Phenomenologies of Art and Vision: A Post-Analytic Turn 9781441119735, 9781441199164, 9781472545800, 9781441130679

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Phenomenologies of Art and Vision

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Also Available From Bloomsbury Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, edited by Owen Hulatt Art and Institution, Rajiv Kaushik Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, Joseph J. Tanke The Phenomenology of Modern Art, Paul Crowther The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition, Tiziana Andina

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Phenomenologies of Art and Vision A Post-Analytic Turn Paul Crowther

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Paul Crowther, 2013 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. Paul Crowther has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-1-4411-3067-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crowther, Paul. Phenomenologies of art and vision : a post-analytic turn / Paul Crowther. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-1973-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-9916-4 (epub : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-3067-9 (ebook pdf : alk. paper) 1. Art – Philosophy. 2. Phenomenology and art. I. Title. N70.C885 2013 701’.17 – dc23 2012028358

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Painting as an Art: Wollheim and the Subjective Dimension 2 Abstract Art and Transperceptual Space: Wolheim and Beyond 3 Truth in Art: Heidegger against Contextualism 4 Space, Place and Sculpture: Heidegger’s Pathways 5 Vision in Being: Merleau-Ponty and the Depths of Painting 6 Subjectivity, the Gaze and the Picture: Developing Lacan 7 Dimensions in Time: Dufrenne’s Phenomenology of Pictorial Art Conclusion: A Preface to Post-Analytic Phenomenology Notes Bibliography Index

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List of Illustrations Figure 1.1: Figure 1.2: Figure 2.1: Figure 2.2: Figure 2.3: Figure 2.4: Figure 3.1: Figure 4.1: Figure 4.2: Figure 5.1: Figure 6.1: Figure 7.1: Figure 7.2: Figure 7.3:

Paul Cezanne, Auvers, Panoramic View, 1873/1875 Paul Cezanne, Le Chateau de Medan, c. 1880 Hans Hoffman, Pompeii, 1959 Franz Kline, Meryon, 1960–1961 Fiona Rae, Night Vision Newman, Barnett (1905–1970): Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950–1951 Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Shoes, 1886–1889, Paris Michelangelo, David, 1504; a replica placed in the original location that the statue was created to occupy Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993 (demolished 1994) Paul Cezanne, Gustave Geffroy (between 1895 and 1896) Hans Holbein, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘The Ambassadors’), 1533 John Brett Ynys Mon, 1875 John Liston Byam Shaw, Study for Love, 1898 Mojca Oblak, Frames, 2008

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Acknowledgements Chapter 4 was first published as ‘Space, Place, and Sculpture: Working with Heidegger’ in the Continental Philosophy Review, June 2007, pp. 151–70. I owe thanks to Aengus Daly for his help in preparing the manuscript.

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Introduction

Many pictures and sculptures are intrinsically meaningful. They fascinate and intrigue in excess of any practical functions they might serve. But how can this be? On what basis do pictures and sculptures have intrinsic significance?1 Of course, it might seem that the very idea of visual art having such a character is no longer viable. Such a view – the objection might proceed – is an ‘essentialist’ hangover from discredited foundationalist philosophies.2 However, this relativist objection is not compelling.3 Indeed, one might argue that there is a strong case for a modified foundationalism, a position which will be explored throughout this book, and in particular, Chapter 5.4 I return, then, to the question of what it is that allows images to be so fascinating? What is their intrinsic meaning, and how does this engage with fundamental truths concerning our relation to the universe? The clearest way to answer this is through consideration of how images become art. For it is here that pictures and sculptures are enjoyed for their own sake rather than for the visual information they convey, or their persuasive effects in respect of it. Such enjoyment is not only aesthetic, but is so in a distinctively visual way. There are two philosophical traditions that are of special, continuing relevance, to the understanding of visual art (Marxist aesthetics having fallen by the wayside, somewhat). The first is that of analytic philosophy. Since the 1960s, it has produced a very extensive body of important work concerning the logic and perception of pictorial representation.5 There have also been two very substantial accounts of the artistic status of the visual arts. The first is from Arthur Danto,6 whose discussions of the definition of art for the most part centre on visual examples. In his approach, the specifically phenomenal and ‘exhibited’ properties of art media are, in effect, made secondary to the role played by theoretical and institutional contexts in clinching the visual work’s status as art. (Indeed, the aesthetic plays no significant role at all in this strategy.) Now I have shown the difficulties of Danto’s position at great length in a number of other works7 and will not rehearse them again now. Rather, I will move on to the second – and more relevant – analytic philosopher, namely, Richard Wollheim. His book Painting as an Art is the single most sustained philosophical treatment of its topic.8 Indeed, some of the ideas he broaches have real potential for further development, but only if disconnected from more problematic notions and strategies.

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One such difficulty can be indicated now. Wollheim places great emphasis on painting’s expressive properties. He takes these to embody specific emotions – such as joy, sadness, melancholy and so on – but there is something deeply perplexing about this linkage. It might well be thought that the only pictures or sculptures that express definite, individual emotions of the ‘joy’ and ‘sadness’ kind are rather obvious simplistic works, that is, pieces that are kitschy rather than artistic. This is not to say that such emotions are not involved in pictorial art; it is just that they are small elements in a much deeper complex of cognitive engagements. We might well call this expressive, but it is expressive in much more intricate terms than the tie-in to specific emotions suggests. For example, is Michelangelo’s Last Judgement ‘unhappy’, ‘victorious’, ‘horrifying’, ‘uncanny’, ‘claustrophobic’, ‘liberating’, ‘gracious’ or, perhaps, expressive of some other emotion? In fact, all these terms (and many others besides) could describe its many expressive aspects, and still leave much more to be said.9 To his great credit, Wollheim is aware of the oversimplification that is involved in the link between expression and emotion, and, in this, he stands out from many analytic philosophers. Indeed, as we shall see, he even acknowledges that the level of feeling that painting engages with may be beyond what can be articulated in language. All well and good. If there are aesthetic experiences that are unique to the visual arts, then they will, indeed, not be adequately paraphraseable in language. At the same time, however, they will not – at pain of unintelligibility – be entirely unavailable to linguistic expression. The thing is, therefore, not to remain content (as Wollheim is) to use an admittedly oversimplified model, but rather to find analytic strategies and philosophical vocabularies that will begin to probe expression at the appropriate, deeper levels. This involves focusing on the fact that visual representation is an intervention on the visual. It makes the world appear differently, through the artist’s style of handling (or, in some cases, organizing) the medium. Whatever expressive significance the work has, it is achieved through aesthetic/cognitive transformations of the visual appearance of that which is represented. To understand these transformations requires, therefore, sustained consideration of how pictures and sculptures intervene in our general perceptual immersion in the visual world, and, indeed, how they change our relation to Being in the broadest sense. We need, in other words, an ontology of artistic representation and experience that reaches far beyond Wollheim’s analytic approach, and indeed, beyond the more general limitations of analytic aesthetics itself. Now it is significant that Wollheim pays the closest attention to how paintings appear and the ways in which they engage both the artist and the spectator, perceptually. In this respect, Wollheim’s work – while analytic in its basic orientation – has an important phenomenological emphasis. This allows a methodological bridge to be made to the second tradition that addresses the fundamentals of visual art in substantial terms, namely existential phenomenology. Indeed, if Wollheim leaves us in the subjective dimension (somewhat), this second tradition allows us to think through the relation of painting and art in much deeper, ontological terms. Philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan10 and the much neglected Mikel Dufrenne, for example, have illuminated different aspects of

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Introduction

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how visual art changes our relation to Being, and the basis of our perceptual inherence in things. However, a serious methodological problem arises. Much work by the aforementioned scholars is extremely opaque – often deliberately so – on the grounds that a more elliptical idiom of expression will be truer to the ambiguities of art’s involvement in our fundamental relation to Being, or in our bodily insertion in the world (or both). This is a viable strategy, but one that, perhaps, underestimates the scope of sustained philosophical argument that is mindful of the qualitative division between itself and artistic representation. Such underestimation is reflected by (some) recent scholarship in the field. Commentators on phenomenological texts often run with ideas rather than arguments. Instead of following the selected thinker’s arguments closely, extracting their essence and testing them in detail against concrete artistic examples, the interpreters prefer to address relations between phenomenological thinkers – emphasizing an interesting idea in one, relating it to an interesting idea from one or two others and then thinking them through together.11 Now strategies based on the linking of ideas alone can sometimes achieve impressive results,12 but they also run further risks. For example, they can give rise to pastiche – a tendency to think, primarily, within the terms of the linked ideas, without achieving a critical distance from them. Indeed, by linking together scattered ideas and conclusions in relation to a problem, difficulties of truth and meaning in those ideas and conclusions themselves tend to be overlooked. The thinkers are treated, in effect, as authorities – repositories of wisdom that are to be drawn upon, piously, rather than questioned. This approach has a further drawback. It tends to treat sustained analyses of the aforementioned thinkers (i.e. approaches which explain key terms and identify and follow up basic trajectories of argument in a careful and elaborated critical way) as no more than textbook stuff, a mere ‘introduction to’ so and so. Even worse, it takes such analysis to be alien to the dense and elliptical strategies of presentation adopted by the thinkers in question. To analyse, or – even worse – to criticize ideas systematically in a way that highlights serious errors and contradictions is dismissed as inappropriate.13 However, this is a mistake. For even if an exposition is elliptical, ellipticality in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Dufrenne is not obscurity for the sake of pseudo-profundity and the edification of true believers, but a challenge to follow, to explain, to argue and to contest. Indeed, by identifying and engaging with the discursive substance of a philosophical position rather than its scattered insights and conclusions, much more of its problem-solving potential can be realized. A more analytic approach is also demanded on practical grounds. For insofar as phenomenology involves a specialized vocabulary and strategies, its magnificent insights tend to be kept at the level of exchanges among devotees, rather than made accessible to a wider philosophical audience. Analysis is needed, if only to, as it were, ‘spread the word’. The benefits of this for a philosophical viewpoint are obvious. A tradition of analytic interpretation has, for example, proven continuingly fruitful in relation to Kant’s philosophy. Whereas phenomenology is a tradition that appears to be losing influence

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(in contrast with other strands of ‘continental philosophy’), the influence and status of Kant’s thought have been sustained and massively expanded through the systematic exposition and critical analysis devoted to his individual works and arguments. Such work suggests, indeed, that the sustained exposition of a text or argument can, in itself, sometimes amount to a significant new interpretation, rather than just an ‘introduction’ to the ideas contained therein. On practical grounds, then, it can be argued that phenomenological works might benefit from an alternative, robustly post-analytic treatment. This entails the possibility of a conceptual reinvigoration. A further – moral – argument can be broached, also. It holds that the importance assigned by phenomenological thinkers to how their arguments are constructed is actually abused if approached in anything less than extended expository, critical and reconstructive, analytic terms. This amounts, in other words, to the ethical demand that, if one engages with a thinker, then one must do them the justice of careful and detailed attention to the structure of what they argue, as well as to their stimulating conclusions. A sustained phenomenology of argument is needed just as much as a phenomenology of perception or Being. Should interpretation fall short of this, it runs the risk of turning authoritative thought into authoritarian rule. Individual insights and concepts should be considered in this light, also. Consider, for example, Heidegger’s pairing of ‘world and earth’ and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’. These terms are used with insistency and repetition by the two thinkers, respectively, but insistency and repetition do not, of themselves, develop these concepts in terms of their philosophical content or scope of application (a fact that many interpreters of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty do not understand).14 For their full potential to be developed, we need detailed analyses and explanations of what they actually mean (which is, by no stretch of the imagination, self-evident), and, where possible, further, critical development. In relation to the philosophy of art, this is all the more urgent. Phenomenology provides material that allows the expressive character of painting and sculpture to be explained at a much deeper level than analytic philosophy does. However, it has, ironically enough, a radical shortcoming in precisely the area that is most central to ‘clinching’ the image’s intrinsic meaning. For, as I shall argue throughout this book, where all the thinkers addressed fall short is in respect of proper criteria of the relation between art and the aesthetic, and, in particular, the role played by comparative historical criteria in the relation. Phenomenology clarifies the main ontological factors involved in how picturing and sculpture become art. However, it does not engage with those critical relations that mediate these, and which enable them to be perceived in aesthetic terms. By failing to negotiate this, it does not do full justice to the fact that visual art expresses ontological truth in far more than just philosophical terms. In order to bring all this to the surface, phenomenology must be activated and negotiated through a more analytic perspective. This is not a plea for some cheerful philosophical ecumenicism or ‘pluralism’ that should be pursued for its own sake. Rather, there is a complementary mutual need. Analytic aesthetics needs phenomenology in order to expand its ontological scope and solve the problem of expression, and phenomenology needs to supplement its superior descriptive strengths through the

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discursive force and lucidity of analytic philosophy. Overall, we need a post-analytic phenomenology. What I propose, then, is first, a consideration of Wollheim’s analytic philosophy of painting. Then a going-beyond it – based on key phenomenological contributions – developed through post-analytic strategies. These strategies involve, specifically, an attentiveness to conceptually connected terms and structures of argument, the sustained way in which arguments (or constellations of ideas) are organized logically, consideration of potential objections and counterarguments, clear explanation of ambiguous terms and a willingness to take a critical distance – where necessary – from the ideas being presented. The upshot will be a proper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the theory. This will allow the weaknesses to be rectified, or at least will prepare the grounds for such rectification. Before describing the structure of my book in more specific terms, a few qualifications should be made. First, painting, sculpture and conceptual tendencies are the main focus of the present work. I will hope to offer a dedicated phenomenology of architecture in a future book. Now, it may seem that to address painting and sculpture in detail is anachronistic in the present age. For surely, in the context of globalization and the advent of new technologies, idioms such as painting and sculpture are somewhat passé. I have dealt with the artistic importance of new media in great detail elsewhere.15 That importance by no means supplants the more traditional idioms. Whilstsoever humans are embodied, these idioms will always have a special significance. It may seem otherwise. Contemporary global consumerism is sustained by an ideology of inbuilt obsolence that extends to ideas, as well as to consumer products, and the technologies whereby they are produced. We exist in a culture that is driven by a craving for novelty – even though the novelty craved for is not necessary in any significant practical sense. (It functions as entertainment.) Visual media – in the form of television, video, computer games and digital imagery in general – play key roles in this craving. However, this comes at a price. New technologies produce imagery that is dependent on electrical activation, and which – if the energy source is lost, or the hardware is damaged – becomes unavailable to vision. Painting and sculpture (including minimal and assemblage work) are not so dependent. They endure and have an ontological self-sufficiency that allows them to exist alongside us, sharing the same places and being physically present, even though their raison d’être is to present virtual meaning. Their visibility and space-occupancy – like ours – are not things that can be switched off or which may require repairs in order to operate properly. As visible products of gestural activity or design, painting and sculpture allow an intimacy of familiar and stable existential contact that electronic media do not. What I am describing here is more than a cosy ‘alongsideness’ between us and paintings and sculptures. For, in such works, the physicality of the medium is integral to the emergence of virtual meaning. The character of the computer screen is not a part of the meaning of the digital image even though the image is dependent on it. Such imagery is disembodied illusion. Painting and sculpture, in contrast, present meaning as emergent from the tangible visible world. Through this, they aesthetically

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symbolize – in partial terms, at least – the emergence of consciousness and its inherence in the visible. It should be emphasized, also, that to privilege art based on new media embodies a profoundly Western bias. The great bulk of visual image-making in non-Western cultures continues to involve pictures and sculptures. One other qualification needs to be made. My discussions of Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and (to a lesser degree) Dufrenne outline their general theories in great detail before relating these to the visual arts. My exposition of Wollheim’s and Heidegger’s general ontologies, in contrast, is rather more abbreviated. There are two justifications for this. First, Wollheim’s treatment of painting does not invoke any detailed background philosophy. It is relatively self-contained, and such broader connections that are relevant can be raised in passing rather than in preparation. In Heidegger’s case – and at risk of scandalizing devotees – his key notion of ontological difference as the Being of beings is relatively straightforward. The great profundity of Heidegger is in the way he explores the ramifications of this in different philosophical and cultural contexts. Merleau-Ponty’s, Lacan’s and Dufrenne’s ontologies, in contrast, require much more clarification in order for their basic character even to be understood. Indeed, this level of exposition is warranted further in that they ground their approach to the relevant art forms on complex and distinctive ideas concerning the specific ontology of vision’s relation to Being. It goes without saying that to achieve a comprehensive phenomenology of the visual arts, the Being of vision per se, as well as the relevant art forms, must be given due attention. These issues aside, while this book can act as an advanced introduction to phenomenologies of art and vision, its main intention is to make a substantial new contribution to knowledge in the field. This latter goal will be realized through the very extensive exposition, critique and revision of each thinker’s position that informs every chapter. (It should be emphasized, also, that, in many respects, even my expositions of their relevant arguments tend go beyond existing interpretative frameworks – precisely because they are approached from the post-analytic viewpoint.) The book’s more specific strategy is as follows. Chapter 1 expounds and analyses Wollheim’s account of painting as an art. I identify the strengths of the theory, in particular, the importance he assigns to ‘Ur-painting’, and to the correlated notions of ‘seeing-as’ and ‘twofoldness’. However, I also show the shortcomings of his approach in relation, especially, to his understanding of ‘style’ and ‘expression’. (These weaknesses, are, in effect, what the rest of my book will endeavour to overcome.) Chapter 2 considers Wollheim’s approach to abstract art, and both modifies and significantly extends it in new directions, by reintroducing a concept from Wollheim’s early work – namely, ‘seeing-as’ – and linking this to a notion inspired by Merleau-Ponty, namely the transperceptual. A major upshot of my analyses of Wollheim is the recognition that the notion of expression in visual art has to be grounded ontologically, rather than in the mainly subjective terms that Wollheim countenances. The remaining chapters address some of the many different aspects that might figure in such an ontology.

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Chapter 3 analyses Heidegger’s general philosophy of art with special reference to his treatment of visual idioms as disclosures of the Being of being. I rectify its shortcomings vis-à-vis the work’s aesthetic status, but am at pains, also, to defend Heidegger’s approach from the contextualist criticisms of Meyer Schapiro. Chapter 4 continues this strategy by addressing, in detail, the extremely complex and condensed arguments in Heidegger’s rather neglected final essay on ‘Art and Space’. This essay offers crucial insights into the ontological status of sculpture and its disclosure of the Being of place. Again, significant modifications of Heidegger’s position are made, and related to contemporary sculptural and electronic idioms. In Chapter 5, sustained attention is turned to Merleau-Ponty’s extensive discussions of painting. His linkages of painting to the disclosure of Being through embodiment, reversibility, ‘flesh’ and vision are explored and developed in some detail. It is argued that, despite its general excellences, Merleau-Ponty’s approach is limited through a misunderstanding of how the specific pictorial structures of painting transform and aesthetically idealize our visual perception of Being (through interventions on the temporality of vision). Chapter 6 takes this approach further by analysing Lacan’s complex insights concerning the relation among vision, subjectivity and picturing. Particular emphasis is given to Lacan’s important points concerning the picture’s link to Desire, its intersubjective significance and its status as a visual arresting of gesture. However, it is argued again – as in the case of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty – that Lacan does not do justice to the aesthetic and artistic aspect of picturing, and its comparative historical mediation. In Chapter 7, Mikel Dufrenne’s neglected but profound explorations of the links between pictorial art and temporality are investigated. His key terms are explained and developed in directions that go far beyond what Dufrenne himself countenances. Again, inadequacies in his understanding of the notion of art, and its comparative historical mediation, are highlighted. By way of conclusion, I summarize the main arguments of the book and identify the common flaw in all the thinkers addressed – namely, a misunderstanding of the aesthetic, and how, in art, its emergence is mediated, necessarily by a comparative horizon of stylistic originality. I trace this difficulty, further, to a misunderstanding of the relation between pre-reflective and reflective judgement, and end the book by spelling out the need for a post-analytic phenomenological aesthetics.

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Painting as an Art: Wollheim and the Subjective Dimension

Introduction There are extensive discussions of visual art throughout Wollheim’s work. However, his book Painting as an Art offers arguments especially relevant to the present work.1 The book is addressed to a broad rather than specifically philosophical audience, but has, nevertheless, formidable conceptual substance – both in its general theory of painting and its searching phenomenology of spectatorial experience. Indeed, as well as offering the most comprehensive analytic account of painting as an art, Wollheim also assigns decisive roles to intention and expression – two of recent analytic aesthetics’ most favoured concepts.2 He is committed to an ‘internalist’ conception of painting’s artistic status. This centres on the relation between the activity from which paintings issue, the way it is practiced and the background knowledge (or ‘cognitive stock’) whereby the spectator recognizes a particular painting to be a work of art. Part one of this chapter addresses painting as an activity, and the key concepts of ‘Ur-painting’ and ‘style’ through which Wollheim clarifies it. Part two considers his account of the spectator’s understanding, and, in particular, the decisive relation between expressive perception and expression through painting. In Parts three and four, sustained critical appraisals of Wollheim’s key concepts are offered. The former focuses on difficulties accruing to his theory of style, and the latter on the problematics of his understanding of the relation between art and expression. In Conclusion, I consider and refute two more general defences of Wolheim’s position, and go on to identify the deep-seated problems at the root of his difficulties.

