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an Electronic Journal, 12 June 2004, , last accessed 18 March 2021.

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14 Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Daniel Breazeale, quoted in 1998, Ian Markham, Truth and the Reality of God: An Essay in Natural Theology (London: Bloomsbury, T & T Clark, 1998), p. 103. 15 Tiziana Andina, “Taking Danto’s Suggestions Seriously: Nietzsche’s Theory of Truth Revisited,” in The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, eds. Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 2013), pp. 483–508. 16 She centers her essay on Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, New York: Macmillan, 1965. 17 Andina, “Taking Danto’s Suggestions Seriously,” p. 505. 18 Arthur C. Danto, What Art Is (New Haven; London: Yale Univ. Press, 2013), and Embodied Meanings. Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994. 19 David Carrier, Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pg. 3. 20 I. A. Richards. The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1965). 21 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 22 Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). 23 Elisabeth El Refaie, “Understanding Visual Metaphor: The Example of Newspaper Cartoons,” Visual Communication 2, no. 1 (2003): p. 75. 24 As suggested by Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p. 153. 25 El Refaie, p. 84. 26 Ibid, discussing Ray Morris, “Visual Rhetoric in Political Cartoons: A Structuralist Approach,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, vol. 8, no. 3 (1993): 195–210, 196. 27 Charles J. Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, eds., Multimodal Metaphor (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009.) 28 Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 29 Noël Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; orig. publ. 1994), p. 348. 30 And in the proper false humility of an endnote, I can point out that using the chart here and this idea to discover and name metaphors in famous fine art, and to spur on new ideas for fine art of their own, has been one of the more popular activities in my art history and aesthetics classes. 31 Robert DiYanni, Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay, second edition (New York: McGraw-Hill Education. 2006), p. 451. 32 “Visual Tropes Chart,” Dr Great Art website, , last accessed 23 March 2021.

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33 Ted Cohen, Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 8. 34 Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987; paperback, 1990). 35 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, pp. 224–5. Italics in the original. 36 Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002; paperback, 2003). 37 Joseph E. Grady, Todd Oakley and Seana Coulson, “Blending and Metaphor,” in Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected papers from the 5th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and Gerard J. Steen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), viewed online , last accessed 20 March, 2021. 38 Amitash Ojha and Bipin Indurkhya, “Interpreting Visual Metaphors: Assymetry and Reversibility,” Poetics Today, vol. 38, no. 1 (February 2017): 93–121, 94. 39 The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, ed. Mark Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 40 Maria J. Ortiz, “Conceptual Integration Theory and Hybrid Visual Metaphor,” a paper presented at Rethinking Metaphor: Conceptual Integration and Empirical Methods, the University of Murcia, Spain, 10–12 May, 2012, viewed online , last accessed 18 October, 2020. 41 Foundational metaphors (which appear in upper-case italics) can be found in all of the works of Lakoff, Turner and Johnson. The primary source for researchers is the “Master Metaphor List” begun by Lakoff and in revision. This is the bulk of the web site at the University of California at Berkeley titled the Conceptual Metaphor Home Page (for URL and other references please see bibliography). As the metaphors repeat in these sources, they will not be individually referenced. Foundation metaphors were brought to the attention of a wide public first through the book Metaphors We Live By. 42 Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, p. xiv. 43 Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 51. 44 Please note, the typographical conventions of style in this paper for presenting figurative phrases, metaphors and metaphor themes are described in “Notes on Typographic Style” at the beginning of this book. 45 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradise, Purgatory and Inferno, trans Henry Francis Cary (Scotts Valley, California: CreateSpace, 2014 [1320]). 46 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, 1563, oil on wooden panel, 37.1 × 55.6 cm, London, the Courtauld Institute of Art.

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47 Bill Viola, with technical assistants Bernd Lintermann and Nikolaus Völzow, Tree of Knowledge, 1997, mixed media animated video installation, dimensions variable, c. 16-meter-long hallway, New York, Whitney Museum. 48 Ojha, Visual Metaphor and Cognition (Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP Lambert, 2015). 49 El Refaie, p. 75. 50 Ibid., p. 78. She is referring to information from Alexander Goatly, The Language of Metaphors (London: Routledge. 1997). 51 John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Penguin Classics, 2000, [1667]). 52 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1974). 53 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, London; New York: Longman, 1977. 54 Milton, book 1, lines 284–9. 55 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; paperback, 1980), pp. 131-133. 56 Noël Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; orig. publ. 1994), p. 351. 57 David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics (University Park, PA: Penn. State Univ. Press, 2000). 58 Sonya Clark, The Hair Craft Project, 2014, hair and canvases, dimensions variable, Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts. Information at , last accessed 20 March, 2021. 59 Sonya Clark, Unraveling and Unraveled, 2015; Confederate battle flags, one fully unraveled, one partially; dimensions variable, flag 178 x 91 x 18 cm, Sonya Clark art website, , last accessed 20 March, 2021. Image available . 60 Andre Molotiu, ed., Abstract Comics: The Anthology, 1958–2008 (Seattle, Washington, 2009). 61 Molotiu, Universe A (unpublished, 2020). Several pages available at the website Abstract Comics, , last accessed 20 March, 2021 62 Donald Kuspit, Idiosyncratic Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 2. 63 This terminology was invented by Christian Doelker in the books Kulturtechnik Fernsehen; Analyse eines Mediums, “Wirklichkeit” in den Medien, and Ein Bild ist mehr als ein Bild: Visuelle Kompetenz in der Multimedia-Gesellschaft, his many articles, TV series, CD-ROM and other publications. See the bibliography for reference information concerning each of these publications. 64 William Conger, personal correspondence, Facebook comment on “Mark Staff Brandl Facebook Page,” , 7 February, 2020. Conger is referring to linguistician Roy Harris, whose “Integrationism” is explained on his website. Roy Harris, Roy Harris Online, “Integrationism” Page, , last accessed 20 March, 2021. Marc De Mey, “Mastering Ambiguity,” in The Artful Mind, ed. Mark Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 271–304. Saul Ostrow, “William Conger’s Metaphysics,” catalog essay (New York: Vendome Gallery, 2014). Sue Taylor, “William Conger at Roy Boyd,” Art in America (July 1997). Available online last accessed October 20, 2020. William Conger, Privateer II, oil paint on wood, 41 x 41 cm. 2020, collection of the artist. Viewable online on Conger’s Facebook Page, , last accessed 21 March, 2021. Robert Burns, “ A Red, Red Rose,” 1794. Original Scots spelling of love. In various collections as a song and a poem. Online at “A Red, Red Rose,” The Poetry Foundation website, , last accessed 21 March, 2021. Pablo Picasso, Tête de taureau (Bull’s Head), 1942, bronze cast of a bicycle seat and handlebars, 33.5 x 43.5 x 19 cm, Paris, Musée Picasso. Julian Schnabel, The Sea, 1981; oil paint, crockery shards, bondo on wood; 274.3 x 396.2 cm, New York, Brant Foundation. Viewable online, WikiArt website, “Julian Schnabel The Sea,” , last accessed 21 March, 2021. Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 2008, oil and wax on wood, thirty-six panels: each: 25.4 x 20.32 cm, Washington, DC, The National Gallery of Art. Leon Rosenstein, “The Ontological Integrity of the Art Object from the Ludic Viewpoint,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 34, no. 3 (Spring, 1976): p. 323. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955). Ibid., p. 203.

5 Metaphor(m): A Theory of Central Visual Trope 1 George Lakoff, “Mapping the Brain’s Metaphor Circuitry: Metaphorical Thought in Everyday Reason,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 8, article 958 (16 December 2014), online journal , last accessed 25 March 2021.

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2 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981). In particular, his Chapter 7 in this book, “Metaphor Expression and Style,” is particularly pertinent to my book. 3 Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 4 René Magritte, La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), 1928–1929, oil on canvas, 63.5 × 93.98 cm, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 5 Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 110. 6 Jack Whitten, from “Stories of the Soul: A Farewell to Jack Whitten,” author Victoria Sung, 29 January 2018, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, website, , last accessed 20 December, 2020. 7 James Romberger, The Self-Created Man (New York: Ground Zero Books, 2018), p. 52. 8 Buzz Spector, The Bookmaker’s Desire (Santa Monica, USA: Umbrella Associates, 1995), p. 16. 9 Michael Rees, Synthetic Cells: Site and Para(site), 2018; mixed-media installation including air-inflated PVC vinyl, ink jet print on vinyl, steel, augmented reality app; dimensions variable, Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, USA. Viewable online at Michael Rees art website, , last accessed 25 March, 2021. 10 Alex Mesmer/Reto Müller (aka Zeitgarten), art website The Transitory Museum at Pfyn, , last accessed 25 March 2021. 11 Heather Dale, “How to Find a Tribe that Loves Your Art,” TEDxUW lecture, University of Waterloo, Canada, 17 November, 2012 posted online 7 Jan 2013, YouTube video, 11:30, , last accessed 25 March 2021. 12 Iconosequentiality is my neologism for the unique combination of forms of phenomenological perception in comics including especially so-called exhibition or gallery comics. Viewers frequently perceive both the entire page as an iconic unit, similar to a traditional painting, and simultaneously follow the flow of narrative or images from panel to panel, left to right, up to down. Among other venues, it has been presented here, “Two New Terms,” Brandl’s Art Articles (28 October 2013), , last accessed 25 March 2021. 13 The typographical conventions of style in this paper for presenting figurative phrases, metaphors and metaphor themes are described in “Notes on Typographic Style” at the beginning of this book.

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14 Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 5. 15 Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason, p. 89. 16 Ibid., p. 91. 17 Lakoff, “The Neuroscience of Form in Art,” in The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, ed. Mark Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 153–69. 18 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p. 152. 19 Berel Lang, ed., The Concept of Style (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1987). 20 Lakoff and Johnson, Chapter 20 “How Metaphor Can Give Meaning to Form,” in Metaphors We Live By, pp. 126–38. 21 Turner and Fauconnier, The Way We Think, p. 46. 22 Vincent van Gogh, De Aardappeleters (The Potato Eaters), 1885, oil on canvas, 82 x 114 cm, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. 23 Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 73.7 cm × 92.1 cm, New York, Museum of Modern Art. 24 Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Cypresses, 1889, oil on canvas, 72.1 cm × 90.9 cm, London, National Gallery. 25 Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 79. 26 Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889, oil on canvas, 65 x 54.5 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay. 27 Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890, oil on canvas, 50.5 cm × 103 cm, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. 28 Vincent van Gogh, “Letter to Anton Ridder van Rappard.” In Letters to an Artist: Vincent van Gogh to Anton Ridder van Rappard, trans. Rela van Messel. Quoted in The Creative Process: A Symposium, ed. Brewster Ghiselin (New York: New American Library, A Mentor Book, 1952), pp. 54–5. 29 Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, p. 171. This idea was first espoused by H. Paul Grice in 1961 in his essay “The Causal Theory of Perception,” Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 35, pp. 121–52. 30 Norman Bryson, Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 31 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1984). 32 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 33 Francis Landy, “The Song of Songs,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, p. 305.