Part one The starting point for Wollheim’s philosophy of painting is a basic theory of action. For him, intentional acts are intentional relative to a description. Of course, an individual act can be the subject of many descriptions; but they do not all pick out its intentional core. Wollheim offers, accordingly, the following refinement. Corresponding to each description of an action is a thought, and an action is intentional under a certain description if what guides the person’s action is the corresponding thought. A thought guides an action when it both causes and forms its character.3

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Now since painting is an intentional activity, the ways in which it is practised will embody the particular descriptions – or ‘thoughts’ under which it is intentional. Most important here are the ways in which those intentions are formed and changed on the basis of new guiding descriptions. In order to understand these intention-guiding descriptions, Wollheim introduces the notion of ‘Ur-painting’ – a thought model that considers painting in terms of the activity’s most basic characteristics. He presents the model in six descriptive steps. Each of these involves a ‘thematization’, that is, a description of some aspect of painting which then becomes a thought that guides the painter’s intentions and practice. These thematizations are, according to Wollheim, necessary to painting practised as an art. 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

The model starts with an agent placed next to a support, who places marks on the support using a charged instrument. This is the most basic description under which painting as an act is intentional. As marks are placed on the support, one part of the surface will become obscured by them, leaving a contrasting (and decreasing) unmarked area. The agent may then become attentive to this relation, and, in placing marks on the surface, be influenced in what he or she does by the contrast between the marked area and the unmarked zone that borders it. The painter can become attentive to the fact that each time a mark is placed on the support, it lies at a certain distance from each of the edges. This description can then guide the painter’s action, in addition to the factors already described. The painter notices that there is a certain coalescence of placed marks into wholes or units wherein groups of them are seen as one. If the painter’s subsequent placing of marks is guided by this forming of groups of marks into unities, then, according to Wollheim ‘He has organized the motif.’4 Though constructing motifs intentionally, the painter notices a decisive new factor. For, in beholding them, a special kind of perceptual experience arises. As well as seeing the marks distributed on the surface per se, the painter comes, at the same time, to experience the marks as presenting something in front of, or standing out ahead of, something else. This experience of ‘seeing-in’ – orientated around the ‘twofoldness’ – ‘of seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the surface’5 is, according to Wollheim, not altogether new to the painter. He or she has seen things ‘in’ clouds, or stained walls and the like. However, the strategy of making things appear in front of other things can now guide the way the painter marks the surface. He or she forms ‘motifs’, and, in doing so, ‘thematizes the image.’6 The final and overriding thematization is that painting involves the realization of some purpose. It is only in relation to purpose that the various intentional aspects Wollheim has described can be coordinated as a unified activity, and the mere material of mark and support become the medium of a practice. In the broadest terms, the end in question here consists of the surface being endowed with content or meaning ‘and meaning may in turn be glossed as that which we understand when we understand a painting: when we understand not some fact about the painting, but the painting itself.’7 In effect, this means that we are concerned with how the painting realizes the artist’s intentions, rather than facts concerning its practical/informational function.

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Now Wollheim himself rather underestimates the significance of Ur-painting – suggesting that it might be regarded as something analogous to those models of a ‘state of nature’ popular in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century political theory. However, while these models are postulates devised for methodological use, Ur-painting is actually much more than this. In order to see why, it is important to disregard Wollheim’s presentation of it as a kind of narrative of discovery, and treat it instead as a characterization of compositional aspects which are basic to making a painting. Seen in this light, Wollheim’s model embodies a kind of phenomenological reduction that isolates the essence of painting as an activity. Painting, of course, serves all sorts of communicative functions, and is done with many different materials. However, if it is painting rather than some other visual practice, then all the factors that Wollheim describes are implicated in it to some degree. Whether it is oil, acrylic or watercolour, or drawing pure and simple, to make images using these media or idioms – however simple – demands attention to all the thematics that Wollheim describes.8 There is scope for a much deeper phenomenological development of Ur-painting. However, for present purposes, the more pressing concern is to show how the initial transition from painting, to painting considered as an art might be made. For Wollheim, the answer is found in the idea of that distinctively pictorial meaning which constitutes the last-mentioned thematizing factor. All paintings have it, but with many examples, we are interested in the specific use that the meaning is created for, rather than the content-creating act through which this use-value is made available. Painting as an art directs us towards the thematizing factors that are involved in this content-creating act, as such, and, more specifically, their relation to the individual painter’s intentions. In this respect, Wollheim centres pictorial meaning of the artistic kind on how it presents, (a) the artist’s mental state, (b) the way this causes him or her to mark the surface and (c) the mental state that results from the sensitive informed spectator’s perception of the marked surface. One might put it like this. Functional painting refers us to practically significant meanings determined by the relation between the work and specific ‘external’ cultural contexts; artistic painting refers us to the painter’s self-presentation within the internal resources of the work itself, as the locus of meaning. This self-presentation converges on a specific factor. As Wollheim puts it, Prominence on the surface ensues upon thematization in the head. But it need not. Sometimes it doesn’t, and, when it doesn’t this is because a process of deletion has been at work. When deletion operates, what happens is that an agent thematizes some feature of the work and then goes on to ensure that this feature of the work does not show up on the surface or shows up only in an alternative fashion.9

It seems odd to use the term ‘deletion’ here, in that the suppression of previously thematized features is surely most often achieved through accentuating new themata in a way that erases or diminishes emphases previously placed. However, whatever the case, Wollheim suggests that the most likely reason for deletion is the artist’s sense that it is no longer significant in terms of the artist’s own practice and that of his or her contemporaries and predecessors. This means that the function of deletion is to ensure

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continuing meaningfulness. Tradition or a sense of the past acts as a starting point for the present, both constraining and encouraging the painter to exceed these constraints through new departures. Now, it should be emphasized that the succession of thematizing emphases is not a continuing or a continuous process, and neither does it operate at a uniform pace throughout the artist’s career. The artist, as it were, ‘banks’ his or her advances. It is in relation to this that Wollheim introduces the focal concept of ‘style’. He notes the existence of general style – which encompasses universal factors (e.g. geometric, painterly or classicist tendencies); or historical periods (such as neoclassicism, or International Gothic) or, indeed, ‘schools’ (e.g. Giottesque, Nazarene, the Norwich School, etc.). However, for Wollheim, these general notions of style are mere shorthand for sets of characteristics. What is taken as constitutive of them changes on the basis of shifting perspectives in art history. In contrast to this, Individual style is the style of an individual painter. But not just of any individual painter: only of an individual painter who has one.10

This is the major point upon which all Wollheim’s arguments ultimately converge. For him, there is a conceptual link between having an individual style, and a painter being an artist. As I understand him, there are, again, six – rather complex aspects – to individual style. 1.

2.

3.

4.

The characteristics associated with it do not alter, though art historians may well struggle to formulate these, and disagree with one another, in relation to understanding the specific artist. Individual style is not (as in the general senses of the term) a mere shorthand for characteristics associated with it. Indeed, Wollheim emphasizes that ‘the style itself is distinct from the characteristics associated with it, and it is it that causes them to be as they are. Individual style is in the artist who has it, [indeed] . . . style has psychological reality.’11 Style, in other words, is a ‘psychological’ state that entails the artist’s absolute ownership of those characteristics that express it. Individual style has explanatory power in a way that more general notions do not. As Wollheim puts it, ‘If general style dropped out of our thinking, we should lose a tool of classification. If individual style dropped out of our thinking, we should lose a form of explanation – as well as losing sight of a piece of reality.’12 Individual style has this significance because (a) it allows us to explain why a particular painting by an artist who has a style looks the way that it does; (b) it can explain why two works by him or her – painted in reasonably close temporal proximity – look the way they do and (c) it can allow us to explain the dissimilarities between artists who have different styles. Individual style has a further, very complex diachronic historical aspect, whose bare exposition requires considerable detail. We are told, for example, that one painting can be stylistic, while another painting is not; or that the peculiarities of a specific painting can be explained by the fact of it being ‘non-stylistic’.

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The term ‘non-stylistic’ is of some importance, and Wollheim analyses it as follows. Its first and most obvious manifestation is in terms of the ‘pre-stylistic’. This consists of the phase before a style is actually formed (which entails as its corollary that it is only with an artist whose style is formed late that it is instructive to recognize some of his or her work as pre-stylistic). In respect of this notion, Wollheim compares and contrasts two paintings by Cezanne – Auvers, Panoramic View (c. 1874) and Le ChateauMedan (c. 1880) (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Wollheim suggests that Cezanne’s work even up to the mid-1870s can be regarded as pre-stylistic, and that this is shown in the difference between these two works. The former is on the way to what is achieved in the latter. Ironically, it is a strongly and firmly realized work, whereas the later painting is more exploratory. However, it is the later one wherein style is embodied, for all its tentativeness. Another aspect of the non-stylistic is that of the ‘post-stylistic’ – which, in Wollheim’s terms, consists of work done in the years after an artist’s individual style has collapsed. In this respect, the example of Guercino is cited – along with evidence that his individual vision become atrophied through the heavy influence of Domenichino and Roman classicism.

Figure 1.1 Paul Cezanne, Auvers, Panoramic View, 1873/1875; oil on canvas: 25 5/8 × 32 in. (65.2 × 81.3 cm). Source : Mr and Mrs Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial, the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Figure 1.2 Paul Cezanne, Le Chateau de Medan, c. 1880; oil on canvas: 59.1 × 72.4 cm. Source: The Burrell Collection, © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums).

There is also a third variety of the non-stylistic. It concerns those cases where an artist has developed a style, but encounters challenges to which it is not adequate. Wollheim uses the example of Hogarth’s supposed failure in trying to do history painting instead of his moralistic narratives, and then (more persuasively), the difference between Renoir’s stylized late kitschy nudes (influenced by Renaissance works and Ingres) and his earlier work. The fourth and most complex example of the non-stylistic occurs in artists of the highest genius. An artist of the order of Titian, for example, has a style that ‘becomes like a personality . . . [It] appropriates his opponent’s style, or some part of it, which remains, for a brief moment, undigested within his own’.13 The result is not disappointing – like the Hogarth and Renoir, rather it is ‘harrowing’ and ‘short lived’ before Titian works through the challenge and reasserts his style. 5) It is interesting that in all the complex details of (4), Wollheim is talking about explanation based on the relation between style and non-style, rather than the change from one style to another. This is because, in his terms, a painter is best regarded as having one style, rather than a succession thereof. For Wollheim, it is because this position ‘goes along very well with, the view of individual style as something real, hence explanatory, that we should be extremely reluctant, without evidence of massive psychological disturbance, to multiply styles by departing from the maxim, One artist,

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one style.’14 Indeed, we should think of the artist’s style as no more susceptible to fragmentation or division than personality itself. 6) Finally, in terms of describing the expression of style, Wollheim distinguishes between style and ‘signatures’. The latter involve idiosyncratic touches and choices that are of ‘forensic’ significance in determining authorship of a work. What they are is relative to the methods and instruments that are available to the connoisseur. The distinction in question, here, is, according to Wollheim, a conceptual one. In his words, ‘Aspects belong to signature if they play a role in a certain kind of scholarly inquiry. Aspects belong to a style if they derive from an underlying competence deep in the artist’s psychology.’15 Sometimes, indeed, style and signature do not coincide. The latter, for example, will often involve superficial mannerisms that are merely repeated. Many critical issues are raised by Wollheim’s approach to style. Before raising them, however, I will address the other major structural features in his theory of painting.

Part two I start with Wollheim’s approach to the spectatorial viewpoint. The goal of painting pursued qua painting according to Wollheim is to produce a specific experience in the spectator that is based on pictorial meaning. This experience must be attuned to such things as the artist’s thoughts, beliefs, experiences, emotions and other existential commitments that lead him or her to paint in the way they do, and should exclude more transient states that just happen to float through the artist’s mind while painting. The communication of such experience does not presuppose that the artist has a total preconception of it, before working (a point we shall return to). And, in its communication, the spectator must be engaged purely on the basis of what the picture reveals through being looked at. Externally derived knowledge about the artist’s intentions may inform the spectator’s response, but should not override what is offered by the internal resources of the work qua visual. With complex experiences of meaning and understanding, the spectator’s role becomes rather involved. The painter must keep the picture ‘on track’, in the sense of ensuring that the experience communicated to the spectator is in tune with the actual mental condition or intention, which is causing the painting to be painted. Wollheim supposes that this self-monitoring – or continuous feedback – at the same time rules out any significant role for the transmission of some ‘inner facsimile’, that is, the copying of some ready-in-advance communicative state of mind. The artist’s experience here has, indeed, further significance. First, it can refine his understanding of how an experience had before a painting can be attuned to the mental condition that motivated its creation. Second, such experience can enlarge the painter’s knowledge of the nature of that mental condition that has been motivating him or her to paint a painting in just this way rather than another.16 The knowledge involved in both cases, here, can be acquired in practice, without the painter having, necessarily, to be explicitly aware of it. It is vital to note that none of this reflexiveness or feedback knowledge will count, unless, at some point, it involves the artist taking on the perceptual role of the spectator. The ‘information’ involved in the spectator’s

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viewpoint is arrived at, by the artist, through ‘the posture that history requires of him’.17 This is analysed by Wollheim in terms of three fundamental capacities that the artist assumes the spectator has, and can use, and which are the perceptual capacities from which painting’s most basic powers derive. They are, seeing-in, expressive perception and the capacity to experience visual delight. The basic powers arising from these are the power to represent external objects, the power to express mental or internal phenomena and the power to induce a distinctive pleasure in the decorative. It is the first two capacities here, which, for Wollheim, are decisive. We have already encountered seeing-in in summary form in relation to Ur-painting. However, Wollheim offers, also, a more sustained development of it – in relation to ‘twofoldness’ – as follows. Seeing-in is a special kind of perception that is triggered by a differentiated surface present in the field of vision. With the right kind of surface, an experience with the distinctive phenomenological structure of ‘twofoldness’ can occur. Wollheim uses this term because when looking at the relevant kind of surface, one can see something standing out in front of, or (in some cases) receding behind something else. One can, in other words, see three-dimensional things ‘in’ the surface. Twofoldness is distinctive, in that, while seeing the surface and seeing the thing in it are logically distinguishable; they are perceptually inseparable. As Wollheim puts it, They are two aspects of a single experience, they are not two experiences. They are neither two separate simultaneous experiences, which I somehow hold in the mind at once, nor two separate alternating experiences, between which I oscillate – though it is true that each aspect of the single experience is capable of being described as analogous to a separate experience.18

This means that while one can describe the whole experience under either of its aspects, the two together are a highly distinctive and unified, complex experience. (One can emphasize seeing one aspect to the exclusion of the other, but, once the twofoldness has been recognized, such exclusive individual emphasis will not prove stable.) Wollheim assigns the most far-reaching significance to these points. Seeing-in is prior to representation, both logically and historically. It is prior logically in that one can see something ‘in’ surfaces that neither are, nor are believed to be, representations. And, of course, seeing-in is historically prior in that our ancestors probably experienced it long before they were able to create representations. Representation, indeed, can be explained in terms of seeing-in. Suppose a cave dweller marks a surface so as to get others to see a bison in it. Others who do see it will allow this to represent a bison. A convention will be established (i.e. a rule that admits of correct and incorrect application). A face seen in the clouds, or whatever, is something one sees, or one does not; here, no standard of correctness or incorrectness applies. Representation, however, comes about when this natural capacity for seeing-in has a standard of correctness and incorrectness imposed upon it, through a standard set for each painting by the artist’s fulfilled intentions. We see it correctly when we understand the three-dimensional form contained on a surface as something that is intended to represent that specific kind of form.

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This reference can, indeed, also encompass such things as thoughts, emotions and commitments. For, once painting is practiced as an art, then it is certain that the painter will mobilize not only his perceptual beliefs about what he represents but also a range of attitudes towards the thing. Indeed some of the perceptual beliefs that he mobilizes will themselves rest upon such attitudes.19

Now Wollheim has a great many other useful things to say about seeing-in, but it is more worthwhile, for present purposes, to focus on the notion of expressive perception – since this carries the burden of argument in establishing the artistic status of painting. He defines expressive perception as ‘that capacity we have which enables us, on looking at a painting, to see it as expressing, for instance, melancholy, or turbulence, or serenity.’20 Wollheim uses these simple examples only for convenience. They stand in for ‘finer-grained examples and perhaps for something that eludes the grasp of language.’21 Indeed, for him, expressive perception is a genuine species of seeing, and this enables it to ground a distinctive variety of pictorial meaning. Such perception, indeed, engages with deep levels of experience beyond the visual – feelings, moods and emotions. Such perception pre-exists painting but expression through painting makes a massive contribution to its refinement and elaboration. In this respect, Wollheim sees the relation between expressive perception and expression through painting, as on a par with the relation between seeing-in and representation. Expressive perception precedes expression in both logical and historical terms. The advent of expression, however, imposes a standard of correctness and incorrectness on expressive perception. This standard is based on what the artist intended and achieved.22 In relation to Friedrich’s Large Enclosure Near Dresden (1832) and Constable’s Hadleigh Castle (1829), for example, Wollheim emphasizes that there is a right and a wrong way to look at them. In each case, the right way is based on an experience that concurs with ‘the fulfilled intention of the artist’.23 ‘Intention’, here, is understood by Wollheim to include thoughts, beliefs, memories and, especially, emotions and feelings, which the artist experienced, and which caused him or her to paint in just that way. It should be emphasized that such expressive intention does not require that the artist has to be experiencing the expressed emotion at the time of painting. It can operate at a distance, insofar as pictorial expression can be controlled and enhanced through reflection upon the emotions, and by recollection of them. The activity of painting stirs such reflection and recollection. Wollheim allows that there is some analogy between pictorial expression and bodily expression. Both are examples of expressive perception, and, as such, are answerable to two factors – namely how the picture’s or the body’s look corresponds to specific feelings or emotions, and to what has caused the look. The perception can then be corrected or adjusted in relation to our more considered interpretation of correspondence or cause. This is possible because one’s initial perception of the look is likely to be ‘underdetermined’. There will be elements of uncertainty, vagueness

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or ambiguity that enter in the interpretation of the corresponding emotion. One can, accordingly, adjust one’s interpretation so as to compensate for these. According to Wollheim, however, the analogy between pictorial and bodily expression cannot be taken any further. This is because when the spectator of pictorial expression tries to fit cause to correspondence, He has the satisfaction of knowing that what he is trying to do is the mirror-image of what the artist tried to do when he made the picture. For what the artist tried to do was give the picture a look which a spectator – and here he relied on the spectator in himself – would see as of a piece with the emotion that was currently causing him to paint as he did. In other words, the artist tried to fit correspondence to cause: something, which I have suggested, the traditional posture of the artist facilitates.24

Wollheim holds further that, while the artist anticipates the spectator’s expected experience, he or she does not presuppose, necessarily, that there will be such a spectator. The anticipation is framed hypothetically – in the form “If there is a spectator, let him have such-and-such an experience.” The question arises as to whether the spectator’s cognitive stock should include an awareness of this. Wollheim says that it can include it, but does not have to – ‘the spectator’s experience must concur with the artist’s intention, but it does not have to do so through knowledge of it.’25

Part three It is now time to offer a critical appraisal of Wollheim’s arguments. First, many of his ideas – especially the account of Ur-painting – and the thematizations involved in them are extremely viable. However, they do not always square with his other explanations of painting as an activity, and of its expressive significance in terms of the spectator. I shall deal with both these dimensions of meaning in turn. First, painting as an activity. Problems develop here, when Wollheim introduces the notion of style. It should be acknowledged that he is entirely justified in making it a focus of analysis, and, indeed, I will be returning to it again, and again, as this book progresses. However, there are significant problems with most of the six aspects of style that he identifies. We will recall that these comprise its unalterable and unchanging character, its existence as a psychological state (that is not to be identified with those characteristics through which it is expressed in painting), its diachronic status (involving contrasts with the pre-stylistic, post-stylistic, style-failure and incomplete assimilation of other artistic styles), there being only one style per artist, the difference between style and idiosyncratic ‘signature’ characteristics, and, finally, individual style’s explanatory power. Many difficulties centre on the idea of style as both an unchanging and a psychological reality. Perhaps, one might make sense of these two notions as joint

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aspects of a deep-seated disposition to do certain kinds of things in certain kinds of ways. Considered in relation to painting specifically, this might encompass choices and preferences (embodied in intentions that guide the painter’s handling of the thematizing factors described by Wollheim). However, even stated in this way, it is difficult to make sense of style as an unchanging psychological reality. One would have thought that every person changes, in some cases, quite radically. There are many traumatic or dramatic changes to one’s life-situation that make one a ‘changed person’, even if these are constrained by the bounds of the body’s and formal criteria of personal identity. Surely, this is especially the case with art. Wollheim insists on the general principle of one style to one artist. However, this is as wildly counter-intuitive as the idea of an unchanged personal style. In this respect, one might cite the limits of those diachronic concepts that Wollheim sees as other than style (the pre-stylistic, post-stylistic, style-failure, etc). These are in principle viable critical concepts (albeit ones whose practical application is rather more complex than Wollheim presents it). However, they do not even begin to sufficiently negotiate the scope of style in painting. This centres on the explanation of stylistic development and variation within the work of one artist, and the significance of difference between individual artistic styles. Two artists whose work Wollheim himself considers are instructive here, namely Cezanne and Monet. We will recall that the former is presented in relation to contrast between pre-stylistic work and one that exemplifies Cezanne’s style (the Auvers, Panoramic View, c. 1874, and Le Chateau Medan, c. 1880, respectively). The problem with this contrast is that it assumes that there is something that is essentially Cezanne’s in the latter work, but not in the former. One can undermine this claim from more than one direction. On the one hand, the Auvers picture approaches landscape features with an emphasis on suggested geometric structure. This gives the features a palpable and solid presence that contrasts greatly with the surface-light orientation of contemporaries such as Monet. These distinctive stylistic accents, indeed, are part of a developing tendency in Cezanne’s art that seems to appear with such works as The Railway Cutting of 1870, and The Black Clock, also of 1870. These works contrast strongly with the strange amateurish fantasies of Cezanne’s work before then, and, in their contrast with both these works and those by other contemporary painters, we can talk of a genuine individual style that is distinctively Cezanne’s. However, what are we to make, then, of the relation between these works, and Le Chateau Medan which Wollheim sees as an exemplar of Cezanne’s essential style. There is both a similarity and a difference at issue. The similarity is the strong plastic emphasis alluded to earlier; the difference is the way in which Cezanne develops a way of laying on paint – a distinctive density and distribution of brush strokes – that, paradoxically, harmonizes the three-dimensional plastic emphasis with the two-dimensional character of the picture-plane. This is an extraordinary achievement. For, while Cezanne’s great modern contemporaries also create work that affirms the picture-plane, the integration of this and the strong plastic emphases is distinctively Cezanne’s. Until, that is, the final 4 years of his life (i.e. 1902–1906). In various treatments of Mont St.Victoire from this time, the three-dimensional accents are reduced to small planes – as though the brushstroke technique that previously integrated the plastic

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accents and picture-plane – are now becoming autonomous space-creating factors. And the magnificent ambiguity that Cezanne leaves us with is a hovering – between whether the autonomous space-creation is an expression of representational space or an affirmation of the physical reality of the canvas as a painted surface. It would be all too easy to treat the features that I am emphasizing here, as mainly technical issues, concerned – as Wollheim would doubtlessly insist – with the painter wishing to emphasize specific intentions. However, these stylistic innovations radically change our cognitive relation to the world, by transforming it. In such works, the picture’s generation of pictorial content from paint is thematized. It appears as the power to transform visual reality into new aesthetic forms. What is always present in painting is affirmed overtly, rather than discreetly (as in more traditional and classical idioms). Similar considerations hold true of Monet and the other great Moderns, but whereas Cezanne emphasizes the constitutive power of painting in the generation of plastic structure, Monet affirms it through relations of colour, light, and surface. I will explore the ramifications of picturing as a transformative cognitive power in more detail in subsequent chapters (especially Chapter 5). Before that, it is worth considering the deeper implications of my analysis of Cezanne for Wollheim’s notion of style. First, while identifying some visual continuity in Cezanne’s work from around 1870 on, I have indicated also the changes that take place in Cezanne’s style. These are quite far-reaching, and in relation to them we might well feel justified in talking of different styles in the same artist, rather than just variations on a single style. To construe them in the latter sense makes little sense to the radical new avenues of pictorial exploration that Cezanne opens up. It is doubtful, also, whether such stylistic changes, qua visual, could centre on the specific set of communicative intentions that Wollheim emphasizes. One might claim, rather, that what guided Cezanne’s styles was a process of give and take between practice, experimentation and the activity of painting, over a considerable period of time. And, in all this, of course, the vicissitudes of everyday life and its concerns would inevitably seep through and influence an already complex process. The point is, then, that while Cezanne’s painting may be driven by the artist having intentions, these are reciprocally bonded to the act of painting and the painter’s sense of his or her own personal history in relation to knowledge of the medium. (And this is as true of any painter as it is of Cezanne.) One cannot separate style in painting from the visual characteristics in which it is expressed. In this respect, my treatment of Cezanne shows also the superficiality of Wollheim’s treatment of the relation between style and idiosyncratic ‘signature’ features. He treats the latter as though they should be understood exclusively in terms of small-scale characteristics that are of mainly ‘forensic’ significance in determining authorship. However, I have identified features – such as the integration of both plastic and planar emphases – that are distinctive characteristics of Cezanne’s painting (i.e. would count as ‘signatures’) but which have the most far-reaching ramifications in describing both his styles and their broader significance. One cannot separate ‘an underlying competence deep in the artist’s psychology’ from the idiosyncratic pictorial characteristics in which it finds expression. And one cannot even begin to differentiate individual styles and their significance, unless the analysis focuses on the painted characteristics in which these styles are embodied.