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6 Conceiving Visual Metaphors 1 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; paperback, 1983), p. 31. 2 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980; paperback, 1981), p. 145. 3 Charles Altieri, “On the Sublime of Self-Disgust; or, How to Save the Sublime from Narcissistic Sublimation,” in Beauty and the Critic: Aesthetics in the Age of Cultural Studies, ed. James Soderholm (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1997), p. 128. 4 Larry Briskman, “Creative Product and Creative Process in Science and Art,” in The Idea of Creativity, ed. Michael Krausz, Denis Dutton and Karen Bardsley (Leiden: Brill Press, 2009), p. 29. 5 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). 6 Daniel Ammann, “Pfade, Knoten, Leerstellen: Leserstimulation und textuelle Mitarbeit,” in Medien Lesen: Der Textbegriff in der Medienwissenschaft, ed. Daniel Ammann, Heinz Moser, and Roger Vaissière (Zurich: Verlag Pestalozzianum, 1999), pp. 10–34. 7 Ibid., p. 23. 8 Ibid. 9 Charles Sanders Pierce, “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” The Monist, vol. 16, no. 4 (1 October 1906), 492–546. 10 Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 11 Theodore Gracyk, mentioned in the following lines, appears to be the source of the term work of phonography in its present sense, although it is now in wide use. 12 Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1996). 13 Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 14 Joel Weinsheimer, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 80. 15 Bill Viola, Heaven and Earth, 1992, video installation (monitors, wood column, black and white videos), dimensions variable, circa 2.9 x 4.9 x 5.5 m, San Diego, California, Museum of Contemporary Art. 16 Stefan Rohner, Wolken, 1999, photo object, 30 x 30 x 40 cm, base 170 cm, Stefan Rohner art website. . Last accessed 2 April, 2021. 17 Lakoff and Johnson, Chapter 20, “How Metaphor Can Give Meaning to Form,” in Metaphors We Live By.

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7 Visual Metaphor in Criticism: Two Contemporary Painters’ Works 1 George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 50. 2 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Contemporary Sculpture: Arts Yearbook 8, ed. William Seitz (New York: Art Digest, 1965), pp. 74–82. 3 This has occurred in past art, such as when heavenly blue was reserved for the Virgin Mary in the Renaissance, but also in popular, common symbolism. For example, red represents good luck in China, yet it stands for passion in Europe and the United States. Americans associate green with money due to the standard hue of dollar bills, however a reference to that in song lyrics and the like often confuses Europeans. Black is the color of mourning in Western countries, while it is red in Ghana. 4 Charles Boetschi, Color Unit 24.1, 1998, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200 cm, Warth, Switzerland, Kunstmuseum Thurgau, viewable at . 5 Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, pp. 67–72. 6 Joan Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” Art in America, May 1996, p. 86. 7 Charles Boetschi, personal communication, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2000–6. 8 Daniel Ammann, David Lodge and the Art-and-Reality Novel, Anglistische Forschungen, no. 216 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1991), p. 86. 9 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 214. Ricoeur’s italics. 10 Leonard Bullock, personal communication, Basel, Switzerland, 2007. 11 Karsten Harries, “Metaphor and Transcendence,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 85. 12 James Elkins, What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting Using the Language of Alchemy (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 2–3. 13 Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990); quoted in Elkins, What Painting Is, p.3. 14 Holland Cotter, “Conceptual Abstraction,” The New York Times, 2 November, 2012, p. 24. Online , last accessed 10 April 2021. This is one review of the exhibition. 15 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). 16 Kim Atkins, “Paul Ricoeur (1913—2005),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource website, , last accessed 13 April, 2021.

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17 Herbert Spencer, cited by Stewart B. Whitney, “Spencer, Herbert 1820–1903,” in Encyclopedia of Anthropology ed. H. James Birx (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2006), p. 2123. 18 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), lines 1314–1316, p. 85. 19 Leonard Bullock, The Donor/ der Spender, 2006; oil, encaustic, pencil, serigraph ink and spray paint on synthetic vellum; 122 x 102 cm. Private collection. 20 Leonard Bullock, personal communication, Basel, Switzerland, 2009. 21 “Yet abstraction has dared to try to get along without the human figure. Today it struggles, at least partly, because it has failed to come up with a viable substitute for human figuration, for the spatial vitality and versatility provided by the human figure. It was not so much the loss of the human figure itself as it was the loss of what the figure did to the space around itself that has been so hard to replace.” In Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 74. 22 Peter Yanczer, “The Eidophor Television System: Fritz Fischer,” Early Television Museum website, , last accessed 13 April, 2021. 23 Euripides, Helen, trans. Andrew Wilson, The Classics Pages website, , last accessed 11 April, 2021. 24 “Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.” Willem de Kooning, from “A Desperate View,” 1949, a lecture given in New York. Included in Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, ed. George Scrivani (New York: Hanuman, 1988).

8 Art History Timelines are Visual Metaphors 1 Bate, W. Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (New York: Harvard, 1970; paperback New York: W. W. Norton, 1972). 2 James Elkins, personal communication: autograph in book, Stories of Art, 2008. 3 A 55-minute speech, with images, first presented at the CAA (College Art Association, art historians organization) annual conference in Chicago, February 13, 2010. 4 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, original 1979). 5 Ihab Hassan, “Let the Fresh Air In: Graduate Studies in the Humanities,” in Beauty and the Critic: Aesthetics in an Age of Cultural Studies, ed. James Soderholm (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1997), p. 195. 6 Ernst Gombrich, The Essential Gombrich (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), p. 7.