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To regard style as primarily psychological, indeed, is almost meaningless in relation to painting. Every embodied subject experiences the world from a unique perspective, and will have his or her own experiential style. However, what count in terms of painting’s style are not these psychological origins but the distinctive way in which style appears in the paintings’ displayed characteristics. Style in painting, in other words, is focussed not on intentions, but on outcomes. In Wittgensteinian terms, painting’s visible characteristics are the ‘criterion’ of style.

Part four I turn, now, to the difficulties raised by Wollheim’s approach to expression. We will recall that he takes the artist as striving to bring about a state of mind in the (‘sensitive’, ‘informed’) spectator. This state of mind centres on the painter’s creation of a pictorial meaning – a specific idiom of ‘twofoldness’ and ‘seeing-in’ – that is attuned to his or her thoughts, beliefs, emotions and existential commitments. In short, the spectator engages with the states of mind that are leading the painter to create just this pictorial meaning. Wollheim holds, further, that expression imposes a standard of correctness and incorrectness on expressive perception. We interpret the painting as something intended to present those specific states of mind that caused the work to be created. A correct interpretation will engage with these states of mind, but an incorrect one will not. The former interpretation ‘concurs with the fulfilled intentions of the artist’26 and is, supposedly, ‘the mirror-image of what the artist tried to do when he made the picture’.27 This theory of intentional expression (as I shall call it) is not viable, at any level. Consider, for example, the claim that it conventionalizes expressive perception in that criteria of correctness and incorrectness are taken to apply to it. They apply in the sense that we understand the work as something intended to be expressive in a specific respect. In affirming this, Wollheim is explicitly following the precedent set by his notion of seeing-in. We will recall that there is a natural version of this where criteria of correctness and incorrectness do not apply. However, when a painter creates a configuration that presents a recognizable kind of three-dimensional state of affairs, and the spectator takes it as intended to represent just this kind of state of affairs rather than another, then we judge it correctly. Now, in the case of expression in painting, to recognize a work as expressive in one way rather than another (thus paralleling the precedent of seeing-in) depends, surely, on the character of the work’s appearance. It is this level of expression that must be explained, before any issues relating to the intentions that informed its creation can be raised. And the explanation, in outline, is not difficult. In many paintings, we will find pictorial meaning that not only presents three-dimensional forms in a plane surface, but also characterizes them – through the way in which the work is composed, and its light and colour articulated. By ‘characterize’ here, I mean the work’s attempts to persuade us into take a certain attitude towards the style which it embodies. Now the nature of the attitude in question here is directed by the artist’s intentions and beliefs in making the painting. However, in terms of basic spectatorial recognition, all we have to go by is what the picture presents to us.

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In this respect, the picture’s specific expressive character is conceptually connected to a comparative horizon – centred on how the picture embodies broader cultural associations between shape and colour, and the kind of state of affairs depicted, and how the painter articulates these features and further ones (such as contour and light) in comparison with other artists. Without starting from this comparative horizon, so as to determine the character of expression, we do not have the means to even think about its relation to the artist’s intentions at the time the work was painted. On these terms, therefore, what allows expressive perception to be conventionalized is, primarily, the comparative horizon of similarities and differences between a particular painter’s styles and their relation to our broader cognitive/cultural stock. The actual intentions that went into the work are not relevant. What counts, rather, is the relation between the work’s appearance and that of other paintings. It is this that allows for correctness and incorrectness in judging a work to be expressive in one respect rather than another. We simply do not need to take into account those feelings or states of mind that were involved in creating the work. In fact, there are some further severe difficulties that are disruptive to both the structure and scope of intentional expression. Wollheim insists that, in order to be correct, the spectator’s expressive engagement with the work has to ‘concur’ with, indeed, be a ‘mirror-image’ of, the artist’s intentional expression. However, surely an artist can paint a picture that is expressive in one recognizable respect, while, in the process of creation, he or she is experiencing opposite feelings. In this respect, for example, an artist such as Friedrich or Ruisdael characteristically articulates the landscape in terms of brooding and melancholy qualities. This is their style – it is something mastered and explored through many different works. One should expect, in consequence, that in some of these works, the brooding style of articulation kicks in, even though during the entire process of creation the painter may have been feeling particularly happy and fulfilled. And, reciprocally, one might expect that with more zestful artists such as Sonia Delaunay, some of her happy-looking works may have been created during gloom or depression. The specific expressive character of the work is not correlated, of necessity, with a parallel state in the artist. Of course, Wollheim might argue that even if Friedrich, Ruisdael and Delaunay were not actually experiencing the expressive states that are shown in the painting at the time of its making, they must, nevertheless, have at least been intending them – through reflection or recollection. However, this does not follow, necessarily. In strict psychological terms, if an artist is preoccupied with the act of painting – in terms of all the levels described in Ur-painting – then these may be so intense as to exclude any explicit intentions as to what kind of feelings the painting is intended to convey to the viewer. The painter is absorbed in the very act of painting and composition. And this can be the case even if, in the course of this, the painter places himself or herself in the viewer’s perspective. It may be no more than a case of wanting the viewer to see the picture as organized in a way that is compositionally satisfying – without any further specification of what the specific nature of the satisfaction should be.

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In fact, the whole notion of intentional expression is questionable in terms that extend far beyond Wollheim. An intention is an action generated to bring about a certain end. Now with many paintings of a purely informational, or of a kitsch kind, one can clearly recognize the work as a presentation of this end – as a ‘fulfilled intention’ in Wollheim’s parlance. However, in such paintings, the fulfilled intention is recognized precisely because it is formulaic. And the very fact that the spectator can ‘concur’ with this intention makes the image itself, and our engagement with it, banal, and with good grounds to be judged as non-artistic. However, in the case of painting as art, the intentional nexus from which the painting emerges is of the most unfathomable complexity. True, the artist must intend to paint a picture of such and such a subject, and may frame some intentions concerning how the work will be done. But once the work has begun, many different levels of intentional concern interact simultaneously in a qualitative whole of experience that is more than the sum of its identifiable parts or aspects. There are starts and stops, moments of insight and forgetting, transient thoughts that – in their transience – affect the painter without he or she being aware of it; strategies anticipated but subsequently not realized; anticipations that are realized; moments of struggle, disappointment and overcoming; hopes, fears, false victories, true ones; overriding depression, overriding joy, overriding feelings of nothing-in-particular and then, a finished painting. These descriptions are themselves, oversimplifications that cannot begin to do justice to the complex intentional nexus that informs the making of a painting. However, this actually highlights the extreme inadequacy of Wollheim’s even simpler notion of intentional expression, and perhaps even artistic ‘intentions’ per se, as explanatory factors in the aesthetics of painting. Now, it might be recalled that Wollheim himself admits the oversimplification of the concepts involved in intentional expression. Indeed, he even notes that factors that exceed the scope of language may be involved. But the problem is that he insistently maintains this oversimplification without considering the magnitude of distortion that such insistency involves. This high level of distortion is, indeed, entirely predictable – if only because of the broader ramifications of Wollheim’s own conception of Ur-painting, itself. In this respect, we will recall that it involves six levels of thematization – all of which interact with one another in a temporally sustained and spatially intense, concentrated activity. Painting’s reflexive, give-and-take, character is noted by Wollheim, but not done justice to. For, surely, it is precisely the sheer complexity of the reciprocity of Ur-painting’s themata (with one another and with the painting as a whole, as well as with the artist’s mental states) which undermines the notion of clear avenues of ‘fulfilled intentions’ vis-à-vis expression in a specific work. The complex whole of activity that is a painting’s creation and completion can only be judged through its outcomes, rather than through some fantasy of specific creative intentions and feeling that are realized through the making of it. Before proceeding to my Conclusion, it is worth highlighting a further mistake in Wollheim’s notion of intentional expression that has the most far-reaching significance.

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It is the question of why expressive features (however one understands ‘expressive’ here) created in a painting by someone else should matter to us, personally. An obvious answer is, by virtue of our shared humanity. However, this raises a further question. Most people have genuine concern for others but why should this be a pleasure rather than an imposition? I shall explore this in more detail, in subsequent chapters, but it is worth offering a provisional answer now. The presence of others, even (perhaps, especially) in the case of love – brings a pressure to bear on our identification with the other. We worry about whether we are getting it right; we want to identify more with them so as to help overcome difficulties, or realize possibilities. Now, as I have argued earlier, our engagement with paintings’ expressive dimension is conducted at the level of its phenomenal appearance. Specific expressive quality emerges when the work’s own characteristics are experienced in relation to a comparative horizon of other individual works, and general cultural stock. To imaginatively identify with expression in this context has a qualitative difference from that involved with direct relationships with other people. The other person – the creator of the work – is not there. We have expressive meaning embodied in the work, but without the pressurizing psychological factors involved in face-to-face interactions. In the case of art, it is precisely because we do not have to worry about what the artist’s actual intentions were at the time the work was painted, that we can relate to its expressive qualities on our own terms. Our engagement with expression is aesthetic rather than actual and face to face. There is a freedom of imaginative empathy involved, and, in this freedom, it embodies an aesthetic character that expressive perception in normal interpersonal relationships lacks. It might be objected that a view such as this removes any question of correctness and incorrectness in relation to expression. We have an ‘anything goes’ situation if the artist’s own intentions are left out of consideration. However, this does not follow. Reference to the aforementioned comparative horizon means that in recognizing the expressive qualities of the work, we are, at the same time, squaring our private responses with those of the work and its cultural mediation. In this respect, one might consider an artist such as Turner – who, from around 1840 to his death (1851), produced works which are dazzling and overwhelming in terms of their affirmation of light as a space-creating factor. Our cultural stock and comparative experience of other works allow us to describe these as ecstatic or sublime, rather than morbid, brooding, melancholy or the like. And this is true even if one has a temperament that finds such extremes of light to be somewhat oppressive. In such a case, indeed, one might find Turner’s style all the more rewarding through having expressive features that challenge one’s own deep-seated feelings and sensitivities. The point is, then, that expressive meaning at the level of painting’s phenomenal appearance offers a hypothetical way of presenting the visual world, based on the painter’s preferences. We can accept these or not as we will; but this does not amount to ‘anything goes’, rather, the burden of imaginative negotiation with them constellates around culturally rather than privately defined expressive meaning. There is, in other words, an aspect of correctness or incorrectness involved in how we perceive painting in aesthetically expressive terms. It converges on how the work is situated comparatively in relation to other works.

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Conclusion I have, then, expounded the philosophical basis of Wollheim’s theory of painting, and criticized it at length. In none of the important material that I have considered is there, as far as I can see, any argument that would compel us to accept his theory over my objections. However, he does make two attempts at a more general compelling argument. One is embedded in the aforementioned material, and the other in the conclusion to Painting as an Art. The first argument is in the form of a rhetorical question.28 Why should an artist want the audience to perceive his or her work as expressive of certain feelings and emotions, unless they were directly implicated in causing this particular work to be painted in just the way it is? This question has initial plausibility if we develop its implications in ways that Wollheim himself does not, but which have the appearance of a strong general support to his position. An argument on these lines would hold that if a painting has a specific expressive character, then it follows that the artist intended that it should have this character. Given this, it would follow, in turn, that the character in question was important to the artist in some way, and a sense of this importance (and broader feelings and beliefs implicated in it) must surely have informed – perhaps directed, even – the work’s making. If this is the case, then, it may seem that many of my objections to Wollheim’s theory lose their force. It could be argued that in enjoying the brooding melancholy of a Friedrich, our recognition of it is, indeed, mediated by the comparative horizon of cultural associations and other paintings, but in enjoying its melancholy we are engaging with possibilities that were, necessarily, important for Friedrich in giving the work this character, and which, accordingly, must have played a decisive role in the painting’s creation. This argument, however, can be rebutted. Suppose, for example, that having chosen a subject, the artist paints it – in the terms described earlier – without worrying about the expressive character it will have, over and above compositional factors, and formal arrangements. Of course, these will have expressive significance vis-à-vis the comparative horizon, but the artist need not have the slightest inkling of such expressive qualities, insofar as he or she is preoccupied with formal issues. What is important for an artist in such a context is simply making a work that looks right on formal grounds. It is not necessary that expressive qualities should be intended as a part of this. In fact, it makes perfect sense to suppose that with some artists – and especially those from those outside Western traditions of art-making – expressive intention need not figure at all, as a significant factor in artistic creation. It should be noted, also (in relation to the second step of the supporting argument), that while it is reasonable to assume that a finished work’s appearance embodies characteristics that an artist finds important, this is by no means a conceptual connection. An artist may be working in a style that still produces effective results, but which he or she no longer believes in. The thing is to continue with the frustrating style, until some interesting variation is opened up. Given this, we cannot assume that in enjoying a work’s final appearance, we are concurring with intentions that were necessarily important for the painter.

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As noted earlier, Wollheim offers one other general line of defence for his position.29 He asks how one can be sure that one has obtained appropriate insights into the fulfilled aims and ambitions of the artist? The answer comes in the form of an ‘evolutionary argument’. It can be summarized as follows. 1. 2.

3.

Painting would not have survived as an activity unless it had developed as an art. This follows because if painters had not succeeded in conveying what they wanted to communicate, they would have turned to some other medium, and painting would have died out. The fact that painting has survived means that it has done so through being intelligible on the grounds that Wollheim has set out.

However, the premise of this argument is false, the second step is redundant and the conclusion is, accordingly, false also. This can be explained as follows. Painting as an activity probably developed from ritual functions. The link to expression in the sense described by Wollheim is very much a post-Enlightenment Western conception. Painting survived without it for many, many, thousands of years. Given this, it is entirely reasonable to assume that it would have continued to be practised even in a world without painting understood in Wollheim’s narrow terms. This gives a reason to reject the decisive role he assigns to it in his conclusion that is additional to the many difficulties that I have rehearsed earlier. The roots of Wollheim’s problems are as follows. I have argued that what is decisive is the work’s stylistic appearance in relation to a horizon of critical comparisons. The characteristics which form this appearance may have some expressive qualities of the ‘sad’, ‘melancholic’, zestful varieties, or whatever, but these are mere indicators of much more complex structures that enable them. In many cases, a work simply will not be characterizable in any such ‘easy’ terms. Admittedly, expression is a key concept, insofar as what is important about a painting is how it characterizes some aspect of the visual world in terms of specific preferences in how the work is painted. Wollheim himself, however, does not regard this as significant. For, in producing an ever more refined image of how the thing looks, the artist is in effect representing an ever more specific kind of thing. There is within the representational task no line worth drawing between the what and the how: each fresh how that is captured generates a new what.30

Nevertheless, this is surely false. However ‘refined’ a picture of a bowl of tulips might become through successive treatments, it remains, nevertheless, a bowl of tulips at the logical level of what is represented (unless, rather than refining it, the treatments turn the subject into something else). With many paintings – especially those used for informational or persuasive purposes (in advertising, for example) – our ‘getting the message’ does not have to involve attention to how the painter has created these effects. Consumption of them is enough. In the case of an artistic painting, in contrast, it would make no sense to judge it as art, if our interest did not include how the work

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was painted as a major consideration. (And it should, of course, be emphasized that choice of subject matter – of ‘what’ is represented can be an important feature of this consideration.) In a nutshell, painting becomes an art only when its expressive meaning emerges through the distinctiveness of how the picture has been created, in comparison with other paintings.31 This means, in other words, that we need a concept of expression that is, primarily, object and comparatively orientated, rather than cashed out in the relation between the finished painting and fulfilment of the artist’s states of intentional expression. Wollheim’s account, in effect, misleadingly privileges the subjective and psychological dimension over the ontology of making a painting. In deeper structural terms, these problems arise from Wollheim’s inattentiveness to criteria of the aesthetic. Through this, he loses a golden opportunity to bridge Ur-painting and twofoldness in terms of the ‘aesthetic’. Now, of course, the concept of painting as an ‘art’ is a Western creation – as, indeed, is the concept of the aesthetic itself. But what these terms name, and what enables them, is something much deeper. It centres on the fact that many of the things human beings make – and paintings, especially – posit a new relation between subject and object of experience. Through painting, the body changes the character of the visual world by taking a new relation to it through expression in a specific medium. Of course, many cultures exist under material conditions whereby this significance can only be recognized intuitively (a term I shall return to, as this work progresses). It is the ritual or communicative functions of painting that are the main factors in how it is understood in these cultures. However, if there were not an intrinsic fascination in making the visual world appear in a new way – a pleasure in giving form and content to visual material – then it would be impossible to explain painting’s extraordinary and transcultural significance in the human condition. This dimension of painting’s intrinsic fascination consists in varieties of aesthetic meaning – varieties whose transcultural basis I have explained in the greatest detail in many other works,32 and important further aspects of which will be detailed in each chapter of this book. Painting becomes an art when this aesthetic dimension is made the basis of a cultural practice in its own right. In such circumstances, we attend directly to how a visual structure has been structured, and relegate any ‘official’ communicative function that it may have, to secondary status. It is, of course, not enough to simply describe the nature of aesthetic responses to art. We have to explain the ontology embodied in painting that enables this. And here we have the greatest irony; in that Wollheim’s notion of twofoldness is the key to the explanation. Whereas he is content to negotiate it in terms, primarily of the subject’s perception, its real importance consists in how its two aspects mediate one another in the painting. Putting it simply, when a three-dimensional state of affairs is rendered in a two-dimensional plane – when, as Wollheim holds, we see it in terms of twofoldness – then the meaning of that state of affairs is transformed by such rendering, and by the specific character of the physical medium in which it is embodied. The world is transformed in cognitive terms through this remarkable ontological complex.

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To be understood fully, such transformation has to be thought through in relation to Ur-painting. And it is here that Wollheim misses another golden opportunity. Earlier we saw that he introduces the notion of the artist’s ‘posture’ – understood not in the literal sense but rather a more metaphorical one based on the artist’s intentions and positioning in relation to the tradition of his or her medium. Had he addressed the significance of the artist’s actual physical posture in the act of painting – in placing marks on, or inscribing a surface, then he would have had a further key bridging notion between twofoldness and Ur-painting. The bridge centres on the fact that distribution of marks or lines are traces and exemplars of the artist’s physical presence, even as they generate virtual three-dimensional content. This content is the presentation of a state of affairs that, once the painting is finished, is caught forever emerging under a single aspect addressed to privileged frontal viewing position that forever reproduces, tacitly, the painter’s own physical position in relation to the work as it was created. At the heart of this is the fact that the painted image is a kind of compression of time. The marks placed on the surface are testaments to an activity of bringing forth meaning – an activity that remains virtually implicit in how the content is made to appear, and which is the seat of further complex spatial and temporal relations, with equally complex cognitive significance. These various relations express an ontology of the visual image, whose understanding has been most closely approached by thinkers in the phenomenological tradition. I shall explore their ideas in detail, in the coming chapters. Before that, however, a word of qualification. I have subjected Wollheim’s theory to severe criticism, and shown why two of analytic aesthetic’s key concepts – intention and expression – present significant problems for the understanding of painting as an art. However, this does not mean my analysis of Wollheim is of negative significance only – as the closing-off of what seems to be a methodological dead end. Rather, it must be emphasized once more that Wollheim’s notions of Ur-painting and twofoldness are not only viable, but of the most decisive significance in relation to our key problematic. They offer its phenomenological and conceptual starting point. Indeed, Wollheim’s notion of twofoldness (and other important insights from him) can be used again – at least as a critical starting point – for the understanding of abstract art, specifically. It is to this I now turn.

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Abstract Art and Transperceptual Space: Wollheim and Beyond

Introduction Abstract art traditionally covers works which do not present some recognizable specific kind of three-dimensional entity or state of affairs. This can mean that the work is entirely self-referential – as in the various minimal and post-painterly idioms, or else it seems to allude to varieties of three-dimensional forms (e.g. biomorphic and technomorphic abstraction), or to idioms of spatial structure and its perception (e.g. colour field painting, geometric abstraction and ‘op’ art). Sometimes elements from one or more of these varieties can be combined, or used in combination with specific recognizable three-dimensional forms. Given this variety, it may seem impossible to find any basis of meaning which can encompass them all. However, Wollheim holds that most such works are, in fact, representational, and have the structure of twofoldness. Part one of this chapter, accordingly, reviews and criticizes this theory, but finds worth in some aspects, most notably the importance that he assigns to depth-perception in abstract art. Use is made also of a concept from Wollheim’s earlier work – namely ‘seeing-as’ as a basis for a revised approach. In Part two, I follow up and develop this approach so as to formulate a link between meaning in abstract art and a mode of seeing-as whose objects are aspects of what I shall call transperceptual space. In Part three, I test the theory in relation to examples of four major varieties of abstract art.

Part one First, we will recall that Wollheim emphasizes the importance of seeing-in and twofoldness as the basis of representation. As he puts it, Seeing-in is a distinct kind of perception, and it is triggered by the presence within the field of vision of a differentiated surface.1

With the right kind of surface, an experience with a distinctive ‘phenomenology’ will occur. This is ‘twofoldness’. It is so named because of its dual aspect. In looking at such a surface, one discerns something standing out in front of it, or (in some cases) receding behind something else. One sees, in other words, three-dimensional things in the surface.

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It is vital to reiterate that, for Wollheim, twofoldness is a distinctive perceptual experience wherein the plane surface and its three-dimensional content are seen simultaneously. The unity of this can be divided, in that one can see the surface in its own right, or the content without reference to the surface. But these are analytic reductions consequent upon our original perception of the painting’s twofoldness, and once that perception has occurred, they are not easy to sustain, in phenomenological terms. Now while seeing-in is a natural phenomenon (as when one sees ‘faces’ in clouds, for example), representation arises when this natural capacity is employed intentionally in the making of a picture. The artist has to mark the canvas in a way that ensures that the spectator will see in the picture what it is intended to represent. In this way, a standard of correctness and incorrectness is imposed. The image has been intentionally created to present such and such a three-dimensional content ‘in’ the support, and if one cannot recognize this, then either one is perceiving the work incorrectly, or else the painter has not marked the surface correctly. Interestingly, Wollheim extends this model to abstract art, as a means of overcoming the division between it and more conventional representational idioms. The key move is as follows. In his account of seeing-in, Wollheim emphasizes the seeing of recognizable figures in natural phenomena, But continuous with this kind of case are cases in which we see an irregular solid in a sheet of oxidized metal, or a sphere in the bare branches of a tree, or just space in some roughly prepared wall. The two kinds of case differ primarily in the kind of concept under which we bring that which we see in the differentiated surface.2

The latter involves ‘non-figurative’ or ‘abstract’ concepts. This means, according to Wollheim, that both figurative and non-figurative concepts can be involved in seeing-in. Indeed (as Wollheim shows in relation to planar structure in Hans Hofmann’s Pompeii, of 1959 – an example that will be discussed a little further on), most abstract paintings create a perception of depth. Now Wollheim suggests that the fact we can seldom put our experiences before abstract works into words is not relevant to their status as representational. He admits, further, the possibility that not all abstract works are representational. In his words, On this point there is cause for circumspection. It is plausible to think, for instance, that some of the vast machines of Barnett Newton, such as Vir Heroicus Sublimis . . . are non-representational. Arguably correct perception of such a picture or a perception that coheres with the fulfilled intention of the artist is not characterized by twofoldness.3

Wollheim holds, then, that most, but not all abstract art involves twofoldness, and that the perception of depth is a vital key to such representation. As we shall see, this latter point is correct. However, both the relevance and scope of twofoldness in abstract art are very different from how Wollheim conceives it. In this respect, one must emphasize that what he sees as a similarity is, in fact, a contrast. Twofoldness is an idiom of visual reference founded on conventionalizing

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seeing-in. It imports a standard of correctness. Wollheim’s extension of this to abstract art, however, is much too hurried, and disguises a key difference. We will recall, for example, that he proposes ‘irregular solids’ as instances of ‘non-figurative concepts’ and gives a special emphasis to the role of depth. This seems to allow for both individual representational content and relations in abstract painting. However, these are problematic. The kinds of effects that Wollheim describes are not as unambiguous as they are in ordinary pictorial representation. In terms of such ordinary representation, one could not say a picture was a picture unless one could recognize a specific kind of three-dimensional item or state of affairs that it was a picture of. This is the basis of twofoldness. Wollheim is not troubled by the fact that we are often unable to put what we perceive in abstract works into words. But this, in itself, is something that surely sets it far apart from the recognitional factor that is the basis of twofoldness. In the absence of such a factor, it is difficult to see how there would be any scope for the criteria of correct and incorrect seeing that is basic to twofoldness. Matters get worse, for even in the case where there is some three-dimensional content – such as irregular geometrical solids or depth relations – these are often accidental. Some viewers may see them in such terms but others might not – since the abstract work does not – by definition – present that continuum of three-dimensional relations, which enables the main three-dimensional content in ordinary painting to be defined through the clarity of its context, as well as by its intrinsic form. In abstract works, there is not, in other words, enough evidence from within the internal resources of the work itself, to determine what state of affairs the artist is intending to present. The Hans Hofmann painting Pompeii (mentioned by Wollheim himself) is instructive here (Figure 2.1). Towards the top right-hand corner, there is a form whose appearance is slightly reminiscent of a lampshade. But, while this three-dimensional-looking form may strike some viewers immediately as three-dimensional, it is something that other viewers might not recognize in such terms, without being directed to it. Indeed, far from being an intended effect, the three-dimensional appearance may be no more than a by-product of some other aspect of the painter’s compositional strategy. We cannot, in other words, infer that the artist intended to communicate this form as an ‘abstract concept’. The instructive ambiguity of Pompeii can be explored further. It is dominated by squares and rectangles mainly of shades of red, clustered in the top half of the painting. The effect of these – in relation to those of the other colours – is to create the famous ‘push–pull’ effect in terms of which Hofmann, himself, characterized optical illusion in abstract art. This, indeed, creates a sense of depth, but it is one fraught with ambiguity. On the one hand, squares and rectangles are actually two-dimensional entities; so it is not so easy to say that we see them ‘in’ the painting, as we would a three-dimensional feature. On the other hand, the push–pull effect creates a very ambiguous depth that leaves the establishing of its character much more open to interpretation than depth in conventional pictorial space. For example, are the yellow squares in Pompeii ‘pushing’ or ‘pulling’ in relation to the red ones? Matters come down to this. Abstract artworks can have the appearance of twofoldness, but with a fatal dimension of ambiguity in respect of what exactly one can see in them.

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Figure 2.1 Hans Hoffman, Pompeii, 1959; oil on canvas: 2140 × 1327 mm. Source : Tate Collection, © ARS, NY, and DACS, London, 2012.

The question arises, then, as to whether we can revise Wollheim’s approach in a way that loosens up the demand of twofoldness – perhaps in a way that can then encompass all abstract works (even minimal-looking ones of the Barnett Newman Vir Heroicus Sublimis kind). Interestingly, Wollheim himself, points us in the general direction of such a strategy. In the first edition of Art and Its Objects, he links the perception of representational art to the phenomenon of ‘seeing-as’ – in the Wittgensteinian sense of perceiving something under one of its aspects – a perception that can sometimes ‘dawn’ upon one rather than always be immediately recognized.4 In the second edition, he clearly feels that this is much too loose a notion, and that what is actually involved in representational properties is a quite distinct mode of perception – namely twofoldness, based on the natural capacity for seeing-in.5

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Now seeing-as – in the sense of seeing an aspect of something – involves the selective perception or imagining of some specific feature of that something. This can be exemplificational, as when we focus on one aspect (to the exclusion of others) that is presently available to perception, or it can be imaginative – as in those cases when we think of an aspect that is presently hidden but which could in principle become directly accessible to perception under certain circumstances. Such imaginative seeing-as might, indeed, involve the projection of hypothetical aspect perception (i.e. possible appearances of the item or state of affairs, encompassing, indeed, relations as well as qualities). Indeed, it is possible to project things or aspects that do not actually exist, by means of imaginatively intended aspects (in the form of mental imagery). On these terms, then, seeing-as is a much looser notion than seeing-in, but has some affinity with it. The affinity consists in the fact that, like seeing-in, it involves an idiom of reference that represents sensible aspects of its subject, and can even do so in terms of imaginary rather than actually existing subjects. We are dealing with the realm of the representational, but in a less formal way. Now, in the case of abstract art, it is surely justified, intuitively, to expect that its idioms of meaning will not be entirely different from conventional representation, but will, nevertheless involve, also, distinctive criteria of their own. These two expectations match up with, respectively, the affinities between seeing-in and seeing-as, and the different (looser) representational character of the latter. Seeing-as, in other words, may offer a basis for explaining abstract art’s representational meaning. What is required, accordingly, is a thinking through of abstract ‘content’ – especially depth relations, in a way that does not pretend to amount to twofoldness, but which is, nevertheless, more than a matter of private association, alone. We need a means for seeing the individual abstract work ‘as’ something, but one which can, at the same time, accommodate – even integrate – a level of ambiguity in terms of ‘what’ such works represent. The strategy can be made concrete as follows.

Part two Many abstract works are very different from ordinary pictures, but in order to be considered as art they must follow the display formats and contexts established by more traditional idioms. And, by doing this, such works embody a presumption of virtuality. We take them to be ‘about’ some visually meaningful item or state of affairs over and above their own material being. Of course, minimal works might be intended as purely self-referential forms by the artist, but the role such works play in the collective context of the art world will always invoke the presumption of virtuality. Such works are taken as expressions of ‘purity’, or assertive ‘self-containment’ or the like. If, in other words, a work is offered in a frame, or on a plinth, or in a gallery, or whatever, a claim to ‘aboutness’ is launched, irrespective of the artist’s more specific intentions. Indeed, once an abstract work is presented as art, none of its immediately visible properties are virtually inert or neutral. We do not simply see it; we see it as. Now, the presumption of virtuality finds its realization in a factor intrinsic to all abstract art – namely optical illusion (something which is intrinsic to twofoldness even though Wollheim does not address this fact).6 Any such work evokes a content over

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and above mere two-dimensionality. As soon as even single lines or dabs of colour or whatever are placed upon, or inscribed in a plane, they appear to incise it, or to emerge from it – depending on the character of the line or dab in question.7 Hans Hofmann indicates something of what is at issue here by considering the implications of simply drawing a line on a sheet of paper. In itself, the line may appear meaningless, but if a second line is added, then a complex relation between the two lines and the outline of the sheet of paper is made manifest. Hofmann explores the ramifications of this in great – and surprising – detail, and reaches the following conclusion. Your paper has actually been transformed into space. A sensation of movement and counter movement is simultaneously created through the position of these lines in relation to the outline of the paper. Movement and counter movement result in tension. Tensions are the expressions of forces. Forces are the expressions of actions. In their . . . relationship, the lines may now give the idea of being two shooting stars which move with speed through the universe. Your empty paper has been transformed by the simplest graphic means into a universe in action. This is real magic. So your paper is a world in itself.8

It should be emphasized that Hofmann’s point concerning the edge of the work is of the greatest importance. For it means that even the most minimal pictorial works have a relational significance. In such idioms, the figure of emptiness, absence or whatever emerges as ‘content’ from a ground comprised by the physical edge of the work. The importance of the presumption of virtuality and its correlation with optical illusion cannot be stressed enough. Critics, historians and curators adore tying the meaning of abstract works to the circumstances under which the works were produced and to the specific artist’s theories and intentions. However, my point is that to be recognized as works of art in any terms, such works must adopt presentational formats that carry with them the expectations of ‘aboutness’ raised by conventional picturing. This broader cultural demand is not a distortion of the abstract work’s intended meaning. Rather, it centres on factors of visual formation and disclosure which must be taken account of in the creation of any visual artwork, even though the artist may not be immediately aware of their significance. What I am describing here are ways in which idioms of optical illusion are not just tricks of the eye, but can be seen-as possible visual structures of a kind that are overlooked, neglected or taken for granted under normal perceptual circumstances. In this respect, I shall invoke a concept that will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 5. It is Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘invisible’. He holds that whatever is visible is so only insofar as it emerges from the broader perceptual field’s complexities. These are ‘invisible’ in that they are not usually noted or remarked upon in ordinary conditions. His closest approach to a formal definition of this is as follows The invisible is

1. What is not actually visible but could be (hidden or in actual aspects of the thing-hidden things, situated ‘elsewhere’ – ‘Here’ and ‘elsewhere’)

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2. What, relative to the visible, could nevertheless not be seen as a thing (the existentials of the visible, its dimensions, its non-figurative inner framework) 3. What exists only as tactile or kinaesthetically, etc. 4. . . . the Cogito9 Now to call all these factors the ‘invisible’ is slightly misleading and I will offer an alternative term when further relevant details have been clarified. Specifically, it is important to first make Merleau-Ponty’s important insights more concrete in terms of the visual dimension. On these terms, it can be agreed, first, that we can only recognize visible things and states of affairs insofar as they are contextualized by broader perceptual relations, beliefs and assumptions. These concern how the perceptually relevant things might behave, their broader structures and relation to other things, their amenability to further perception and bodily manipulation (even on the basis of aspects which might not be immediately accessible to our present viewpoint) and, most importantly, features suggested by association with, or variations on, elements present in the immediate perceptual field. This means that the full recognition of any three-dimensional item or state of affairs is not a simple ‘atom’ of recognition, nor is it the passive registering of some datum. It is enabled, rather, by the way in which perceptual recognition involves demarcating it from that myriad of items, states of affairs, qualities, relations and imagined possibilities that constitute not only the immediate surrounding perceptual field but its continuance in new vectors of detail as we change our position. To call this the ‘invisible’ seems rather narrow. It is both immanent in what we perceive, yet extends beyond it, in an unfathomable complexity. The term transperceptual seems much more fitting in relation to all this.10 It is the space of those unnoticed or hidden details that subtend immediate appearance, and of our sense of possibilities and transformations that might emerge to perception if we changed our current spatial and temporal position. Visible items are so, only through being both defined against, and being characterized in relation to, transperceptual space as a cognitive background. A central feature of this space is actuality known mainly through possibility. Suppose for example that one thinks of the computer screen on which this text is being written. It can appear differently with each angle from which one looks at it; it has a microscopic structure in terms of both its surface and cross-sectional features – both of which would provide extraordinary and wholly unfamiliar visual aspects, if we have the means to perceive them. The screen can be viewed by some tiny creature such as an ant, but how it appears at the ant-level, and through ant-vision will, of course, be very different from its standard appearance to me. When I look at the screen, I follow the text I am typing, and do not pay attention to incidental features at the corner of the screen, or how it might appear if I were standing 6 feet away. The text and screen may suggest the pages of a book to me, and the imagined book may then suggest the strange idea of a normal book which becomes magically illuminated in a phosphorescent green glow each time one turns a page. These transperceptual factors and related ones subtend and inform one’s normal visual perception of the computer screen. One does not, of course, have actual

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experience of how the screen would appear at the microscopic level or from unusual viewpoints, and we might not find that it provokes any broader imaginative associations. However, we know that it is the kind of thing which – by virtue of occupying space – does have the possibility of being negotiated in the terms described. They are part of its full definition as a visually perceived actual spatial thing. A transperceptual space of hidden or unnoticed possible visual details, relations and broader factors provides, then, the atmosphere in which discrete visual items and relations exist. And, while the recognition of individual visual phenomena is emergent from this transperceptual space, it must remain in the background, mainly. If it did not, our visual capacities would be overwhelmed by stimuli. It is only exceptionally that we attend to transperceptual space – usually in the cases where recognition is difficult and a configuration has to be scrutinized closely, or acted upon. It is important to emphasize that our relation to the transperceptual hinges on cognitive habituation. We generally attend to the familiar salient aspects of things, but we know their hidden aspects or broader relations or propensities through sustained cognitive familiarity. Hence, the transperceptual is not just an unnoticed or hidden space that subtends the visible; it is logic of negotiation – a way of being orientated. Now let us suppose that an artist abstracts from nature or from the domain of human artifice, so as to create a drawing or painting. It may be, literally, abstracted from an individual, or from a specific kind of, three-dimensional item or state of affairs. It may be derived more loosely from some specific aspect or detail of such three-dimensional things, or simply from a set of initially sketched-out formal structures. However, what is of ultimate artistic interest is not what the artist abstracts from, but, rather, the nature of what he or she and the general viewer can abstract-as in relation to the finished work. For, unless we have specific art historical knowledge of the artist’s intentions, or there is some figurative component which can be recognized, it appears that there is nothing left to see except an expressive or significant form. Expressive or significant in what respects? Sometimes it is said, ‘in spiritual terms’. This, however, tells us nothing unless we can identify the specific sense of spiritual meaning we are dealing with, the reason why it can be visually expressed, and the reason why visual expression of this meaning should have special significance. Explanations of this kind have been elusive. My approach, however, suggests a much more economical theory of meaning, wherein we abstract-as – which means seeing the work’s optical illusion as the presentation of a configuration that is a possible aspect of transperceptual space. The composition looks ‘right’ because it is regarded, intuitively, as the unity of some visual possibility which might be found at one – or even at the intersection of several levels – of transperceptual space (levels which I will describe a little further on). Of course, it may be that neither artist nor audience has ever thought about transperceptual space as a concept. But every one has seen such things as microscopic details, things in unusual cross-section, or from an unusual angle, or, again, visual details and aspects considered independently of the whole of which they are a part. And they will often imagine, fancifully, how something might look if we varied its appearance in

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certain ways (such as emphasizing its structural spatial characteristics at the expense of its particular details). Overall, we become orientated to the transperceptual and its vectors, through habit, even if we have no idea of it (or cognate concepts) in explicit terms. Now, as far as I can see, if we look for virtual meaning in abstract works at a level which is internal to the works themselves, then the relation between optical illusion and transperceptual space is all that is available. If something demands to be looked at but is not immediately recognizable, then we negotiate it – almost automatically – in terms of transperceptual relations. It is worth considering how this might figure in the actual process of artistic creation. In working on an abstract composition, the artist may have all sorts of intentions guided by the specific personal and cultural circumstances in which he or she is working. However, such activity is guided by a more subconscious level of choices where he or she will make decisions that result in compositional features that look ‘right’. (The whole process of Ur-painting described by Wollheim, indeed, is orientated towards achieving this goal.) But what is the criterion of ‘right’? One might talk of formal balance, harmony and the like, and point to examples of these in previous art. However, original composition has to break with what is established, while remaining intelligibly connected to it. In the case of figurative art, compositional strategies can be guided by considerations of scale, viewing angles, lighting and colour schemes which are relevant to specific kinds of visual object and states of affair being represented. The three-dimensional visual world cannot show us in sufficient terms what a satisfying figurative composition must be like, but it can furnish us with criteria that can guide the search for structures that ‘work’ in the particular case. Compositional correctness in abstract works, in contrast, cannot deploy these same criteria. One might, of course, say that the abstract artist composes ‘intuitively’. But intuitiveness is not mere inexplicability. It means real knowledge of great complexity which cannot be expressed adequately in words. I would suggest, therefore, that when an abstract composition looks ‘right’ intuitively – to both the artist and the viewer – it is because the configuration is consistent with the unity of a possible visual item or state of affairs. The consistency in question here centres on optical illusion that suggests an aspect of transperceptual space. As we have seen, this means visual possibilities of a kind that are usually unnoticed or inexplicit, and which would require complex inspection or action so as to emerge. The artist presents dynamic and constitutive elements which might characterize idioms of unity among such possible visual states of affairs. It should be emphasized that in ‘clinching’ his or her abstract composition, the artist does not have to have some specific possibility from transperceptual space in mind. We learn the vectors of possible appearances in transperceptual space through largely unremarked-upon activities, or when studying details and appearances of things for some practical purpose. However, this experience accumulates and becomes a perceptual skill which – like our general sensori-motor capacities – works through recognition and expectation based on habitual rather than conscious factual knowledge.

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Now while our lived experience of transperceptual space is habitual, the philosophical viewpoint can analyse it explicitly in terms of at least five basic aspects.11 These are i) Spatial items, relations or states of affairs which, under normal circumstances, are incompletely available or unavailable to visual perception, or are unnoticed by it. These include forms at the margins of immediate visual fields, small or microscopic structures or life forms, the visual aspects of the internal states of a body or state of affairs (e.g. seen in a cross-section) and unusual perceptual perspectives (such as aerial viewpoints). This level also includes details of specific visual appearances considered independently of the whole of which they are a part. Much ‘biomorphic’ and ‘action-painting’ type abstraction operates at this level. ii) Possible visual items, relations, states of affairs or life forms which might exist in physical and/or perceptual environments radically different from our usual one. This might encompass subterranean, sub-aquatic and extraterrestrial environments, unfamiliar or highly evanescent atmospheric effects and ambiences and effects arising from the inhibition or distortion of the normal conditions of visual perception. Again, this is a level that is much developed by abstract expressionist action painting (especially Pollock’s work in the post-war period). iii) Visual forms that appear to be variations upon recognizable kinds of things and/ or their relations and spatial contexts, without amounting to actual representations of them. This can take the form of apparent distortion or fragmentation of the things in question, or of presentations where there is not enough visual evidence to ‘clinch’ a form as being an actual representation of the thing it loosely suggests. (This tendency begins – but with very different emphases – in aspects of hermetic and synthetic Cubism, and Kandinsky’s work after 1910.) iv) idealized variations on forms basic to visual perception’s structural aspects – such as mass, volume, density, shape (especially geometrical), positional relations (such as ‘in front of ’ or ‘behind’) and colour. These features are presented (individually, or in concert) as purified foci of attention in their own right, rather than as factors embedded in the everyday visual world of things and artefacts. (The tendency begins with aspects of hermetic and synthetic Cubism, and is given stronger emphases in the work of Mondrian and Malevich.) v) Visual correlates of specific states of mind. In formal terms, many visual forms in art can be characterized as expressions of specific kinds or clusters of emotion. However, there are some abstract works – especially of a minimal kind – where colour as such is rendered in the sparsest terms, and where there is an absence or diminution of other formal configurations. Here feelings are evoked through the emotional power of colour in its own right – catalysed, in some cases, by the presence of slight formal devices. In general terms, all these aspects of transperceptual space form a periphery of hidden details and imaginative associations that subtends normal visual perception. However, they need not all be involved at one time, and those which are engaged will be determined by the kind of visual item we are attending to, and the nature of our interest in it. And – to reiterate – our knowledge of them will be mainly tacit. Even with abstract art, an artist may only be aware of himself or herself in explicit terms

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as creating a satisfying composition. My point, however, is that for the criterion of satisfaction, here is a possibility of visual consistency that might characterize some aspect of transperceptual space. The really important avenue of contact between abstract art and transperceptual space can be shown by way of a contrast. Figurative art’s virtual subject matter involves recognizable kinds of visual item or states of affairs rendered in terms of familiar, frontally orientated aspects (or sets of aspects) presented to a notionally stationary observer in a ‘normal’ viewing position. Abstract works, in contrast, can only utilize optical illusion. However, the very fact there is no immediate convention of viewing over and above this illusion, means that abstract works are freed from the constraints of fixed and familiar notional viewing positions. This is why they are able to present possible conditions of visible existence – that is, transperceptual space’s formative elements rather than the recognizable ‘figurative’ objects or states of affairs which might be formed by those elements. It might be objected that the optical illusion of abstract works does not demand to be read in any terms other than mere illusion. All that need be said in describing such works is on the lines of ‘this dab of colour appears to be in front of that one’, or ‘this shape appears to be in motion’, or ‘that volume looks to be heavy’ or whatever. Nothing within the internal resources of the work itself justifies the further inference that such illusion must be taken to evoke transperceptual space. However, the austere spatial dynamics described in abstract works are intrinsically more than mere illusion. This is because they are presented as pure visual appearance, that is, by and large independently of their usual embeddedness in the spatial being and immediate appearances of familiar visible things and states of affairs. They are, as it were, bracketed off from their normal, unnoticed, contextualizing role in visual phenomena, and through this become consistent possible visual items or states of affairs in their own right. For example, in ordinary visual experience, relations such as ‘in front of ’ or ‘behind’, or being ‘in motion’, or whatever is encountered mainly as unnoticed aspects of practical interests and contexts (connected with familiar spatial objects and states of affairs). The abstract work, in contrast, can present, and, as it were, idealize, these relations without reference to such practical interests, and, by this means, it directs attention to the spatial relations in their own right as basic structural components in how things appear visually (i.e. level iv) of transperceptual space. Hence, to even describe abstract works in terms of optical illusion is to already identify key factors in the spatial structure of visual appearance which are not usually noticed directly and/or are not immediately accessible to recognition and exploration. The more specific features of an abstract work can then evoke one or more of the other levels. Reference to transperceptual space is not avoided, it is demanded. The austere description of abstract optical illusion actually engages with transperceptual space in fundamental terms. Creating an abstract work just is to engage with and exemplify some aspect of transperceptual space – and this space is declared through the visual material being presented in an artistic display format. A final objection must be considered. Even if we allow an intrinsic connection between abstract works and transperceptual space, there is, surely, systematic ambiguity concerning which aspect of that space is actually exemplified in any specific work. It is

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true that the relation between abstract art and transperceptual space is not as precise as the convention of twofoldness which allows us to read a picture as being ‘of ’ such and such a kind of thing. The individual abstract artwork is related to transperceptual space more openly, in that it can engage with more than one aspect of such space, and, indeed, do so in a way that invites critical discussion of which aspects it might be most appropriately judged in relation to. However, this actually works to abstract art’s expressive advantage. For it means that the work alludes to, rather than directly represents, a subject matter. Transperceptual space defines a range of possible virtual ‘subject matters’ here, but which exact aspect of transperceptual space is relevant to a particular work is only alluded to (just as, in level iii), abstract works can suggest individual kinds of things without amounting to being pictures ‘of ’ them. This does not make judgement about meaning in abstract works purely subjective. The four aspects of transperceptual space are specific but flexible, and can be applied in more precise ways when judging the concrete individual artwork.