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7 Erwin Schrödinger, “Does Physics Need Pictures,” in Exploring the Universe, ed. Louise B. Young (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 204–5. 8 “Illustrated Timelines, Drawn by Mark Staff Brandl,” on the Dr Great Art website, , last accessed 30 April, 2021.. 9 “Purely Pictorial Timelines,” on the Dr Great Art website, , last accessed 30 April, 2021. 10 James Elkins, Stories of Art (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–38. 11 For more information on this project, see . 12 Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. York, Pennsylvania: Gemstone Publishing. 13 Alan Moore (author), Dave Gibbons (artist), Watchmen: Absolute Edition (New York: DC Comics, 2005). 14 Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 15 Andre Molotiu, ed., Abstract Comics: The Anthology: 1967–2009 (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2009). 16 Rodolphe Toepffer, Histoire de M. Jabot. (Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2010). “Rodolphe Toepffer,” Wikipedia website, , last accessed 30 April, 2021. 17 For example: Laura Anne Tedesco, “Introduction to Prehistoric Art, 20,000–8000 B.C.,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Metropolitan Museum of Art New York website (August 2007), , last accessed 20 April, 2021. 18 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere. (New York: Random House, 2006). 19 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992). 20 Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, Vol. I, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell; 1920), p. 13. 21 The inspiration for this drawing is The Discobolus Lancelotti, c. 450 BCE, a marble Roman copy of original Greek bronze by Myron, height 155 cm, Rome, National Roman Museum. 22 Heinrich Wölfflin Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst. (Basel: Schwabe, 2004). 23 Wölfflin’s idea has been highly influential on all formal and Formalist analyses of art and has inspired other historians who believe in cyclical changes of art styles, including Clement Greenberg. There have been other such cyclical or pendular theories of art history as well, including that of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. 24 Clement Greenberg, “Cézanne and the Unity of Modern Art,” The Partisan Review, vol. 18, no. 3 (1951); reprinted in Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, vol. 3 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 82–91.

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25 See, a.o., Arthur C. Danto, Embodied Meanings; Critical Essay and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; The Noonday Press, 1995), p. 205. 26 Ernst H.Gombrich, The Story of Art (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1989), pp. 405–509. 27 Gustave Courbet, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1854, oil on canvas, 129 x 149 cm, Montpellier, France, Musée Fabre. 28 Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 115. 29 Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes, 1969 version of 1964 original, acrylic and silkscreen ink on wood, dimensions variable, stack of units, each 50.8 x 50.8 x 43.2, Pasadena, California, Norton Simon Museum. 30 Diana L. Eck, “The Pluralism Project,” Harvard University website, , last accessed 1 May, 2021. 31 Franklin Einspruch, “Sliding Gracefully Down the Slippery Slope of Hope,” Artblog. net, Notes from the Life of an Artist website (2004), , last accessed 1 May, 2021 32 Tim Muldoon, “Shepherding the Postmodern Flock,” Chicago Studies, vol. 42, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 81–92. 33 Sinclair Bell and Francesca Tronchin, “Between Canon and Kitsch: Eclecticism in Roman Homes,” Session Description for the 8th Roman Archaeology Conference, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Getty Research Institute (April, 2009). 34 Susan von Daum Tholl, s.v. “Carolingian Art and Architecture, Painting,” Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia, ed. John M Jeep (New York, Garland, 2001). 35 Judith Steinhoff, Sienese Painting After the Black Death: Artistic Pluralism, Politics, and the New Art Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 36 Franklin Toker, “A Sourcebook for Introduction to the History of Western Art;” Toker University of Pittsburgh website, , last accessed 1 May, 2021. 37 Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006). 38 Corinne Robins, The Pluralist Era: American Art, 1968–1981 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 39 Jim Auer, exhibition review “Seductive and Sensational: Art Museum Exhibit Embraces Pluralism,” in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (September 10, 1995), pp. 1 and 15. 40 David Reed, personal communication, 2000. 41 Hack is the common term in the world of applied art, such as illustration or comics, for a creator who is simply work-a-day, probably with little natural talent; one who is employed as a drudge, doing inferior, derivative work for pay, with no aspirations to art. 42 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Northampton, Massachusetts: Kitchen Sink, 1993).

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43 Such as Rodolphe Toepffer, Histoire de M. de M.Vieux Bois, drawn 1827, first published in Geneva in 1837. 44 Goethe’s enthusiastic reaction and encouragement is recorded by Johann Peter Eckermann in his Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, Tempel Klassiker (Leipzig: Tempel Verlag, 1958) in an entry dated 4 January 1831. 45 Rodolphe Toepffer, “Essay on Physiognomics,” in Enter: The Comics—Rodolphe Topffer’s (sic) Essay on Physiognomy and the True Story of Monsieur Crepin, trans. and intro. Ellen Wiese (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 1965). 46 David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics (University Park, PA: Penn. State Univ. Press), p. 113. 47 James Steranko, The Steranko History of Comics (Reading, PA: Supergraphics, vol. 1 (1970), vol. 2 (1972)). 48 George Perry and Alan Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics (London: Penguin, 1971). 49 Wizard Magazine, Congers, New York (published from July 1991 to January 2011). 50 David Chelsea, David Chelsea in Love (Forestville, California: Eclipse 1992). 51 Wikipedia, s.v. “Autobiographical Comics,” (20 September 2006), , last accessed 5 May, 2021. 52 The Comics Journal (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics). 53 Jason Ramos, “Reflections and Generalizations of the Culture at Large,” on Commit to Making a Masterpiece Every Time: The blog of Los Angeles based artist Jason Ramos website (1 August, 2009), , last accessed 5 May, 2021. 54 Ibid. 55 Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois, Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, 2008), p. 11. 56 Ibid., p. 12. 57 Trina Robbins, A Century of Women Cartoonists. (Princeton, Wisconsin: Kitchen Sink, 1993). 58 This article was originally published as “Art, Philosophy and Comics: Beyond The End of Art History” in The Art Book, London (March 2001), pp. 26–8. A modified version also appeared in the United States as “Posthistorical Art: Or, Comics and the Realm of Absolute Knowledge,” The Comics Interpreter, vol. 2, no. 1 (2003): 24–6. 59 David Carrier, The Aesthetics of Comics (University Park, PA: Penn. State Univ. Press), p. 115. 60 This appears frequently in his lectures, discussions, articles and books, including Christian Doelker, Kulturtechnik Fernsehen—Analyse eines Mediens (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989; paperback edition 1991).

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Notes

61 John Perreault, Artopia website: , last accessed 5 May, 2021. Summary of his “braid” ideas “The Braid: A New Paradigm for Art,” The Art Section website, , last accessed 5 May, 2021. 62 “Illustrated Timelines, Drawn by Mark Staff Brandl,” Dr Great Art website, , last accessed 30 April, 2021. 63 “The Braid Timeline Model of Art History,” on the Dr Great Art website, , last accessed 30 April, 2021.

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222

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. academicism 32 Action Painting 144 advertising 11, 29–31, 42, 49, 77 af Klint, Hilma 68 African-Americans 54 Aldridge, Alan 169, 203 n.48 Alighieri, Dante 82, 193 n.45 Alsdorf, Bridget 55, 189 n.41 Altieri, Charles 118, 198 n.3 Ammann, Daniel F. x, 14, 22, 90, 120–1, 135, 198 n.6, 199 n.8 Andina, Tiziana x–xi, 22, 46, 49, 73–4, 187 n.4, 187 n.6, 187 n.16, 192 n.15, 192 n.17 Anglo-American Aesthetics 71 Arakawa, Shusaku and Madeline Gins 68 Argyris, Chris 22, 190 n.63 Aristotle 17 Art concret 130 Atkins, Kim 139, 199 n.16 Auer, Jim 162, 202 n.39 Austin, John L. 73 Bakhtin, Mikhail 22, 58–60, 189 n.53 Bal, Mieke 138, 199 n.15 Ballou, Matt 56, 189 n.43 Baroque 78, 168 Barthes, Roland 73 Bate, W. Jackson 149, 200 n.1 Bauhaus 109 Beardsley, Monroe 20 Bell, Sinclair 202 n.33 Bergman, Gustav 96 Bey, Dawoud 37, 100, 189 n.46 Black, Max 70, 191 n.5 Black, Moe 20 Bloom, Harold 2, 4–5, 7–8, 11, 22, 32, 51, 59, 73, 83, 101, 106, 109, 111, 116,

138, 149, 181 n.17, 182 n.26, 182 n.29, 182 n.32, 185 n.17, 194 n.55, 198 n.1 Boetschi, Charles 29, 58, 123, 129–37, 132, 136, 146, 199 n.4, 199 n.7 Bois, Yves-Alain 137, 199 n.13 Boutin, Monique 188 n.37 Brandom, Robert 73 Briskman, Larry 119, 198 n.4 Brockman, John 38, 186 n.33 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder 82, 193 n.46 Bruno, Giuliana 10, 182 n.31 Bruns, Gerald L. 13, 183 n.34 Bryson, Norman 111, 197 n.30 Bullock, Leonard 29, 58, 129, 137–46, 141, 146, 199 n.10, 200 n.19, 200 n.20 Buren, Daniel 54 Burgess, Anthony 119 Burns, Robert 195 n.69 Cage, John 89 Caniff, Milton 172 Carnap, Rudolf 73 Carrier, David ii, x, 4, 22, 40, 49, 51, 55, 57, 71, 74, 84, 167, 173, 181 n.18, 187 n.17, 188 n.22, 189 n.47, 192 n.19, 194 n.57, 203 n.46, 203 n.59 Carroll, Lawrence 51, 55, 74, 187 n.17, 189 n.47 Carroll, Noël ii, 4, 10–11, 22–3, 27–32, 35–7, 41–2, 71, 77, 82–3, 121, 182 n.21, 184 n.18, 184 n.3, 184 n.4, 185 n.11, 185 n.16, 185 n.21, 186 n.30, 192 n.29, 194 n.56, 198 n.13 Cavell, Stanley 20, 183 n.11 Certeau, Michel de 111, 197 n.31 Cézanne, Paul 42, 55, 83 Chelsea, David 169, 203 n.50