Part three Having outlined the theory, it is time to put it to use in the analysis of specific abstract works. The selection presented here presents examples from the major idioms of abstract art – biomorphic, technomorphic, geometric and colour field/minimal Franz Kline’s Meryon of 1960–1961 is a disturbing painting (Figure 2.2). It is grounded in level (i) of transperceptual space insofar, as simultaneously, it suggests things seen (but not recognized) at the periphery of vision; or the visually small details of a brushstroke presented at macro-level – something all the more disturbing through it being a part of something that seems to have come to life on its own, even though the whole from which it has apparently disconnected is only the trace of gesture, rather than a living thing. Jackson Pollock’s Yellow Islands (1952) is a work that is closely engaged with level (ii) of transperceptual space. Its immediate idioms of optical illusion are suggestive of aggregations of organic matter, perhaps in the depths of water – at a level which a viewer would never have access to except under the most extraordinary circumstances. (It may even suggest an extraterrestrial environment.) There is an especially interesting visual effect created by the yellow islands themselves – which suggest life forms existing in, about to emerge from or being submerged by an environment. These three possibilities, of course, are by no means mutually exclusive, and we may imagine them to all be at issue in the yellow organisms’ struggle for life. The sense of a struggle – or tension at the very least – is augmented by the strong (as it were, tentacled) black form which appears as a kind of spatter in the upper left centre. It could be argued that this form is the weakest element in the picture in terms of compositional balance, but in terms of transperceptual meaning, there is the suggestion of an intruding force, possibly of a destructive nature. The scene can be seen-as an imaginary cross-section through a network of organic entities, relations and processes.

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Figure 2.2 Franz Kline, Meryon, 1960–1961; oil on canvas: 2359 × 1956 mm. Source : Tate Collection, © ARS, NY, and DACS, London, 2012.

Now while this work has immediate organic overtones, some viewers might also be struck by a different possibility, insofar as the optical illusion suggests a jumble of cables and circuits seen under unexpected light conditions. This curious hint of human artifice merges with the vegetal associations insofar as tendrils, wires and circuitry are carriers of energy, albeit of radically different kinds. The work can sustain both interpretations without contradiction. Fiona Rae’s Night Vision (1998) engages a rather different dimension of seeing-as (Figure 2.3). To understand why, a contrast should be made. A great deal of abstract art is suggestive of features created through human artifice (what I have called technomorphic). For example, Mondrian’s works after 1920 – with their emphatic perpendiculars, right angles and primary colours, are suggestive of the embeddedness of pure geometric forms

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Figure 2.3 Fiona Rae, Night Vision; oil and acrylic on canvas, 1998: 96 × 84 in/243.8 × 213.4 cm. Source : Tate Collection, London, © Fiona Rae.

in everyday objects such as houses and buildings seen from above; or of pure colour as something refined from its naturally occurring instances. Rae’s painting is rather more ambiguous. It engages level (iii) of transperceptual space with strong elements of level (ii) as well. The extended rectangular forms (containing a thin space separating them from their emphatic borders) have a blandness and uniformity of colour that – like Mondrian’s – connote a connection with artifice. However, whereas Mondrian’s colours are absolutely pure (‘spiritualized’ as he would have described them), Rae’s are not. They have the ambience of artificial lights about them – perhaps even those of cars at night, seen under time-lapse conditions. This evocation of lights by night fits in well – or, rather, disturbingly – with the various forms that are distributed across and in front of the lights and the background. The forms appear twisted and broken –

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mutilated even. Three of them bleed or cast areas of black over surrounding features. The suggestion is of creatures caught in artificial light (and by the powers sustaining them) that are striving to escape, or have already been wounded or destroyed. The disturbing conjunction of artificial and the suggestion of animal life is made more disturbing by the insistent sense of rigidly ideal compositional order and the restricted colour scheme. This creates a sense of the relation between artifice and animal life, being cold and accidental – a reflection of Being understood as mere mechanism. Malevich’s Supremus (of 1915 or 1916) has a geometric emphasis that is much gentler than Rae’s painting, or, indeed, that of Mondrian. It exemplifies level (iv) of transperceptual space. In this respect, geometric form is usually encountered embedded in the world of human artifice, notably textbook illustrations, and as a structural factor in how humans shape their environments – most notably through building. It is also, however, a structural aspect of many natural formations – both organic and inorganic. The geometrical shapes in Malevich’s painting are idealized in terms of both these aspects. On the one hand, they are absolutely regular – and expressions of the human understanding of geometry; yet, on the other hand, these forms have an autonomous – even liberated – aspect to them, insofar as their distribution in relation to one another suggests that they are in motion, at different angles and velocities. These two aspects meet in a curious visual exchange. The sense of order that is the essence of geometrical shape is turned into a kind of process – suggestive, indeed, of the natural process of crystal formation – where the regular geometrical forms sometimes pile up and collide (as in the case of intersecting crystals). The overall impression, therefore, is of geometry as a formative power rather than an object of immediate visual perception alone. I turn finally to a work mentioned by Wollheim himself, namely Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis of 1950–1951 (Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4 Newman, Barnett (1905–1970): Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950–1951; oil on canvas: 7’ 11 3/8’ × 17’, 9 1/4’ (242.2 × 541.7 cm). Source : Gift of Mr and Mrs Ben Heller. Acc.n.: 240.1969. © 2012. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

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Wollheim suggests that this work may well not be an instance of twofoldness. Indeed, but it still has great power in terms of seeing-as. It engages with level (v) of transperceptual space, namely the evocation of feeling through the intrinsic character of colour and the absence or (in this case) diminution of formal activity. To show this, it cannot be emphasized enough how important scale is, for this particular work. Its large size means that the thin perpendiculars (or ‘zips’ as Newman called them) are much more visually significant than mere reproduction in a book suggests. Some of them – especially at the far right and left – have a ghostly presence as though gradually dissipating into an encompassing and perhaps unknowable void. However, the bright white zip, and the black one have a different significance. They not only divide the red void, but suggest, indeed, something behind it. The white zip presents something shining through; the black zip suggests a perhaps even more unfathomable and menacing void. Now there have been many ‘sublime’ figurative works with ‘high-faulting’ metaphysical ambitions. But in the context of abstract work, intense psychological states with metaphysical overtones are sometimes achieved precisely through the impact of colour and the sparsity of other features. In Vir Heroicus Sublimis, the formal activity reduces to the most precariously thin perpendiculars; yet these catalyse the emotional impact of the bare expanse of red. The great bulk of Newman’s work – and indeed, much minimal painting – emphasizes, similarly, the sparseness of painterly and compositional means in such a way as to present the void, emptiness and modes of privation, and all the intense emotions of anxiety, wonder or even elation that are involved in these (on the basis of the character of the individual work). It should be emphasized, however, that the minimal tendency does not have to have such a dark or metaphysical orientation. Artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Jules Olitski, for example, employ areas of pure colour that give back – in the exuberance and intensity of their colour expanses and reductive shapes – a joy that is mainly lost in the information processing that our everyday colour perception is absorbed in. Now, it might be argued that the interpretations I have offered here are simply fanciful readings of works that are no more than jumbles of animated lines, splodges of paint or recognizable geometrical shapes. However, the interpretations are consistent with how the works appear and can be, demonstrably, ‘cashed out’ through close analysis of the painting itself. There is a clear space of ambiguity in the work, but given the presumption of virtuality, and the criteria of transperceptual space described earlier, the interpretations are more than mere personal associations. One can, in other words, justify their assignation to specific levels and aspects of transperceptual space through careful phenomenological description of their dominant structures of optical illusion. Through this, indeed, there is some scope for criteria of correctness or incorrectness in our abstracting-as. In criticizing and developing Wollheim’s approach to abstract art, then, we have – through the notion of transperceptual space – made a key bridge to the ontological grounding of expression. I turn now to thinkers who address this dimension as their major point of orientation.

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3

Truth in Art: Heidegger against Contextualism

Introduction Heidegger’s extended essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’1 offers profound insights into the relation between visual art and Being. Indeed, it offers an important alternative to dominant formalist and contextualist approaches to visual art. The latter approach, in particular, has been very influential in recent art history and theory, and holds that the meaning of visual artwork is determined, fundamentally, by the work’s relation to the original historical context of its production, and to its subsequent historical reception. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, however, is a difficult text. Much of this derives from a quite specific notion of truth which Heidegger is committed to. It constellates around his specific understanding of Being – an understanding which determines his theory of visual art, also. These important connections with cognition and ontology make Heidegger’s theory one of the most searching accounts of visual art’s ultimate expressive significance. To show this, I will now expound Heidegger’s theory and consider how it overcomes some contextualist objections lodged in, or deriving from, Meyer Schapiro’s famous critique. Part one outlines Heidegger’s complex general philosophical strategy and the way in which this shapes his arguments in the essay. The key example of Van Gogh’s painting of ‘peasant’ shoes is introduced. In Part two, Heidegger’s key paired concept of earth/world is expounded, explained and extended to cover important factors which Heidegger himself does not address sufficiently. Part three presents the major connections which Heidegger makes between the artwork’s unconcealing of the truth of Being and its ‘createdness’. Part four is an extended critical review of Heidegger’s theory which defends it against contextualist objections raised by Schapiro and Hagi Kenaan. However, it is also shown that Heidegger is much too cavalier in his dismissal of other contextual factors deriving from the diachronic history of art media. Reference to this is necessary in order to explain why some works disclose the truth of Being while other works do not.

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Part one Heidegger’s entire philosophical enterprise is that of a fundamental ontology. This holds that the nature of Being in the broadest sense does not admit of adequate philosophical characterization in terms of readily defined concept systems. Being per se and particular beings are mutually dependent in complex ways, but do not relate to one another like, say, attributes of a substance or items in a container. They involve, rather, dynamic and radically temporal factors which discursive thought easily distorts. Philosophy must, accordingly, adopt a non-invasive strategy of address, where the Being of beings is disclosed as much – if not more – by the way philosophy is written or spoken, as by what is said. Fundamental ontology means that the Being of being is shown and reaffirmed through continued processes of philosophical discourse. As one might expect, a position of this sort does not make a rigid distinction between philosophical and poetic meaning. Indeed, in Heidegger’s work from the 1930s onwards, his style of writing becomes increasingly poetic, and, in analytic terms, more elliptical. For those unsympathetic to Heidegger’s work, this may seem obscurantist. His point is, however, that only through this approach can that which is being investigated be disclosed in full and (as it were) non-stereotypical terms. The essay on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ is one of the first major manifestations of this elliptical strategy. I shall now present its basic arguments. Heidegger asks of the work of art, ‘what and how it is?’ Clearly, it has an immediate thingly character, but how should this be interpreted? One could read the artwork as a substance with particular traits, or as a unity of sensible qualities, or as formed matter. Qua thing, the work has the first two aspects, but the third aspect is derived from the realm of human work and artifice. Heidegger argues, accordingly, that the notion of ‘equipment’ provides a better interpretative clue to the artwork, since it is ‘intermediate’ between thing and work. Characteristically, however, Heidegger does not approach this notion directly. He considers a familiar example of equipment, namely a pair of peasant shoes. With deceptive – almost sly – casualness, he then observes that Everyone is acquainted with them. But since it is a matter here of direct description, it may be well to facilitate the visual representation of them. For this purpose a pictorial representation suffices. We shall choose a well-known painting by Van Gogh, who painted such shoes several times.2

This is actually an extremely radical move because, through it – without any sense of argumentative compulsion – the major focus of Heidegger’s investigation is reconstellated around how painting discloses the being of equipment, rather than the character of equipment per se (Figure 3.1). He suggests that the position of the shoes within the work’s pictorial space does little more than present them as bare examples of a certain kind of equipment. To grasp the more fundamental significance of the work, we must attend to the way in which, through being represented, the shoes are, in effect, acted upon. In a famous passage, Heidegger waxes lyrical on this:

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Figure 3.1 Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Shoes, 1886–1889, Paris; oil on canvas: 38.1 × 45.3 cm. Source : Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), s11V/1962, F255.

From the dark opening of the worn inside of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and everuniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field . . . This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting within itself.3

Heidegger emphasizes that this interpretation is no mere imaginative reading-in of meaning. If anything, the description is actually ‘too crude and literal’. The key point is that far from merely aiding visualization of the shoes, the painting discloses the ‘equipmentality of equipment’ per se, through the character of the shoes’ ‘reliability’. Of course, the wearer of the shoes simply wears them. But when they are represented, the painting locates them at the intersections of a variety of changing existential vectors (based on emergence and withdrawal, as well as interaction). These vectors act upon

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the shoes, just as the shoes locate the wearer in relation to them. The reliability of the shoes, therefore, is an expression not of usefulness per se, but rather of how it is given a specific character by the vicissitudes of existence in the irrevocable passage of time. On these terms, then, for Heidegger, Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth . . . In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. ‘To set’ means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, come in the work to stand in the light of its being.4

The artist’s work, in other words, clarifies the particular. Through the conditions of this presentation, the essence of that kind of thing of which the particular is an example is disclosed. This, however, is by no means the end of the story. Heidegger has just taken us through the first stage of an exploratory progression of investigation. In starting from the thingly character of the artwork, he has half-addressed thingliness and halfaddressed equipment. That which is ultimately at issue in art – the disclosure of truth – has been opened up but not fully explored. If we proceed, therefore, from the workly to the thingly aspect of art, then the dynamic notion of truth-as-unconcealedness is put in a fuller and more authentic context, namely that of the Being of beings as such. Heidegger now goes on to address, accordingly, the relation between work and truth in the context of art.

Part two Of decisive importance here is a relation which Heidegger has already introduced in the course of his description of the peasant shoes. It is that of world and earth. In terms of earth, we are told that What this word says is not be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent.5

To make full sense of this difficult notion, we must immediately relate it to world. Heidegger describes it thus. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those decisions of our history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds . . . The peasant woman, . . ., has a world because she dwells in the overtness of beings, of the things that are. Her equipment, in its reliability, gives to this world a necessity and nearness of its own.6

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On these terms, then, earth is a physical matrix, rather than a set of determinate physical things or properties. It is composed of inanimate nature and very basic nonhuman forms and rhythms of life from which the means of sustenance and shelter are generated over and over again, in cycles through time. World, in contrast, is the human emergence from earth, as expressed in the urge to create meaning (through personal and communal interactions, and the creation of artefacts and institutions). Earth and world are distinct from one another, but they maintain a vital reciprocal interaction. As Heidegger puts it, The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.7

There is, in other words, a dynamic ontological exchange between world and earth. It is the earth which sustains the emergence of meaning and the world, but that opening is circumscribed by the earth’s power to generate and arrest life, and return it to more basic forms, or to inanimate Being. In part, this is a conflict, but it is also much more than that. For world and earth are ontologically reciprocal – each is a part of the other’s character. What we bring forth is always informed by knowledge of its finite nature and a sense of outcomes, and the earth’s return of things to itself is only possible insofar as it brings them forth to begin with. And just as the world opens up (in part) through the diversity of things; yet this diversity involves a plurality of individual entities, self-secluding and self-returning by virtue of their very individuality. Heidegger’s understanding of the interchange between world and earth extends far beyond the crude examples provided here. Crucially, he emphasizes its profound significance in relation to art. In this respect, we are given a contrast between equipment and a Greek temple. In the former, the material which the equipment is made of disappears in the usefulness of the artefact. If the tool (or whatever) works, we do not attend to what it is made of. By contrast, the temple-work, in setting-up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of the work’s world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal, into the lightening and darkening of color, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of the word.8

The point is, then, that in creating a temple, the artistic ensemble opens up a world – of divine meanings and sociocultural significance. But these meanings do not merely exist in some indicative mode, which the temple is the mere site of. Rather, the materiality of the temple is profoundly involved in the world-opening. The artwork opens up a world, insofar as, at the same time, it sets forth the earth. Through being worked, the diversity and texture of materials radiate their own individual and collective presence,

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even as they open up a world. They are earth shown as returning to, and resting in itself. It is this which characterizes the thingly aspect of art in its true form. Now obviously, there is a profound harmony involved here. But Heidegger himself gives more emphasis to the fact that it is based on discord. Through this discord, ‘the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their own natures’.9 Unfortunately, Heidegger gives no concrete phenomenological examples of the world/earth discord in art, but only further rhetorical affirmations of the fact that some tensional harmony is involved. Given this worry, one might supplement Heidegger’s position as follows. A drawing or painting or sculpture is usually a manifestly individual thing. However, this self-subsistent individual character is defined by at least three levels of properties which are emergent from it – formal qualities (of line, shape, colour, texture, mass, light and volume); expressive qualities (based on associations between forms and such things as joy, serenity, melancholy and the like) and representational qualities concerning the work’s pictorial subject matter. Our interpretation of the work, accordingly, must negotiate these different ‘world’ aspects, through perceptual gestalt switches, yet always relating back to the self-enclosed physical item which is the artwork qua thing. If each aspect is strong, it can threaten to overwhelm the harmony of the whole by, in effect, excluding or concealing the existence of the other aspects (including the physical one). But the very strength of such multiple aspects can – given the right work – enhance our sense of, and satisfaction with, the physical body which sustains the emergent properties. Another decisive factor in relation to both world and earth concerns the question of limits. In the discussion of Van Gogh’s painting, Heidegger emphasizes the way in which it discloses the existential vectors surrounding the shoes – even though the pictorial space has little content over and above the shoes themselves. However (though Heidegger does not mention it himself), the character of disclosure here still owes a massive amount to the physical edge of the canvas (a point we have already encountered in Wollheim’s account of Ur-painting). It is the relation to this which both constrains and facilitates the artist’s particular treatment of his or her subject matter (the emergence of what Heidegger calls ‘form’ or ‘figure’, as we shall see a little further on). The edge, literally has the earth function of gathering in and retaining the subject matter while defining the character of world-projection in the picture. It activates that content through, in a sense concealing its own reality as a physical limit; yet it affirms that reality (and the ‘earthy’ self-subsistence of the work) as soon as we ask why this projection is so effective. There is another relevant point concerning the significance of the image’s physical being per se. In many cultures, images are not regarded as rigidly distinct from that which they are images of.10 For the difference between image and subject to amount to anything, there must be some clear indicator that this is an image of something rather than that something, itself. This is usually provided by formats which emphasize the image’s physical nature. Familiar examples of this include pictures being executed on paper or canvas, or (rather more ambiguously) sculptures having a free-standing format. In such cases, the physicality of the image declares it to be the bringing forth of a possible appearance,

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rather than the actual being of the subject itself. When a picture or sculpture is set in a specific location (as for example, with fresco), then physical devices such as frames or plinths emphasize that the image is to be seen as an image. In such cases, curiously enough, it is an affirmation of earth characteristics which secure the recognition of world-projecting image-status. An even more subtle earth/world tensional harmony can be found in the phenomenon of linear and painterly emphases in pictorial representation. At first sight, these are purely stylistic features which offer fundamental alternatives in how form is created. However, they actually conceal a debt to the physical reality of drawing and painting. This is because, in the most basic terms, if one wishes to create an image of something, this can be done either by gouging or drawing onto a surface to define an outline, or by placing marks on a surface to define a mass. These ur-possibilites are the earth factor of pictorial style, and it is this which has made them so important formally. They disclose the physical basis of image forming, even while mainly appearing to be no more than stylistic factors. Perhaps, the most poignant factor of all is the simplest one. Given a pictorial or sculptural representation, we see it as a projection of life and world, yet know that it is merely an artefactual configuration of marks on a canvas or carving in stone, or whatever. There is a creative tension here precisely because while there is a possibility of disappointment each time we address the concealed fact that ‘this is just paint’ (or stone), the relapse into earth can, nevertheless, also lead us to marvel all the more at the fact that the inanimate earth does have such magical projective possibilities. (I shall return to this phenomenon in the next chapter.) Many other creative tensional harmonies accrue to the earth/world aspect of visual art. Rather than add to the list, however, I must now say why it is so important to develop Heidegger’s position to encompass such examples. In this respect, we will recall that he links art to the disclosure of truth in the earlier part of his essay. But the account is not complete because this conception of truth has a much broader significance – based on the Being of being. And truth in this context involves a more general conflict between concealing and unconcealing, of which the earth/world relation is one expression. He observes that Concealment can be a refusal or merely a dissembling. We are never fully certain whether it is one or the other. Concealment conceals and dissembles itself. This means: the open stage in the midst of beings, the clearing, is never a rigid stage with a permanently raised curtain on which the play of beings runs its course. Rather the clearing happens only as this double concealment. The unconcealedness of beings – this is never a merely existent state, but a happening. Unconcealedness (truth) is neither an attribute of factual things in the sense of beings, nor one of propositions.11

These difficult remarks emphasize one major point. The disclosure of truth is not a simple correspondence between judgement and state of affairs. Rather, truth emerges in relation to the interplay of aspects in our cognition of the world. If something is found to be true, it is because we can trace its emergence from contexts where it was

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previously unnoticed or hidden or from contexts where it was taken to be, or passed off, as something else. Consider, for example, so simple a truth that my pen is on the table, just to the right. If I look at it directly, it is now central to my vision and no longer to the right. I can describe it as ‘a Parker’, ‘a black and silver thing’ or ‘the pen which I used in my final undergraduate exams’. With each shift of perception or descriptions, a new truth is unconcealed. Through this, I exclude immediate reference to other perceptual viewpoints and descriptions, even though these are, in principle, applicable to it. Sometimes, indeed (for personal or practical reasons), I may treat an item so much in terms of one of its aspects that, in effect, I am treating it as if it were no more than this aspect – even though I know that this is not literally the case. That which enables truth, in other words, is not some fixed, rigid order of factual being. Rather, it is the phenomenological outcome and instigator of changes in our cognitive orientation towards the world. In any such change, some things stand revealed while others fall into concealment. One cannot separate these two vectors. It is only through their constant interplay that the Being of being – the character of what is – is revealed in its existential dynamic. Now the examples which I developed to illustrate the tensional harmony of world and earth in art fit in well with this account. For, sometimes, the specific aspects involved are concealed or taken to be other than they are; sometimes they are recognized in their own right and other times they are recognized in an unconcealed form as mutually dependent earth/world relations. The truth of the artwork, therefore involves a complex interplay of unconcealed and concealing world and earth aspects recognized through constant interpretative gestalt switches. Having linked art to truth-as-unconcealedness, Heidegger makes one further move which is of far-reaching significance. It is to this I now turn.