223

224

Index

Chicago x, 1, 54, 87, 144, 150, 200 n.3 Chisholm, Roderick 73 Chomsky, Noam 4 Christopher, St. 18–19, 47, 111 Clark, Sonya 84–5, 98, 194 n.58, 194 n.59 Coalter, Colleen xi, 14 Cohen, Ted 78, 193 n.33 Colan, Gene xi Colectivo Binni Cubi 58–9, 189 n.52 College Art Association 3, 150, 187 n.17, 200 n.3 Conceptual Art 34 Conceptualism 34 Conger, William 86–8, 194 n.64, 195 n.68, 203 n.49 Constable, John 87 Continental Theory 39, 51 Coulson, Seana 80, 193 n.37 Courbet, Gustave 33, 160, 202 n.27 COVID-19 14 Crumb, Robert 172 Dada 89, 113, 130, 144 Dale, Heather 100, 196 n.11 Damisch, Hubert 137 Danto, Arthur C. xi, 4, 22, 28, 39, 46, 49, 71, 73–4, 95, 160–1, 163, 170, 173, 181 n.11, 184 n.5, 186 n.38, 187 n.5, 187 n.17, 192 n.16, 192 n.18, 196 n.2, 202 n.25, 202 n.28 Daum Tholl, Susan von 161, 202 n.34 Davey, Frank 5–6, 182 n.23 Davidson, Donald 21, 70, 73, 184 n.16, 191 n.7 Dawkins, Richard 112, 197 n.32 de Chirico, Giorgio 55 de Kooning, Willem 138, 140, 142, 144, 200 n.24 de Man, Paul xii, 1–2, 73, 181 n.4 De Mey, Marc 87, 195 n.65 de Saussure, Ferdinand 59 Deal, Raoul 37, 61, 190 n.64 Deconstructivism 7, 70 Deleuze, Gilles 54 Derrida, Jacques 1–2, 6, 54, 73, 151, 181 nn.1–3 Descamp, Mary Therese 18, 183 n.3 Dewey, John 22, 61, 188 n.37, 190 n.63 Diao, David 138

Dickie, George xi, 22, 39, 71, 173 Dickinson, Emily 119 Diener, Carmen 163 DiYanni, Robert 78, 192 n.31 Doelker, Christian 28, 86, 173, 184 n.7, 194 n.63, 203 n.60 Donatello 162 Dondis, Donis A. 67–8, 191 Donne, John 9 Donner, Christa 58, 189 n.49 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 60 Dubnick, Randa 54, 188 n.34 Duchamp, Marcel 68, 90, 160, 162, 170 Duffy, Damian 58, 172, 189 n.51, 203 n.55 Dürer, Albrecht 70, 191 n.8 Dutton, Denis 2, 181 n.6, 198 n.4 Eck, Diana L. 161, 202 n.30 Eco Art 30–1 Einspruch, Franklin 161, 202 n.31 Eisner, Will 162, 167, 172 El Refaie, Elisabeth 35, 75–6, 82, 185 n.23, 192 n.23, 192 n.25, 194 n.49 Elkins, James xi, 47–8, 137, 149, 155, 187 n.10, 199 n.12, 200 n.2, 201 n.10 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 90, 139 Empson, William 19–20 Epperson, Gordon 40, 186 n.40 Ernst, Max 97 Euripides 143, 200 n.23 fascism 14 Fauconnier, Gilles 56, 79–80, 103–4, 189 n.42, 193 n. 36, 197 n.21 Feininger, Lyonel 172 Feminist criticism 39, 70 Fischer, Fritz 143, 200 n.22 Fish, Stanley 73 Fitzpatrick, Tony 144 Forceville, Charles J. 27, 29, 184 n.1, 192 n.27 Formalism (Artworld) 1, 6–7, 9, 12, 32, 39, 70, 135 Forrest, Erik 67, 191 n.1 Forrester, Stefan B. 22 Foster, Hal 165 Foucault, Michel 54, 73 Fricker, H. R. 99

Index Friedman, Julia 55, 189 n.40 Fukuyama, Francis 159, 201 n.19 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 4, 22, 61, 122, 181 n.9, 190 n.61 Gal, Ofer 70, 191 n.9 Galileo, Galileo 83 Gaut, Berys 22, 71 Geary, James 45, 47–8, 187 n.2, 187 n.3, 187 n.8, 187 n.12 Gibbons, Alison 27, 184 n.2 Gibbons, Dave 201 n.13 Goatly, Alexander 194 n.50 Goehr, Lydia 71, 191 n.11 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 74, 167, 203 n.44 Gogh, Vincent van 37, 83–4, 105–8, 123, 144, 197 nn.22–4, 197 nn.26–8 Gombrich, Ernst 152, 160, 163, 169, 200 n.6, 202 n.26 Goodman, Nelson 20, 22, 71, 183 n.10 Gould, Chester 172 Gould, Glen 121 Gracyk, Theodore 121, 198 nn.11–12 Grady, Joseph E. 80, 193 n.37 Greenberg, Clement 160, 173, 201  nn.23–4 Grice, H. Paul 110, 197 n.29 Haacke, Hans 54 Hardt, Michael 60, 190 n.56 Harries, Karsten 50, 137, 187 n.18, 199 n.11 Hart, Elizabeth 38–9, 186 n.36 Hartman, Geoffrey 2 Hasegawa, Machiko 165 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 159–60, 163, 201 n. 20 Hellenism 161, 168 Hempel, Carl 73 Hermeneutics 39, 70 Herriman, George 172 Historicism 161 Hogarth, William 166 Hoke, Jeffrey 53, 182 n.27, 188 n.30 Hokusai, Katsushika 106 Homer 83n 194 n.52 Homerin, Th. Emil x, 14, 64, 190 n.71, 191 n.72

225

homospatiality 36–7, 75, 77, 83 Huizinga, Johan 89, 195 hyperbole 10, 41–2, 45, 59, 74, 77, 101, 125, 180 Iconosequentiality 101, 196 n.12 Imagism 110 Indurkhya, Bipin 80, 193 n.38 Jakobson, Roman 54 Jameson, Fredric 22, 32, 185 n.18 Jaynes, Julian 75, 192 n.22 Jennings, John 58, 172, 189 n.51, 203 n.55 Johnson, Ken 54, 188 n.36 Johnson, Mark 4–5, 10, 21, 38, 50, 75, 79, 81, 103, 117, 126, 181 n.15, 184 n.14, 186 n.34, 186 n.41, 188 n.21, 192 n.21, 192 n.24, 193 n.35, 193 n.41, 197 n.18, 197 n.20, 198 n.2, 198 n.17 Joyce, James 60, 109, 119, 198 n.5 Judd, Donald 130, 199 n.2 Kandinsky, Wassily 14, 183 n.35 Kant, Immanuel 22 Kaphar, Titus 36, 61–2, 185 n.27, 190 n.65 Kaplan, David 73 Kentridge, William 55, 189 n.39 Kerouac, Jack 119 Kim, Byron 89, 131, 195 n.72 King, Frank 167, 172 Kirby, Jack 162, 165, 167, 169, 172 Knapp, Steven 71, 191 n.10 Kripke, Saul 73 Kristeva, Julia 4, 22, 60, 73, 139, 181 n.12, 190 n.60 Kunz Brandl, Cornelia xi Kurtzman, Harvey 99, 172 Kuspit, Donald 2, 22, 85, 181 n.7, 195 n.62 Lacan, Jacques 73 Lakoff, George x, xii, 4–6, 10, 15, 17, 21, 38–40, 45, 75–6, 79, 81, 93, 100–3, 110, 117, 126, 129, 131, 181 nn.15–16, 182 n.25, 183 n.36, 183 n.2, 184 nn.13– 14, 186 n.34, 186 n.41, 186 n.1, 192 n.21, 192 n.24, 193 nn.34–5, 193 nn. 41–3, 195 n.1, 197 nn.14–15, 197 nn.17–18, 197 n.20, 197 n.29, 198 n.2, 198 n.17, 199 n.1, 199 n.5

226 Landy, Francis 113, 197 n.33 Langlotz, Andreas x, 3 Lasker, Jonathan 5–6, 138, 144 Leonardo da Vinci 22 Levinson, Jerrold 22 Lipinski, Lisa 53, 188 n.31 Lodge, David 135 Logical Positivism 18, 69–70 Lombardi, Mark 68 Lum, Ken 57, 189 n.45 Lyotard, Jean-François 150, 200 n.4 Magritte, René 53–4, 96, 188 n.33, 196 n.4 Mainardi, Patricia 150 Maltz-Leca, Leora 55, 189 n.38 Manet, Édouard 138 Mannerism 168 Marshall, Kerry James 29, 54, 100, 184 nn.8–9, 188 Martin, Agnes 134 Marxism 39, 70 Mazzuchelli, David 121 McCay, Winsor 172 McCloud, Scott 166, 202 n.42 Mehretu, Julie 138 Merleau Ponty, Maurice 53 Meszmer, Alex and Reto Müller 61, 100, 190 n.62 Meyer, Leonard B. 76, 192 n.28 Michael, Walter Benn 71, 191 n.10 Michelangelo 158, 162, 168–9 Miller, J. Hillis 2 Millet, Jean-François 106 Milton, John 83, 172, 194 n.51 Minimalism 33, 89, 109, 123, 125, 130, 144 Mitchell, W. J. T. 21, 184 n.15 Modernism 1, 8, 37, 56, 101, 109, 115, 153, 156, 168 Molotiu, Andre 85, 150, 156, 194 nn.60–1, 201 n.15 Monet, Claude 106 Mongrel Art 53, 58 Moore, Alan 201 n.13 Moran, Richard 20 Morstein, Petra von 54, 188 n.32 Muldoon, Tim 161, 202 n.32 Myron 201 n.21

Index Nabokov, Vladimir 50, 187 n.20 Negri, Antonio 60, 190 n.56 Neo-Classicism 161 Neo-Conceptualism 113, 162 Neo-Expressionism 162 Neo-Freudianism 39, 70 Neuwirth, Donna 58 New Criticism 12 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 18, 22, 73–4, 183 n.4, 192 n.14 Nogier, Frédéric 78 Noland, Kenneth 33 noncompossibility 37, 75, 83 Oakley, Todd 80, 193 n.37 Ojha, Amitash 80, 82, 193 n.38, 194 n.48 Oldenburg, Claes 28, 84, 184 n.6 Oppenheim, Dennis 60, 190 n.55 Ortiz, Maria J. 80, 193 n.40 Ortony, Andrew 69, 191 n.4 Ostrow, Saul 87, 195 n.66 Paik, Nam June 123 Panter, Gary 172 pareidolia 30 Passmore, J. 71 Paul VI, Pope 19 Performative Aesthetics 39, 70 Perreault, John 173, 204 n.61 Perry, George 169, 203 n.48 Peterson, Matthew O. 49, 187 n.15 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 9 Phillips, Barbara J. 30, 185 n.10 Philo of Alexandria 13 Picasso, Pablo xii, 36, 60, 88, 139, 160, 168–9, 190 n.54, 195 n.70 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 121, 198 n.9 Plato 144 Pluralism 161–2, 170 Polányi, Michael 33, 185 n.19 Polke, Sigmar 140 Pollock, Jackson 55, 97, 140, 188 n.37 Pop Art 28, 112, 144, 161–2 Postmodernism 1–2, 8, 38, 72, 85, 101, 139, 153, 155–7, 168 Poststructuralism 1, 6, 33, 39, 70 Pragmatism 61 Prosch, Harry 33, 185 n.19