Part three Heidegger notes that The establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and will never come to be again.12

This uniqueness centers on a complex interplay among earth, world, truth and a newly introduced concept – ‘createdness’. In another complex passage, Heidegger claims that The strife that is thus brought into the rift and thus set back into the earth and thus fixed in place is figure, shape, Gestalt. Createdness of the work means: truth’s being fixed in place in the figure. Figure is the structure in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself. This composed rift is the fitting or joining of truth.13

The various harmonies in conflict described earlier might be seen as focused in these comments. The ‘rift’ is the artwork’s act of world-opening which, through its

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articulation in figure and shape, declares the material from which those factors are made. In it, the unity of world and earth separates – but in a way that allows us to become aware of earth as that from which world emerges. Indeed, this setting back into earth means that the emergence of world is now fixed in place as emergent. It becomes a truth whose unconcealment we can constantly witness and reaffirm, through the gestalt switches involved in perceptions of the work’s different aspects. Createdness is thus the giving of enduring form to a specific unconcealing of truth. But it has other decisive aspects. For whereas the createdness of equipment disappears in its use, the createdness of art does not. As Heidegger puts it, in the work, createdness is expressly created into the created being, so that it stands out from it, from the being thus brought forth from it, in an expressly particular way.14

This does not mean that createdness is some device whereby the artist draws attention to himself or herself, rather it emphasizes that this is a unique occasion of bringing forth. It discloses the work as a specific and unrepeatable event wherein truth is unconcealed. Two further, extremely complex factors are embodied here. The first concerns experience. In Heidegger’s words, The more solitary the work, fixed in the figure, stands on its own and the more cleanly it seems to cut all ties to human beings, the more simply does the thrust come into the Open that such a work is . . .15

This thrust, indeed, transports its audience into an out-of-the-ordinary realm. To submit to this displacement means: to transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening within the work.16

At first sight, this smacks of the traditional formalist notion of the aesthetic attitude of disinterested contemplation. Such contemplation involves focusing on the work’s form, so that our usual practical orientation towards the world is suspended. However, this is not Heidegger’s meaning.17 His real concern might be described best as an intensive contemplation of truth across manifold dimensions of Being. These include the unconcealing of subject matter (as in the Van Gogh example), the various complex harmonious conflicts of world and earth described earlier; the work’s self-disclosure as a specific act of unconcealing, its exemplification of the Being of being’s self-disclosure and one remaining vital factor. Heidegger describes this factor as follows Whenever art happens – that is, whenever there is a beginning – a thrust enters history, history either begins or starts over again. History means here not a sequence in time of events of whatever sort, however important. History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people’s endowment.18

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Through its manifold disclosures of truth fixed in the particular work, that work is, thereby, an opening up of history in its most vital sense – namely that of how the Being of beings is understood. It is this which is the ‘appointed task’ of a people – no matter how much their current circumstances may have led them into more superficial concerns. And it is the artist whose achievements renew this task. The artist’s individual achievement situates his or her broader community in relation to Being once more. Collective identity and openness to Being are exemplified through what the artist creates. In the createdness of art, the community can comprehend and renew its quest for understanding of the ultimate. Given all these points, it is obvious that Heidegger’s philosophy of art does not simply have a different analytic content and approach. It is trying to shake and reconfigure all aspects of our understanding of the way art is created and appreciated. Our familiar aesthetic concepts become ontologically reconfigured and massively expanded through the manifold relation to truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance – as this being of truth in the work and as work – is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth; truth’s taking of its place . . . The beautiful does not lie in form, but only because the forma once took its light from Being as the isness of what is.19

Part four It is now time for a provisional critical review of Heidegger’s arguments. A first point concerns their relation to Contextualism (i.e. the view that the meaning of an image is explicable mainly through the socio-historical context of its production and patterns of reception). In a famous critique of Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro adopts a contextualist viewpoint. He holds that Heidegger is fatally indifferent to questions of iconography in his key Van Gogh example of the ‘peasant’ shoes. Schapiro notes that there are a number of treatments of this theme by Van Gogh, and that two were exhibited at an exhibition in Amsterdam, which Heidegger attended. However, in Schapiro’s words, From neither of these pictures, nor from any of the others, could one say that a painting of shoes by Van Gogh expresses the being or essence of a peasant woman’s shoes and her relation to nature and work. They are the shoes of the artist, by that time a man of the town and city.20

The shoes, in other words, are not even those of a peasant woman – they are the urban dweller Van Gogh’s own. Hence – despite Heidegger’s explicit affirmation to the contrary – the philosopher is merely reading meaning into the work. Indeed, as Schapiro notes also, there is nothing in Heidegger’s description that could not be evoked by merely looking at a real pair of peasant woman’s shoes. The objection is then hardened. For, even if there were an actual painting of a peasant woman’s shoes

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by Van Gogh, the philosopher’s fulsome description of it would still be problematic. As Schapiro puts it, Heidegger would still have missed an important aspect of the painting: the artist’s presence in the work. In his account of the picture he has overlooked the personal and physiognomic in the shoes that made them so persistent and absorbing a subject for the artist (not to speak of the intimate connection with the specific tones, forms, and brush-made surface of the picture as a painted work).21

In the remainder of his chapter, Schapiro devotes much energy to showing iconographic and, more emphatically, detailed biographical reasons for why Van Gogh represents the shoes in the way that he does. The upshot of all this is that the meaning of Van Gogh’s painting is taken to be a function of its quite specific historical context of production. Now there are a few useful pointers in Schapiro’s critique which I will address further on. The greater part of his argument, however, entirely misses the point. In this respect, for example, Heidegger can – with complete equanimity – accept all Schapiro’s iconographical and biographical explanations of how Van Gogh came to make his painting in the way he did. However, the painting is an image. This means that while biographical and contextual factors inform how it is made, it is necessarily much more than these factors.22 An image (in its artefactual visual form) exists to communicate visually. Most images become physically and temporally discontinuous from their sites of creation, and even if, like fresco, they are physically bonded to it, this bonding can be, and often is, removed. Also, it is exceptionally rare for an image to exist side-byside with written explanations of what it is ‘about’, even at the place of origin. And if it does, in a sense, this defeats the whole point of visual communication. The point here is that image-making is a social practice where the artist knows that his or her work does not go into the future with an umbilical cord attached to his or her intentions or the original context of its creation. The work may serve documentary functions, but these are just one aspect of its existence qua image, and are not the basis of its artistic meaning in any sufficient sense. In this respect, consider the example of the portrait. Its official purpose is to present an appearance of its sitter. Sometimes – if it is a quick sketch – it will indeed present a specific appearance of the sitter. A more finished work will present a possible appearance – synthesized from many hours of study. Now a sitter (and, indeed, a more general audience) may regard a portrait as bad because it does not present a true likeness. But if we address the work as art, rather than in terms of its documentary function, different criteria come into play. Holbein’s Portrait of Ann of Cleves, for example, is reputedly an image which visually misrepresents its sitter. But it is a charming portrait in terms of the physiognomic and possible character insights which it presents. Suppose also that it was discovered that Velazquez’s wonderfully sympathetic studies of dwarves at the court of King Phillip were in fact wholly imagined rather than based on individuals who actually existed. Would this diminish the power of the works in any way? The answer is no. This is because, the artwork’s raison d’être is to present possibilities of visual experience not actual ones.

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This being said, knowledge of who a sitter is can make a very significant difference to how we respond to a work (and this would especially be the case with a self-portrait). It could enhance our enjoyment and make us see the work in an entirely new way. Our response might then be described as ‘informed’. But while this might enhance our aesthetic appreciation in some circumstances (on lines indicated by Gadamer,23 for example), in many other cases, documentary knowledge of a work’s ‘original’ will have no relevance. A portrait is artistically meaningful in basic terms simply as a visual interpretation of a possible individual human being. We are led, accordingly, to a most interesting question. Which of these two aspects – visual documentation or art – is closer to the ontological basis of the picture qua picture? And the answer must be art. This is because, in making a picture, it is not logically presupposed that the picture is based on any specific individual thing. (Picturing is not the same as copying.) All that is required is that the image is recognizably of such and such a kind of three-dimensional thing.24 In ontological terms, it is the artefactual projection of kinds of visual possibility. More specific functions – such as creating or using images so as to denote quite specific historical individuals, items or states of affairs – are of derivative, secondary significance. This explanation exactly parallels Heidegger’s approach. He identifies art with the image’s primal status as a projection of visual possibility, based on a physical medium. The fact that we are dealing with art and not just an image per se, however, introduces a further angle. In this respect, we might – like Kant – see art as an embodiment of aesthetic ideas. As Kant puts it, By an aesthetic idea I mean a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever . . ., can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.25

Consider this now in relation to the Van Gogh painting of shoes. The painting itself qua image is just of a pair of shoes. By looking at it, we cannot tell anything about who the wearer of the shoes is, or, indeed, the gender of that person. Van Gogh’s treatment of the subject, however, characterizes in a way which makes it an aesthetic idea in Kant’s sense. This status means that there are many different ways which are consistent with its imaginative development, and, indeed, that it is the possibility of such development which allows the image to disclose its subject matter to such powerful effect. Heidegger’s analysis, therefore, is entirely consistent with the work’s status as an artistic image, even if it does not square with its documentary significance and empirical historical origins. These latter factors are specialist professional practices, which are parasitic on the image/art structure. Schapiro, however, reverses this order. Like contextualist art historians in general, he identifies the meaning of art with the professional interests of contemporary art historians. The bad faith of Schapiro’s art-historical managerial ‘takeover’ here is beautifully illustrated in the following, telling passage. He says of Van Gogh In isolating his own old, worn shoes on a canvas, he turns them to the spectator: he makes of them a piece from a self-portrait, that part of the costume with which

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we tread the earth and in which we locate strains of movement, fatigue, pressure, and heaviness – the burden of the erect body in its contact with the ground. They mark our inescapable position on the earth. To ‘be in someone’s shoes’ is to be in his predicament or his station in life.26

Note the movement here from talk of Van Gogh himself to the basis of the shoes’ reliability, and their general significance for others. It seems that, for Schapiro, Van Gogh is disclosing the way in which the reliability of the shoes exemplifies (both literally and metaphorically) possible paths across the earth. If this is so, then Heidegger’s specific imaginative activation of one such possibility is entirely justified. Schapiro is, in effect, criticizing a much more developed version of an interpretation, that, he himself actually embraces. His position is, therefore, self-contradictory, as well as more generally flawed. This being said, I suggested earlier that there were a couple of small useful points in Schapiro’s critique. The first is his comment that Heidegger’s treatment of Van Gogh does no justice to the work’s painted character. In a sense, this is true. Heidegger rather shoots himself in the foot by introducing the earth/world pairing but then confining his account of its workings to the representational content of the Van Gogh painting. It was for this reason that I showed ways in which the pairing is vitally involved in many different aspects of visual art, and why it engages especially the relation between the work qua painted or carved object, and its various emergent qualities. To be fair to Heidegger, he does make some connections of this sort – but they are not much developed, and occur somewhat further on in the essay (mainly in relation to his Greek temple example). Schapiro’s criticism has been taken much further by others. Hagi Kenaan, for example, claims that Heidegger’s invulnerability to Schapiro’s factual points has an unexpected significance. It exemplifies a kind of blindness to visual art’s concreteness. In Kenaan’s words Just as one seems so lost in the context of the equipment one uses that it is not seen as equipment, Heidegger’s philosophy of art, on a different but analogous level of preoccupation, promotes a kind of absorption that obscures the singular presence of the thing as art.27

This is because the visual is allowed to appear only in the form of meanings that language already inhabits, meanings that are already to be found within the space of the text.28

Kenaan concludes, accordingly, that for Heidegger, The painting is a mute object whose communicability depends on those singular moments of oracular grace which are inspired by the philosopher.29

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The interpretation here is both unfair and misleading. There is a sense in which, for Heidegger, language has an existential priority over other idioms of communication. But this does not entail that visual art can only communicate, accordingly, through reference to language. In fact, there is a quite extraordinary irony at work. Heidegger’s world/earth pairing (as far as I can see) is meant to describe the dynamic basis of art as such. However, it is probably derived from the visual arts and, at the very least, is much more suited to them than it is to other media. This is because, in literature (and, one presumes, music), the pairing operates almost exclusively at the level of what is read. In the visual arts, it works at many levels through the relation between the ‘read’ content and various aspects of the physical medium which sustains it. The autographic character of most traditional visual art media gives them a special lucidity vis-à-vis the expression of world and earth. On these terms, whatever Heidegger’s ‘official’ position about the privilege of language, there is de facto elevation of visual art to communicative centrality in the essay. He firmly indicates – even if he does not clarify – the distinctiveness of visual art. Of course, it might be objected that in taking visual art to exemplify unconcealment, Heidegger is making it dependent on philosophy. But, in Heidegger’s terms, the Being of being is that which all idioms of communication and self-consciousness themselves constellate around. Philosophy can interpret its general character, but because Being is the ‘isness of what is’, we need other communicative idioms in order to better articulate the centrality of the particular. The world/earth structures of visual art offer a distinctive perspective on this. Their meaning cannot be explained away. I turn now to the second instructive point in Schapiro’s critique. It is his emphasis on the artist’s presence in the work. This is a problem for Heidegger because while he emphasizes the ‘createdness’ of the work, he does not clarify it except through rhetorical affirmations of its role in unconcealment. Schapiro himself, however, takes us no further. He reduces the question of individuality of vision to biographical details that, in the final analysis, are relevant only to documentary questions. We need, therefore, an alternative way of conceptualizing the artist’s individuality – his or her fundamental artistic presence. This can be found in the concept of style – understood not in the sense of fashion or chic, but in that of working an artistic medium in a distinctive way (on lines described in previous chapters). The main expressions of style are in the artist’s choice of medium and basic facility in it; the selection of subject matter and which specific aspects to address and compositional strategies in working the subject matter. These factors together mean that the artistic image is not a mere reflection of its subject matter, but rather creatively interprets it, and in so doing, transforms and characterizes it from a particular existential standpoint. Such interpretation enables us to see the subject matter and the artist’s relation to it in new ways and opens up imaginative possibilities which the audience can develop. Through this, the ontological factors involved in art are made into aspects of the artist’s expressive achievement, rather than presented as ideas alone. We are offered an aesthetic experience of them. However, not all images have this aesthetic effect. For it to occur, the image must be distinctive in relation to a further aspect of style based on a comparative historical dimension. If a work has some individuality in relation to this comparative context,

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it can engage our attention aesthetically, and we find that the artist has presented a new way of experiencing the world. A work becomes art, by virtue of its aesthetic significance emerging through a comparatively determined superiority to formulaic artifice. This is the dimension of effective historical difference – a topic which I shall elaborate as this work progresses. Unfortunately, the importance of this comparative dimension of style is not recognized by Heidegger.30 He talks of how art starts or renews a people’s historical endowment through its unconcealments of Being, but he does not explain why do some works do this and others do not. He takes himself to be talking only about ‘great’ art in the essay, but he offers no criterion of this. But great art and art which succeeds in unconcealing Being must do so on the basis of positive differences from other works. And these differences must be central to articulating the relation between earth and world. Heidegger is rather dismissive of art’s empirical history (of successive schools and techniques and the like) but it is here that the substance of positive difference is to be found. This substance does not consist of contextual knowledge of the circumstances of a work’s production, but rather its contribution to how art is made subsequently, that is, its role in the comparative diachronic history of a medium. Comparative history is not a series of mere technical facts, its refinements and innovations are significant through being exemplary, that is, opening up new possibilities for artists – literally new ways of seeing and doing, each of which can reconfigure, in Heidegger’s terms, the expression of earth and world. The development of techniques and rivalries of schools often centres on such issues. At the heart of these new developments is originality and exemplariness of style. If an artist develops an individual style and if it can engage with factors which are important to the medium’s scope, then this body of work will have canonic significance. ‘Canonic’ is more than skill or cleverness. It is art’s capacity to present the world in a new way, and so reconfigure our relation to Being (no matter in how slight a way). The key to this effective history is diachronic, rather than synchronic context. It is through originality and exemplariness in this dimension that artistic achievement can lead to what Heidegger calls ‘thrust’.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to present the extraordinary way in which Heidegger tries to overcome static ways of thinking about art. I have also tried to fill in necessary details about how the earth/world tensional harmony can be understood in relation to visual art, and to argue the importance of comparative historical factors bound up with the diachronic context of style. That Heidegger does not fill in these details is a problem. But it also has an important virtue. All the analytic points through which I have explained or developed his position must be squared against the intuitive character of aesthetic experience. This is a decisive factor in terms of visual art’s disclosure of Being. How we directly perceive art is full of complexity and ambiguity – of things felt and known, without being spelt out in the most literal terms.

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The factors which I have analytically resolved are initially experienced as a complex whole. Such experience has its own special nature precisely because of this immediacy. It has phenomenological depth of an intuitive kind. However, intuition is, in large part explicable. We can understand it reflectively, even if this distances us from the experience. But this brings us to an ultimate philosophical dilemma. Philosophy of its nature analyses. The being of its object, however, can only be reassembled abstractly as the result of this analysis. Heidegger’s whole philosophical strategy tries to overcome this problem, and to show the nature of Being, as it were between the lines – hence the convolutions of argument in his essay. However, even in its formulation of the problem of Being – however elliptical – it is already an analysis. The Being of visual art, in contrast, situates us in the problem without remarking on it explicitly. It genuinely shows the nature of Being in intuitive terms. But as rational beings, we always demand to know how such intuition is possible. Hence the origins of the The Origin of the Work of Art, and of this discussion also. In the course of the present chapter, I have introduced sculpture into the discussion at various points. It is now time to address this medium’s relation to Being in much more detail, using key ideas from Heidegger once again.

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Space, Place and Sculpture: Heidegger’s Pathways

Introduction The essay ‘Art and Space’1 (1969) is probably Heidegger’s last important philosophical writing. It is also the place where he gives his fullest discussion of sculpture. His approach, there, is strikingly original and illuminates factors which are central to the interests of the present work. Unfortunately, the structure of argument in “Art and Space” is cryptic and elusive even by Heidegger’s standards. The small amount of relevant literature tends to focus on the paper’s role within Heidegger’s own oeuvre (as an expression of changes in how he conceived space as a philosophical concept).2 There is a certain irony in this; for Heidegger’s main thematic in the essay is not the problem of space as such, but the way in which it is overcome in the sculptural work. This is a quite surprising position, since, by virtue of its three-dimensional character, sculpture seems to be a spatial medium, par excellence. Since Heidegger’s approach is so counter-intuitive, his argumentative strategy invites especially close scrutiny. In this chapter, therefore, I will attend closely to the structure of Heidegger’s argument, with the aim of understanding, rethinking and then developing his most important insights (using some ideas, indeed, that he himself might not have found congenial). My ultimate aim is to show the subtle, but radical points which are at issue in Heidegger’s arguments, and to put them to work in the clarification of sculpture’s key relations to Being. Part one presents some basic (but necessary) background concerning Heidegger’s general philosophy, and his specific reservations concerning space as a philosophical concept. Part two, then explores the elusive structure of argument in ‘Art and Space’, filling in some key details which Heidegger fails to address. In Part three, important critical points are made, and it is argued that Heidegger’s notions of place and sculpture must be rethought in more balanced terms. Part four does this by emphasizing a factor which Heidegger understates in ‘Art and Space’, namely temporality. A temporalized notion of place is then applied in relation to an expanded notion of sculpture. Specifically, it is used to clarify varieties of site-specific and assembled sculptural works. Part five then applies the revised notion of place in relation to free-standing sculpture. It is argued that such sculpture is especially distinctive through its emphasis on the mutual dependence of the elemental

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and relational aspects of place. Indeed, it is this very factor which gives sculpture per se its unique form of meaning. Part six and the Conclusion explore some vital implications of this meaning.