Index Proweller, William 36, 186 n.28 Pygmalion 96 Rahmani, Aviva 30–1, 185 n.14–15 Ramirez, Dan 51–3, 188 n.23–4, 188 n.26, 188 nn.28–9 Ramos, Jason 171, 203 n.53 Raphael 162 Rauschenberg, Robert 95, 101 Raymond, Alex 165 Reader-Response theory 39, 70 Reed, David 83, 138, 144, 162, 202 n.40 Rees, Michael 100, 196 n.9 Reinhardt, Ad 121 Relational Aesthetics 39, 70 Renaissance 30, 94, 100, 138, 158–9, 162, 168 Richards, I. A. 20, 41, 75, 192 Richter, Gerhard 139 Ricoeur, Paul 20, 39, 71–2, 137, 139, 184 n.12, 186 n.37, 191 n.12, 199 n.9 Ridder van Rappard, Anton 107 Rimbaud, Arthur 45 Robbins, Trina 172, 203 n.57 Robins, Corinne 162, 202 n.38 Rococo 150, 161, 168 Rohner, Stefan 124, 198 n.16 Rollins, Tim and K.O.S 37 Romanticism 52, 161 Romberger, James 99, 196 n.7 Rorty, Richard 21, 96, 196 n.3 Rosenberg, Maddy 55 Rosenblum, Robert 107, 197 n.25 Rosenstein, Leon 89, 195 n.73 Rothko, Marc 122 Saatchi & Saatchi 78 Salinas, Jay 58 Sampaio, Cristina 35, 185 n.24 Sanford, Tom 59 Schnabel, Julian xii, 88, 195 n.71 Schön, Donald 22, 190 n.63 Schor, Mira 60, 190 n.59 Schrödinger, Erwin 153, 201 n.7 Schulz, Charles M. 172 Schwabsky, Barry 5–6, 182 n.24 Sedlmayr, Hans 161, 202 n.37 Segar, E.C. 172 Selden, Raman 60, 190 n.57

227

Serig, Daniel 36, 186 n.29 Shakespeare, William 8, 17, 182 n.28 Sharpe, R. A. 4, 19–20, 22, 62, 181 n.14, 183 n.9, 190 n.70 Shiff, Richard 51, 188 n.24 Shusterman, Richard 22 Sickles, Noel 165 Skulsky, Harold 20 Smith, Sidonie 68, 191 n.3 Sontag, Susan 22 Spector, Buzz 99–100, 102, 196 n.8 Spencer, Edmund 83 Spencer, Herbert 139, 200 n.17 Spiegelman, Art 171–2, 201 n.14 St. Clair, Robert N. 35–6, 185 n.25 Steen, Francis F. 38, 186 n.35 Steinhoff, Judith 161, 202 n.35 Stella, Frank 96, 142, 196 n.5, 200 n.21 Steranko, James 99, 167, 169, 203 n.47 Stevens, Wallace 50, 187 n.19 Stockholder, Jessica 98, 101 Stroll, Avrum 40, 186 n.39 Structuralism 12, 39, 70 Surrealism 28 Taber, Mark G. 56–7, 189 n.44 Taylor, Sue 87, 195 n.67 Tezuka, Osamu 165 Thunberg, Greta 35 Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) 15, 137 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 137–8 Toepffer, Rodolphe 156, 167, 169, 201 n.16, 203 n.43, 203 n.45 Toker, Franklin 161, 202 n.36 Tronchin, Francesca 161, 202 n.33 Turner, Mark 4, 10, 56, 79–81, 102–4, 110, 129, 131, 181 n.16, 182 n.25, 189 n.42, 193 n.36, 193 n.41, 193 n.43, 197 n.15, 197 n.21, 197 n.29, 199 n.1, 199 n.5 United Migrant Opportunity Services 61 Urios-Aparisi, Eduardo 27, 184 nn.1–2, 192 n.27 Ursprung, Philip x, 3, 181 n.8 van Eyck, Jan 87 Vasari, Giorgio 158–9, 163, 201 n.18 Velázquez, Diego 142 Ventura, Héliane 5, 182 n.23

228 Vermeer, Johannes 135 Veronese, Paolo 137 Villedary, Gaëlle 30, 185 n.12–13 Viola, Bill 82, 123, 194 n.47, 198 n.15 Walton, Kendall 20 Ware, Chris 172 Warhol, Andy 161, 170, 202 n.29 Weiner, Lawrence 33–4, 185 n.20 West, Cornel x, 4, 22, 61–2, 181 n.13, 190 nn.66–9 Wheeler, Samuel 73, 191 n.13

Index Whitman, Walt 140, 200 n.18 Whitten, Jack 97–8, 196 n.6 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 201 n.23 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 40, 52, 73, 188 n.25 Wölfflin, Heinrich 159–60, 183, 168, 201 nn.22–3 Wollheim, Richard 48, 121, 187 n.14, 198 n.10 Worm Farm Institute 189 n.50 Zanker, Andreas T. 18, 183 n.5