Part one As we have already seen, during the so-called ‘Kehre’ or ‘turn’ in his thought during the 1930s, Heidegger gives great emphasis to the importance of truth as the disclosure of Being. In talking about the ‘isness of what is’, one must not seek to distort that disclosure through the use of neat oversimplifying categories. Rather, philosophical discourse must approach its subject less directly, allowing Being to be manifest gradually through sustained and diverse turns of questioning and description. Philosophy should also be willing to reinvent its vocabulary, in order to find linguistic idioms which do not assimilate the subjects of investigation to conceptual structures determined by the modern Western urge to technological and scientific control. This urge has found particular expression in the understanding of space. In his later philosophy, Heidegger is more attentive – in a broadly positive way – to the spatial aspects of Being. However, his approach is still a very cautious one. In the important essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, he notes how, in the modern world, the idea of spatium (intervening spaces or intervals) and extensio (the occupancy of breadth, depth and height) have come to be important notions. It is necessary to be aware of their scope and limits, however. In relation to this, Heidegger observes that spatium and extensio afford at any time the possibility of measuring things and what they make room for according to distances, spans and directions, and of computing these magnitudes. But the fact that they are universally applicable to everything that has extension can in no case make numerical magnitudes the ground of the nature of spaces and locations that are measurable with the aid of mathematics.3

This is an important point. The contents of space are amenable to measurement, but while this is a key aspect of their nature, it is not the ontologically fundamental one. Things inhabit space and give it a character irrespective of whether the means of measurement are available. In order to allow the possibility of measurement, indeed, spatial things must already exist. If modern technologically and scientifically determined thought sometimes reverses this order of priority, Heidegger emphatically restores it. In this respect, he considers the example of a bridge – where the edifice does not come simply to some empty location, but rather defines a location through being constructed there. Of course, one might think, initially, of the bridge as no more than a resource placed in a pre-existent space. But Heidegger’s point is a corrective to this. The building of the bridge defines a location, and it is in respect of this that a space is created through room being made for the edifice. In Heidegger’s words,

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A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary. [Further] Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which has been let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is gathered, by virtue of a location that is by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their being from locations and not from ‘space’.4

These points indicate that in order to understand the nature of space in its authentic sense, its relation to place and location must be carefully thought through. Heidegger’s arguments in ‘Art and Space’ centre on this very relation, and the special role which sculpture plays within it. I shall now address his arguments in detail.

Part two At the beginning of the essay, Heidegger notes that his remarks will remain questions even if put in the form of assertions. His initial characterization of sculpture is as follows: Sculptured structures are bodies. Their matter consisting of different materials is variously formed. The forming of it happens by demarcation as setting up an inclosing and excluding border. Herewith, space comes into play. Becoming occupied by the sculptured sculpture, space receives its special character as closed, breached and empty volume.5

It is important to note that while this description is in some respects true literally, it is only an initial characterization. Heidegger will gradually show that to think of sculpture in these thinly descriptive terms only is to overlook its most vital dimension of meaning. Indeed, while unobtrusively introducing the idea that space has some ‘special character’, he will gradually show that it is ultimately very different from this initial rhetorical characterization of it. Moving on, Heidegger questions what it is that the sculptured body embodies. Is it space? Is it, in fact, a domination of space, which might match up with that of its conquest by technical scientific approaches? Art and technology certainly work on space with different ends and means but perhaps there is a homogeneous space which is the subject of these various operations. It would be a ‘cosmic objective space’ of which all other spaces are mere aspects. Heidegger questions this possibility, however, on the grounds that The objective world-space remains, without question, the correlate of the subjectivity of a consciousness which was foreign to the epochs which preceded modern European times.6

Here the approach to space (which I described in more detail in Part one) is introduced. The character of space is historically specific, and, as Heidegger goes on to assert, merely

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describing its different historical varieties will take us no nearer to understanding its special nature.7 In pursuit of this understanding, he posits one further possibility. Space – does it belong to the primal phenomenon at the awareness of which men are overcome, as Goethe says, by an awe to the point of anxiety? For behind space, so it will appear, nothing more is given to which it could be traced back. Before space there is no retreat to something else. The special character of space must show forth from space itself.8

Heidegger treats this insight concerning space’s unanalysable nature as indicative of a possibility. Space’s special character is bound up with its ontological status as a limiting condition of existence, rather than (one presumes) with secondary factors such as its amenability to measurement. Until this ‘special character’ of space per se is further clarified, however, the way in which space ‘reigns throughout the work of art’ will remain indeterminate. That Heidegger should make this assertion is hardly surprising. But, at this stage, it is a case of conjecture rather than implication. Artistic space could be distinctive in its own right on grounds which are logically independent of those responsible for the special character of space as such. Despite this possibility, Heidegger does actually go on to link the distinctiveness of space to that of its sculptural embodiment, but before doing so, he finishes the initial phase of his discussion by returning to a slightly deepened rhetorical question concerning the literalist description of sculpture. The space, within which the sculptured structure can be met as an object-presentto-hand; the space, which encloses the volume of the figure; the space, which subsists as the emptiness between volumes – are not these three spaces in the unity of their interplay always merely derivative of one physical-technological space, even if calculative measurement cannot be applied to artistic figures?9

This is an important transitional question. Heidegger has already shown the inadequacy of both the literalist description of sculpture and its putative linkage to the modern European conception of homogeneous space. By asking such a rhetorical question at this point, he is, in effect, summarizing and filling out what has been explored already so as to move beyond it. That this is Heidegger’s strategy is shown by two radical moves which he then makes in rapid succession. The first is an observation. Once it is granted that art is the bringing-into-the-work of truth, and truth is the unconcealment of Being, then must not genuine space, namely what uncovers its authentic character, begin to hold sway in the work of graphic art?10

Heidegger’s earlier and subsequent insights both constellate around these points. The concept of space which is decisive ultimately is that which can be linked to the unconcealment of Being. This ‘genuine space’ is the primordial basis of all spaces, and thence the artistic space of sculpture must involve some distinctive articulation of it.

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To understand what is involved here, Heidegger then makes his second radical move. It consists of what he calls an ‘emergency path’ (i.e. a jump in his progression of argument) which starts from how language ‘speaks’ the term ‘space’. Though Heidegger does not remark upon it, the usage he focuses on is essentially colloquial. Space ‘speaks’ as follows. Clearing-away . . . is uttered therein . . . Clearing-away brings forth the free, the openness for man’s settling and dwelling. When thought in its own special character, clearing-away is the release of places toward which the fate of dwelling man turns . . .11

The vital point here is that space in its most fundamental sense is based on the ‘release’ of places. In Heideggerian terms, this involves ‘making-room’, and in the course of this, ‘granting’ and ‘arranging’. As he describes it making-room admits something. It lets openness hold sway which, among other things, grants the appearance of things present to which human dwelling sees itself consigned. On the other hand, making-room prepares for things the possibility to belong to their relevant whither and, out of this, to each other . . . Place always opens a region in which it gathers the things in their belonging together.12

This difficult passage (and the previous ones) suggest that making-room involves the enabling of something to manifest its human relevance and its harmonious relation to the order and purposiveness of other things. I shall call this place in its relational sense (though Heidegger does not put it this way himself). At first sight, this may appear rather anthropocentric insofar as relational place seems, on these terms, to arise through human intervention on things. However, there are considerations which militate against such an interpretation. For example, the fact that humans find places through adapting to locations already laid out through the interaction of purely natural things and processes. Human dwelling can transform these; through technological and environmental abuse, it can erase them, but they will always remain a part of its character, and may even retain something of their individuality within this. We must also attend to the special sense in which Heidegger understands ‘dwelling’. In ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, we are told that to dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that guards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. [Indeed,] real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature, when we return it specifically to its own being, when we ‘free’ it in the real sense of the word into a preserve of peace.13

Heidegger’s points here are a mixture of the descriptive and the normative. One might develop them as follows. A finite subject’s relation to Being is always one of involvement and responsibility for the preservation and enhancement of the existential

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and physical environment in which he or she exists. In some historical contexts, this can be an abusive relationship where involvement and responsibility amount to little more than control. However, Heidegger’s notion of dwelling emphasizes what the relation ought to be. It emphasizes the importance of respect for things, natural landmarks, edifices and the physical site of finite being, and the importance of not simply regarding all these as no more than resources. Through respecting them, one at the same time respects and discloses the truth of Being. Relational place in its most authentic sense, therefore, is not the site of things organized for human purposes alone, but an adaptation, rather, which attempts to harmonize those purposes with the natural order of things in the light of the Being of beings. We can now understand the next pivotal question asked by Heidegger in ‘Art and Space’. Are places first and only the resultant issue of making-room? Or does makingroom take its special character from the reign of gathering places? If this proves right, then we would have to search for the special character of clearing-away in the grounding of locality, and we would have to meditate on locality as the interplay of places. We would have then to take heed that and how this play receives its reference to the belonging together of things from the region’s free expanse.14

Through this extended questioning, Heidegger takes us through, in effect, some of the normative points which I developed previously. He is gradually moving us from the centrality of human arrangement, to the decisive role of the Being of things, in the determining of place. He then draws some further surprising consequences. We would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are places and do place. In this case we would be obliged for a long time to accept an estranging state of affairs: Place is not located in a pre-given space after the manner of physical-technological space. The latter unfolds itself only through the reigning of places of a region.15

On these terms, then, space is a function of regions and places in the sense described above, and these are determined by the character of the things within them. However, there is an even more important point involved. Heidegger’s phrase ‘things themselves are places’ suggests rather more than that relational notion of place noted earlier (which arises from the gathering up of things). Specifically, his point proposes that the individual thing itself should be regarded as place. It is this (as I shall call it) elemental notion of place which is ontologically fundamental. Heidegger does not himself clarify the relation between elemental and relational place (a task which I shall address in Part three), but it is the former sense which guides his final turn towards the clarification of sculpture’s overcoming of space. Art as sculpture: no occupying of space. Sculpture would not deal with space. Sculpture would be the embodiment of places.

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Places, in preserving and opening a region, hold something free gathered around them which grants the tarrying of things under consideration and a dwelling for man in the midst of things.16

These remarks suggest that in making sculpture, a place is created through the setting free of both the sculptured form and its physical earthy embodiment, and also (where appropriate) a figurative content which is emergent from it. The relation between all these factors radiates a uniqueness of presence which engages different dimensions of human interest. This engagement is not that of the appropriation of resources, but rather a care for the work in its own character as sculpted being. Through this character a horizon of reverence and insight constellates around the sculpture. The sculptural work is, accordingly, an elemental place-instituting entity which occupies a distinctive location among other things, by creating a relational space of display and interpretative contexts around itself. I will develop the critical implications of this interpretation in the next section. Before that, however, we must consider the way in which Heidegger deploys sculpture’s embodiment of elemental place. Specifically, it is used to overturn the literalist description of sculpture which, as we saw earlier, occurs at the beginning, and then at the first major transitional point in his essay. Presumably, volume will no longer demarcate spaces from one another, in which surfaces surround an inner opposed to an outer. What is named by the word ‘volume’, the meaning of which is only as old as modern technological natural science, would have to lose its name.17

A similar transformation will take place in our understanding of the emptiness of space. Heidegger observes that Often enough it appears to be a deficiency. Emptiness is held then to be a failure to fill up a cavity or gap. Yet presumably the emptiness is closely allied to the special character of place, and therefore no failure, but a bringing forth. . . . Emptiness is not nothing. It is also no deficiency. In sculptural embodiment, emptiness plays in the manner of a seekingprojecting instituting of places.18

Volume and emptiness in sculpture are transformed when understood in relation to sculpture’s embodiment of elemental place. In themselves, they describe the content and limit of space only in an abstract techno-physical sense. But their embodiment in sculpture means that they are transformed into factors which actively declare the emergence of a unique elemental place. Through this character, they constellate a space of human dwelling around them and draw it into the work. Before concluding his study, Heidegger makes one final extraordinary observation. Having resolutely identified sculpture with the embodiment of place, he declares Sculpture: the embodiment of the truth of Being in its work of instituting places. Even a cautious insight into the special character of this art causes one to suspect that truth, as unconcealment of Being, is not necessarily dependent on embodiment.

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Phenomenologies of Art and Vision Goethe said: ‘It is not always necessary for the truth to be embodied; it is enough if it floats nearby and generates a sort of concord, like when the sound of bells floats as a friend in the air and as bearer of peace.’19

The significance of these cryptic remarks will only become clear after we have subjected Heidegger’s theory to critical scrutiny and development.

Part three I begin with a problem. In making a painting, the artist places marks upon a physical surface, builds them up and erases others through complex phases of gestural activity. During this time, the emerging work is situated in a physical and psychological place which is drawn into the work’s creation, just as, through its creation, the work opens up a range of possible interpretative responses and potential display contexts. If the work is good enough, it will define itself as a special place to be visited as well as occupying a place within a gallery or whatever. This suggests, in other words, that the institution of elemental place is not unique to sculpture. The features which Heidegger emphasizes can be applied to painting and drawing also. This should not be undervalued. It means that, at the very least, Heidegger has shown, indirectly, how sculpture can be related to that reciprocal relation of world and earth which, as we saw in the preceding chapter, he holds to be fundamental to art.20 Now, on Heidegger’s behalf, it might be claimed that this is damning by faint praise. It may be that the pictorial arts are place-instituting, but they are not so in the same way as a sculpture. Architecture and sculpture are three-dimensional arts, but while architecture is tied by definition to practical functions, sculpture is an art form whose three-dimensionality is not so restricted. And in this, it establishes a privileged relation to elemental place. For, while there are places which appear to be two-dimensional, these have notional existence only. Place as concrete being is only intelligible through its key role in the ontology of three-dimensionality. It follows, therefore, that the elemental places of sculpture have, by virtue of their unrestricted three-dimensionality, a privileged status. They exemplify the fundamental form of elemental placehood per se. This development of Heidegger’s position, however, needs further work. This is because of two rather more substantial difficulties. They gravitate around the restrictedness of his notions of place and sculpture. I shall now explain the restrictiveness of these notions, in turn. First, as we saw in the previous section, Heidegger’s initial use of place is in the relational sense of things being ‘gathered in their belongingness together’. However, we also saw him progress to a more elemental sense of place centred on the being of the individual thing. The relation between these two senses of place is left ambiguous. Heidegger seems to regard the elemental form as more fundamental. It is the character of the individual thing which enables the emergence of relational space, through gathering other things about it. And it is this which gives place philosophical priority over ‘physico-technological space’.

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But here we encounter an acute interpretative problem. For, while Heidegger’s conclusion assigns priority to elemental place, his strategies of argument seem to suggest otherwise. Heidegger’s use of the phrase ‘emergency path’ and his laborious progression of argument, for example, invite analogy with the notion of a journey, with elemental place as its destination. And while the posited destination brings the journey into being, the journey is, of course, just as much the places encountered along the way and the twists and turns of travel direction, as it is arrival at the destination. Indeed, the nature of the individual places themselves is, at least in part, determined by the ways in which they allow themselves to be journeyed towards. This suggests that the structure of Heidegger’s argument itself is closely analogous to a journey between places. His argumentative strategy, with all its twists and turns, is one which shows what is at issue in the nature of place. Relational and elemental places are disclosed as equal coexistents in the fabric of the journey, even if, at journey’s end, it seems to have all been about arriving at the destination, that is, elemental place per se. (If, in contrast, Heidegger had analysed place through a step-by-step deductive structure, this might have set up misleading parallels with the parte-extra-parte character of physico-technological space.) Given this, I would suggest that, if Heidegger’s insights concerning place are to be put to use, we should follow the spirit of his journey, and shed the somewhat hierarchical overtones of his explicit conclusion. The matter might then be summarized as follows. Elemental and relational places are different but reciprocal aspects of the same phenomenon. And while – as different aspects of place – they are logically distinguishable, in ontological terms they are mutually dependent. This dependency is not a simple matter, but one which finds expression in many different ways according to the place in question. Individual things are the basis of relational place, but individual things do not come into existence by magic. They are the complex effects of relations between prior things and many interacting natural phenomena of a non-thingly character (such as earth movements, the weather and organic processes). Indeed, the character of the individual thing is determined as much by its possible and actual relations to other things, as by any inherent nature. Elemental and relational places are reciprocally correlated – one cannot make full sense of the one without some reference to the other. Given this, it follows that Heidegger’s linking of sculpture to place needs to developed in this more balanced form. It must find ways of emphasizing the mutual dependence of place’s elemental and relational aspects. Now we consider the second difficulty raised by Heidegger’s approach. His sense of sculpture itself is restricted (although in rather less complex ways than his notion of place). In this respect, it is clear that he approaches sculpture on the basis of traditional hand-hewn idioms. However, in the Modern and Postmodern eras, the notion of sculpture has been greatly expanded. Broadly speaking, it is now regarded as a visual idiom based on the hewing, carving, digging, casting or arranging of three-dimensional material.21 The notion of sculpture created through the assembling of pre-made things might not have been very amenable to Heidegger personally. But the introduction of it (in relation to a more balanced notion of place) allows his ideas to be developed in interesting ways. In order to maximize the full potential of Heidegger’s approach to

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sculpture, then, the next section will first develop his notion of place, by integrating the elemental and relational aspects a little further, and will then begin to consider them in terms of the expanded notion of sculpture, noted above.

Part four First, Heidegger’s concept of place in ‘Art and Space’ implies but does not develop the importance of temporality.22 Place comes into being not only through the relation between things, but through the event of their coming together to define a certain location, and even more importantly, through their enduring together, and individually, through time. Both these aspects import a distinctive quality of fragile uniqueness to place. In terms of the first, when things cohere so as to define a location, this brings about a bonding between their particular elemental characters and the physical site which allows their juxtaposition. If these elemental-place things are moved away from their original site while being kept in exact spatial relation to one another, then the relational place which they come to define is not that of the original. It is new and artificial. The earth of the founding place has been lost forever. Even if one returned the configuration to its original site subsequently, the passage of time would have changed the nature of that site. The resulting place would no longer be the same. In terms of the second factor, the truth of finitude is such that the elements of place must decay and pass away. Some of the original things may remain, but most will be replaced by new elements. And even the elemental thing-places which do remain will be changed as individuals (to greater or lesser degrees) by the passage of time. The possibility and actuality of these changes are definitive features of elemental place, even. Place – in every sense – is mutable. This is not a lack; it is a decisive aspect of how the Being of beings is disclosed. The relation between place and time, accordingly, is of the most decisive significance, even though Heidegger does not emphasize it. With this in mind, we can now address the significance of place in relation to the expanded notion of sculpture noted earlier. This comprises both idioms of making and of arranging three-dimensional material. As a starting point, I shall consider a mode of sculpture where the time–place relation is especially central, but very diverse in application. It is that of site-specific works. In order to do justice to the variety of its relation to place, it is important to consider a number of different examples in turn. First, it is interesting that there is much in Heidegger’s understanding of sculpture which suggests (though he never says as much) that his approach is based, actually, on sculpture’s site-specific role in the Greek temple, where a statue of the relevant Olympian God would be placed in the centre of the temple, and would serve, accordingly, as a massive focus for ritual and cognate attention.23 The surviving statues have now, however, been wholly displaced from their original viewing context. Similar considerations hold in relation to many subsequent site-specific works. Michelangelo’s David, for example, was sculpted so as to take account of the fact that it

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Figure 4.1 Michelangelo, David, 1504; a replica placed in the original location that the statue was created to occupy. Photograph by, and courtesy of, Rossella Lorenzi.

would be viewed from below through its elevated placement on a buttress of Florence cathedral (Figure 4.1). Its symbolic meaning as an emblem of the city as a whole was also linked to this placing . (This is an especially useful exemplar of how elemental and relational aspects of place can be profoundly correlated in a single work.) Time, however, has seen the work move away from its original site, and its significance has been changed by virtue of this displacement (a key point to which I will return). Rather different considerations arise in relation to works which are site specific in a much more complete physical sense. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or James Turrell’s Roden Crater, for example, are works which, through direct modifications of the relevant environment, allow a specific place to be declared as an object of wonder or region of perceptual exploration in its own right. Here the work lives and dies on the very same terms as the relational aspect of place which it defines. Sculpture and place are wholly inseparable. An important and ambiguous case is presented by some of Rachel Whiteread’s articulations of negative space. House of 1993, for example, was created through spraying concrete on the inside walls of a single remaining terrace house on a road in east London (Figure 4.2). The outer walls were then demolished leaving a casting of the empty interior space and wall markings. This negative space has, of course, a range of uncanny and symbolic associations based on invocations of the presence of absence, and the absence of presence. And in this particular case, there is a very strong link to place in

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Figure 4.2 Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993 (demolished 1994), © Rachel Whiteread. Photographed by Sue Ormerod.

its full temporal sense. This is poignantly underlined by the fact that, in the following year, House was demolished by the local council and the whole area completely redeveloped. In terms of site-specific works, then, the relation between the more balanced notion of place which I have developed from Heidegger and sculpture is absolutely paramount in relation to the sheer variety of site-specific works. It might seem that this is also true of one of the most important formats of late Modern and Postmodern sculpture, namely installation and assemblage works. In terms of the former, it is true to the degree that the elements which constitute the work are to be brought together at a certain site and to be left there for a specific length of time.

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But this actually involves another interesting variation. Most places exist without being subject to a specific lifespan. In the case of installation works, there is such a restriction. J.-F. Lyotard’s Les Immateriaux, for example, took the form of an exhibition whose labyrinthine physical structures and complex interpretative layers were themselves intended to model the Postmodern condition. The exhibition itself was the work. It was held in June 1985, and, thereafter, its contents were dispersed for ever. And in this, it provided an interesting revelation. For one’s knowledge of the short lifespan of this work itself accentuated the awareness that, through accelerating global and technological transformations, the threat of total change and the loss of substantial identity is something constantly faced by place. Indeed, it also powerfully exemplified the fact that no place, qua finite configuration, can last forever. Les Immateriaux exemplified the fact, in other words, that the imposed determinate lifespan of site-specific works can illuminate something of the ultimate destiny of place, per se. In the case of assemblage art, rather different considerations hold. Here we are dealing with works which, while often being site specific, can in principle be reassembled in different exhibition locations (unless their constituent elements are composed of perishable items, mainly). This has an ambiguous significance. For, while the assembled fragments form a place (in the sense indicated by Heidegger in ‘Art and Space’), the fact that they can be reassembled elsewhere means that that they are somewhat artificial in terms of the temporal aspect of place which I noted earlier. However, this, of itself, invites interesting questions concerning the degree to which place depends on its continuing connection to a specific time and site of origination. Here, the character of the individual work is decisive. Consider, for example, Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter installed at the Chisenhale Gallery in London, during 1991. This work was assembled from a garden shed and its bric-a-brac contents which had been blown up by army explosives experts. The destruction of this place was filmed, and the physical fragments were reassembled in accordance with the pattern of violent dispersal recorded by the film. This involved suspending the fragments from the gallery ceiling by wires, and illuminating them with special lighting. In this way, a dramatic play of shadows was created, appearing to be continuous with, and inseparable from, the physical material of the work. While such a work can, in principle, be reassembled in different locations, it retains a specific connection to its destroyed place of origination, and – unless the exact proportions and light system of the original gallery space are exactly duplicated – will have a different appearance wherever it is installed. The work, in other words, is able, in principle, to create new places around itself, while retaining the character of its origins. This again illuminates a general factor about place. For while the temporal aspects of a place do not allow it to be genuinely recreated in other locations, it can, nevertheless serve as an inspiration and guiding factor for the formation of new places, investing them with something of its own character as a creative legacy. The vital point to gather from these diverse examples is that the three-dimensional aspect of sculpture – and especially (though not exclusively) its late Modern and Postmodern formats – can embody and illuminate the Being of place in profound and different ways. It enables the artwork to feature as a constitutive element in the physical

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being of place, and its disclosure. Heidegger’s basic insights are viable, therefore, as long as we develop our understanding of place to encompass its temporal dimensions. It is now time to make an important transition. Earlier, we saw how, in Michelangelo’s David, the character of the sculpture’s original relational place is incorporated into the work’s appearance. But this is very much the exception rather than the rule. Most works since the Renaissance (and, of course, many before) are free-standing. This means that they are often created without taking account of any specific display location, and are able to create many new relational places around themselves as they are moved to different sites. I shall, accordingly devote the next section to a detailed consideration of such work.

Part five Sculpture’s free-standing character emphasizes the elemental aspect of place while internalizing the relational aspect. This happens because we know that this three-dimensional thing has been brought forth through human artifice. Now whereas the being of most three-dimensional artefacts is simply acknowledged through perception of their dominant aspects, or, as in the case of functional artefacts, through using them, with the sculptural work, things are different. The way in which the object has been brought forth – its made aesthetic character is the preoccupying factor – and its comprehension can only occur insofar as we have direct perceptual acquaintance with all its three-dimensional aspects. This means that we must walk round it, or through it (in the case of some unusual abstract works), or manipulate the object so that its full dimensions become accessible to perception. Sculpture’s aesthetically significant three-dimensionality, in other words, makes us attentive to it as a focus of exploration. In the spirit of my analogical reading of Heidegger, it is a place which we both journey towards, and move around. Whereas informed mono-directional vision is sufficient for the aesthetic perception of pictorial art, sculpture’s aesthetic perception demands vision, touch and mobility – the very factors which are involved in our coming to know, and dwell in, a place. Its three-dimensional being, in other words, involves aesthetic criteria which link it to elemental and relational places, and which distinguish it from those of pictorial art. In some respects, these points also apply to architecture. But as I noted earlier, the aesthetic perception of architecture is also regulated by criteria of use. These in no way to disqualify it from aesthetic status, but they do entail that the place character of architecture is mediated differently from sculpture, and involves, accordingly, a somewhat different principle of aesthetic unity. Indeed, whereas architecture is concerned fundamentally with the enclosure of space, sculpture is concerned with its declaration mainly. The difference between sculpture and architecture is most clearly manifest in something which is absolutely distinctive to sculpture’s three-dimensionality. In Part two, we saw Heidegger note (without developing the point) that what is spatial marks out important existential limits. Something is existing, for example, is unintelligible except insofar as it is correlated with spatiality. What is can only be characterized as

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existent insofar as it has spatial being, or at the very least (as in the case of sounds, and other events) a spatial location of occurrence. And the nature of spatial being is such as to mark out what is possible and not possible for finite entities. In this respect, for example, it is a conceptual truth that no individual material body can exist, at exactly the same time, in the same exact spatial location as another such body. Now space in its most concrete form is that of the thing or – in terms of the present analysis – elemental place.24 Two-dimensional items are things, but of course (as we saw in Part three), no reality is ever wholly two-dimensional except in notional terms. Hence, it is the three-dimensional elemental place which is the most complete expression of space’s ultimate, existentially limiting, character. But if this is so, then in the sculptural thing, something extraordinary occurs. The work is a particular material thing, but, through having been brought forth as figurative work, or in a way which declares specific significant formal features, it manifests something other than its own brute thingliness. It is a thing which is an image of something else. Abstract sculpture (especially minimalist idioms) might appear to be an exception to this point. But it is not. In fact, the enigmatic shapes and masses of such works give them a quite distinctive image-character.25 As we saw in Chapter 2, they are things which suggest the embodiment of other phenomenal forms and forces over and above those of their physical materiality. In this respect, they are allusive images of possible configurations in transperceptual space, and, if anything, this allusive character intensifies our sense of something else being present in the work, by forcing us to think about what it might be. In the case of most minimalist works, similar considerations apply. This being said, there are important boundary cases such as Robert Morris’s Slab. This consists of a rectangular slab of stainless steel cast by a foundry to the artist’s specifications. Surely here, there is no suggestion of an image-character? But the point is that we do not even think of such a work as being a sculpture, except insofar as it is situated in relation to the diachronic history of sculpture as a medium, and in contrast to functional artefacts. Mediated by our sense of these relations, the work’s emphatic thingly character becomes an object of attention in its own right. Slab is a thing which declares its own physical presence in a way that most things do not. This gives it an uncanny character. In the very insistency of being itself, it seems to be something more than itself. Its very minimality represents. I am arguing then that all sculpture has a twofold character. What makes this so extraordinary is that, through it, the limiting nature of space itself appears to be contradicted. In the sculptural thing, two different things or orders of Being seem to inhabit the same place at the same time. Of course, we know that this is explicable rationally in terms of the sculpture’s image character, but it is the appearance rather than the reality which is decisive in aesthetic terms. To see a bird in flight or the motion of waves embodied in stone is a miraculous conjunction in imaginative terms. And precisely because of the emphatic incongruity of these, and, indeed all sculptural juxtapositions, the work’s embodying or suggesting of one form of thing in the substantiality of another will always have something of a quasimagical character. This means that, rather than settle in its character as a particular, elemental thing, the sculptural work will always be caught in the act of seeming to

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become something else. Sculpture is where that event of finding or bringing together of different things which is also constitutive of place is itself fixed in place through the work’s distinctive character as a thingly, three-dimensional image. Sculpture manifests the reciprocal dependence of elemental and relational aspects of place through its distinctive twofoldness.

Part six I will now consider two broader consequences which follow from all the foregoing arguments. One of these consequences would probably be warmly accepted by Heidegger, while the other might be rather more ambiguous in his terms. The acceptable consequence is that of sculpture as an alternative possibility to electronically generated virtual realities. To explain: Immersion in three-dimensional virtual ‘realities’ involves taking a means to an end – switching on equipment, and then switching it off again. At the end of this, the work disappears until reactivated. If one chooses to enter into the mechanism which provides the illusion, then one is caught up in it. And even if a means were found for placing people in such realities against their will, the creation of this strategy and means of implementation are subject to the will of the instigator. In knowing what a sculpture is, in contrast, one’s interpretation of its meaning can involve volitional elements but recognition of it as a sculpture of such and such a kind of thing is something which occurs irrespective of the will. Acknowledgement of the emergence of illusion is written into the recognition of sculpture per se. Hence, while virtual realities strive to conceal the conditions of their own illusory character, sculpture perpetually unmasks the nature of three-dimensional illusion by fixing and declaring its conditions of emergence in the very character of the work itself. Indeed, sculpture’s quasi-magical three-dimensional quality (described in Part five), its frequent positioning in public spaces and the fact that it cannot, as it were, be switched off mean that it discloses illusion-in-the-making with unparalleled lucidity and drama. Postmodern sensibility’s developing taste for total three-dimensional illusion is reminded, thereby, of both its own limits and ultimate origins. The consequence which Heidegger might not have been able to countenance is more complex. I noted earlier that to recreate a temporally specific place in another location, or to disassemble it and reconfigure it somewhere else, is highly artificial. It will not be the same place as the original one. But the elemental-place aspect of the work is that which endures and stays the same (though not, of course, in absolute physical terms) if the work is put in a protected environment. And in this, it answers to a more subjective need for place which Heidegger does not consider. By this, I mean that wherever a human goes, he or she will tend to construct a surrounding from familiar or valued things. The embodied subject will make a place for itself. The most familiar aspect of this is one’s home. But even outside such a domain, one strives – through arranging or making things – to create the conditions whereby one dwells in, rather than simply stays in, a location.

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As we have seen, a sculpture involves the integration and stabilization of Being’s elemental and relational place-making characteristics. This means that in sculpture, we find, in effect, an idealization of place-making. This remains as long as the work endures, no matter where it happens to find itself located. Now, of course, in the most literal terms, no subjective place made by a person can really endure beyond that person’s life, but surely there is a yearning for this – a wish to have such a place endure, no matter what. For the sculptor, such aesthetic idealization of place is achieved through the making of a work. And even for the audience of such a work, there is surely the possibility of communion with such idealization through enjoyment of what, aesthetically and ontologically, is at issue in the work. Through it, one dwells – however indirectly, and transiently – in the possibility of subjective place eternalized. I do not know whether Heidegger would have countenanced this favorably. For it embodies a yearning to overcome finitude. Indeed, perhaps the touchstone of whether this is authentic or not is the fact that such an overcoming is not a denial of finitude but a special adaptation to it through a factor which is fundamental to our finite belonging to the world, namely dwelling with and through things. In Heidegger’s terms, this might count as a vision – however slight – of that higher order of Being which he regards as the domain of the Gods.26 Irrespective of Heidegger’s exact position on this, his approach overall – together with all the foregoing arguments – converges on a vital insight. They show how sculpture’s relation to place engages and clarifies key aspects of the human experience of place, per se.

Conclusion Finally, one general and one specific point need clarification, and a more wide-ranging critical point must be raised. The general point is that of how the relation between sculpture and space should now be understood. As we have seen, Heidegger displaces the use of such terms as volume and emptiness in sculpture (the basis of what I have called ‘literalist description’) in favour of the link with place. By doing this, he certainly points us towards profounder understandings of what sculpture does, but where does this leave the literalist approach? Is it just a modern way of describing sculpture, which misses the mark in decisive respects, or does there remain something to be said for it? I would suggest the latter. For even if one focuses on sculpture’s place-making aspects, in order to explain how these work in detail vis-à-vis the individual work, formal notions such as volume, mass, texture, density and emptiness are of enormous general analytic value irrespective of their Modern provenance. In this respect, consider the notion of ‘three-dimensionality’ – which summarizes those features which Heidegger sees as constitutive of the Modern notion of space. I have used it to clarify what is special about sculpture’s relation to place. Such usage is possible because, while some concepts may be relative to historical epochs, they are rarely arbitrary in their origination. Rather, their character is enabled by the phenomenon which they articulate. This means that a careful analysis of this character can lead back to an

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understanding of the phenomena that is all the richer through having the historically specific as its starting point. The particular point which remains to be clarified is that – as I noted at the end of Part two – after linking sculpture to the embodiment of truth, Heidegger makes the remarkable suggestion that truth can exist without being embodied. But what is the significance of such a remark in this context? I can only surmise that this is Heidegger’s way of overcoming any suggestion that sculpture’s embodiment of truth has a hierarchical significance. While sculpture makes a special contribution to the disclosure of Being’s truth, truth per se is not dependent on such disclosure. Forms of thought can also achieve it, as can, indeed, those artworks (such as the poem or story) whose existence is not dependent necessarily on embodiment in a physical thing. The more general critical point that must be raised is in the spirit of those criticisms made in the previous chapter. As we have just seen, sculpture’s various complex media embody a wealth of different and very profound ontological factors. But Heidegger does not consider the fact that not all sculpture succeeds in declaring these factors. Many such works are simply there, and are not noticed in any significant terms. If, however, a work has at least some individual style (in ways I shall explain in more detail in the following chapter), then we respond to it aesthetically. This does not mean that we simply recognize some of the ontological factors as being characteristic of sculpture, rather we marvel at the way the sculptor has given expression to these in this individual work. Here, cold ideas and cold material are fused in a whole that is more than the sum of both aspects. The sculpture is not just a statue (say); it is a work of art. In order to recognize such distinctiveness, however, it is logically presupposed that our perception of it is mediated by comparative criteria. It must stand out from the more commonplace statues whose significance amounts to no more than their practical function (memorial or decorative, or whatever). Heidegger fails to negotiate this vital dimension.

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5

Vision in Being: Merleau-Ponty and the Depths of Painting1

Introduction Heidegger’s discussions are orientated towards visual art’s relation to the Being of being, in general. Merleau-Ponty’s approach, in contrast, is more specific, and identifies the decisive role of embodied subjectivity in the relation. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty did not do aesthetics in the sense of addressing criteria of art and the aesthetic or the principles of criticism. This is, at once, his greatest strength and weakness. It is strength because his interests in painting locate it in central areas of philosophical interest bound up with problems of ontology and meaning, rather than sideline it as a more specialized concern. It is a weakness because artistic, aesthetic and critical issues are actually central to the ontology of painting in ways that Merleau-Ponty did not fully understand. The justification of these claims, however, must wait. Before that, the extraordinary depth of linkages which Merleau-Ponty makes between painting and ontology (much of it profoundly viable) and the broader critical points that he draws from the linkage must be presented in full. In what follows, I will expound Merleau-Ponty’s ideas. I will also criticize some of them, and develop them further. Broadly speaking, I will move from the earlier to the later work in my general outline of his philosophical position, but in presenting the theory of painting, will draw on his earlier and later works without regard to chronological order. (There is significant conceptual continuity between them.)2 It might appear that an analytic approach is at odds with the spirit of Merleau-Ponty’s more elliptical strategies of expression – which are meant to evoke truths whose deep-seated character and complexity are not amenable to analytic and discursive presentation (in this, of course, he shares common ground with Heidegger). However, what we perceive and how we negotiate it is always orientated by a capacity to stand back from things. For the embodied subject – no matter how primal its bonding with Being may be – the analytic attitude informs its pre-reflective perceptual orientation, and is a part of its full definition (a topic I shall return to in the Conclusion of this book).3 This is why Merleau-Ponty’s position can be, and needs to be, analysed. Logical points and arguments shape his more intuitive strategies of exposition, and if we do not make them explicit, we lose an opportunity for deepened understanding.

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Indeed, it is noteworthy that the greater part of existing philosophical treatments of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of painting is expository. It offers broader intellectual contexts for locating his arguments, or extended paraphrases that operate within, rather than challenge, his idioms of expression. A more analytic approach, is demanded, therefore, if Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are to be developed.4 My more specific strategy is as follows. Part one elaborates, and, in some respects, expands, Merleau-Ponty’s basic philosophical position. Special attention is devoted to the bonding of subject and object of perception in the notion of reversibility/flesh. The privileged role of vision and perceptual depth in this is highlighted. Part two examines Merleau-Ponty’s account of style and expression in perception and the way in which painting’s embodiment of this enables it to make vision’s inherence in the visible, visible to itself. In Part three, I explore his sustained deployment of this theory of painting in affirming the significance of Cezanne and criticizing the scope of ‘classical’ perspective. Part four emphasizes the strengths of Merleau-Ponty’s general theory, but then offers a sustained critique of its unnecessarily narrow scope by noting difficulties which accrue to his treatment of both Cezanne and the moderns, and classical perspective. In particular, it is argued that Merleau-Ponty neglects the vital role played by pictorial structure and convention in transforming how painting makes vision’s inherence in the visible, visible to itself. Part five expounds and develops Merleau-Ponty’s further ideas concerning the historicity of painting. Again, it is argued that in key aspects relating to the structure of picturing, he is unduly narrow. Suggestions are made as to relevant factors which his general theory needs to negotiate. I then proceed to a brief summary and Conclusion.

Part one Before our undivided existence the world is true; it exists. The unity, the articulations of both are intermingled. We experience in it a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.5

This quotation – from near the beginning of Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) Phenomenology of Perception – sets out the basic position of his entire philosophy. Our fundamental perception of the world arises pre-reflectively through the body’s operations as a unified sensori-motor field. The body not only sustains higher-order cognitive activity, it is the basis of a total cognition of which explicit, reflective acts of judgement are an emergent aspect. Being and embodied subjectivity inhere in one another at the deepest level. This primal unity (as I shall term it henceforth) is formidably difficult to understand. Science, philosophy and other idioms of knowledge (the physical sciences, in particular) explain it through analytic procedures that tend to privilege quantified relations and models. Of course, these procedures have their own use value, but, for the most part, treat primal unity (if they treat it at all) as a principle of cohesion extrapolated from

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the quantifiable and predictable behaviour of selected aspects of Being (often at the molecular and/or subatomic level). The problem with this, however – as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes time and time again – is that only insofar as the undivided primal unity of Being and subjectivity is already in place do we have the stable conditions which enable measurement, prediction and analytic procedures to develop and be applied.6 Primal unity is analysis-enabling truth, rather than a mere function of those ‘fundamental’ units and quantified relations which emerge through analysis. It follows, then, that a different approach to primal unity is required. Specifically, we must understand it through that which is implicated in all its aspects, namely the body. For Merleau-Ponty, even reason itself is shaped by the particular configuration of the human body. As he notes It is no coincidence that the rational being is also the one who holds himself upright or has a thumb which can be brought opposite to the fingers. The same manner of being is evident in both aspects.7

This dependence of cognition on the structure of embodiment has the most farreaching ontological implications. We are told that The thing and the world exist only in so far as they are experienced by me or by subjects like me, since they are both the concatenation of our perspectives, yet they transcend all perspectives because this chain is temporal and incomplete. I have the impression that the world itself is a living, self-subsistent entity outside me, just as absent landscapes live on beyond my visual field, and as my past was formerly lived on the earlier side of my present.8

The point is, then, that in the perception of an embodied subject, Being in the broadest sense is structured in specific directions. Its sensible aspects are organized into an ordered field – of things, locations and events – through avenues of approach that are dependent on the unity of the body. One would not, for example, have a sense of an individual thing qua thing unless one had a sense of it as something which one comes across and which will be amenable to some avenues of perceptual explorations, but not others, or of some actions performable upon it but not others (a point I shall return to). Developing this, we might argue that, as a child’s sensori-motor capacities become unified through engagement with phenomena, so too do things emerge as unified ways in which such engagement becomes intelligible. It is through basic correlation between the embodied subject’s sensori-motor activities and what it encounters that Being is organized into the more developed unity of a cognized ‘world’, that is, a stable continuity of concrete things, events and persons, which can then be understood in more explicit and abstract terms. There is much in Merleau-Ponty’s approach that requires qualification beyond what he himself offers. For example, he is not, I think, claiming that the space and time-occupying existence of things is dependent on their being perceived. Rather, it is the existence of the particular form of their appearance which is so dependent. In this

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respect, say, human beings and butterflies have to negotiate the same spatio-temporal masses and events, but how these appear to such kinds of sentient being is very different. To put the point more generally, what is structured by perception exists independently (i.e. whether perceived or not) but how it appears in perception is dependent, qua structure, on the bodily capacities of the particular species. Now the very fact that the Being’s spatio-temporal masses and events exist independently of perception emphasizes the finitude of the body’s inherence in it. Merleau-Ponty holds that perception is always incomplete. Things exceed even our most comprehensive perceptual perspectives and are not, as it were, ‘used up’ through being perceived. There is always more to see of them or more action to be taken on them. The question of how much ‘more’ in this context is determined by how sustained our perceptual interest in the thing or event is, but more fundamentally, through the way in which these interests are mediated by constraints arising from the item’s own spatial and temporal properties. Our perceptual orientations can only negotiate what Being itself will allow. It is important to emphasize that Being’s independent existence is not some unfortunate limitation to perception. Rather, it places demands on the embodied subject which are the very factors that stimulate human ontogenetic and phylogenetic development. Embodied subjectivity and Being are correlated in a constant, on-going, reciprocal interaction. Each is a part of the full definition of the other. Without Being, there would be no embodiment; but without the embodied subject, Being would not have the character which it does, and would not be able to appear as a ‘world’. This point needs further elaboration. For Merleau-Ponty, ‘world’ just is the intersection of embodied subjectivity’s and Being’s reciprocal interactions with one another. To have a ‘world’ is to make Being meaningful – in concert with other subjects – through perceptual structure and practical actions, and the constant transformations brought about by Being’s demands. There is no, as it were, supreme perceptual terminus where the subject eventually arrives and comprehends all things in some final, once-and-for-all total meaning. Meaning – in the broadest sense – is unintelligible except as a function of perception’s perpetual self-renewal in response to the challenges of Being. Now the great achievement of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (especially the later work) is that he foregrounds the importance of ontological bonding in the achieved correlation of subject and world. In particular, he focuses on a decisive continuity between the ontology of perception and its expressive meaning. The road to understanding this is, however, of the greatest complexity. Of key significance in this respect is his emphasis on reversibility. This arises – in the most general terms – when our perception of something’s character makes us realize that this character is dependent on, and in a sense, refers back to, features shared with something else. The ‘something’ and the ‘something else’, here, can be objects in relation, or modes of being, or processes or combinations of all these things. Indeed, as we have seen already, the relation between embodied subject and Being has this general character. Whatever the case, reversibility is implied wherever we find reciprocal correlation and dependence between factors in perception. Consider, now, the following remarks,

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Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things: it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are encrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition.9

Here, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that the perceived and the percipient, or, better (in terms of the particular modality of sense emphasized in Merleau-Ponty’s later work) the visible and the see-er are not only of the same ontological order or class, but are, in a sense, of the same ‘stuff ’. The embodied subject and the perceived world share a common ‘universal flesh’. As he says of the body’s visual and visible being If it touches and sees, this is not because it would have the visibles before itself as objects: they are about it, they even enter into its enclosure, they are within it, they line its looks and its hands, inside and outside. If it touches them and sees them, this is only because, being of their family, itself visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs, because each of the two beings is an archetype for the other, because the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is universal flesh.10

On these terms, flesh is ‘a Sentient in general before a Sensible in general’;11 it is a principle whereby that which perceives must be perceptible, and only through this is it able to ‘segregate’ itself as the subject of perception.12 Merleau-Ponty does not characterize ‘flesh’ in much more detail than this (over and above some cryptic analogies with the ancient Greek notion of an element). However, it is through the ontological bonding involved in reversibility/flesh that the body’s interactions with Being take on a recurrently meaningful character as the basis of a ‘world’ in ways that far exceed the ad hoc, stimuli-based responses of most animals. Overall, then, reversibility/flesh is ontologically fundamental in the primal unity of our bond with Being. It enables a free-belonging wherein humanity experiences Being in the form of a world. This allows a decisive transition to be made. As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty holds that subject and object of perception have independent existence only through being dependent on each other. The intimacy and reversibility of this relation forms the main trajectory for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of painting – a theory that I shall now address in detail. As a bridge to that theory, I turn to the phenomenon of expression – in the context of language.

Part two For Merleau-Ponty, while signs express meaning, and language attempts to do this in complete terms, there is no simple correspondence of sign to referent, because signs can only refer through language as a whole – a massively complex mediating network of

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relations is involved. However, unlike Derrida and other ‘deconstructionists’, MerleauPonty is not content to rest on this Saussurian insight.13 Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us and so on without end, and language is not like a prison we are locked into or a guide we must blindly follow; for at the crossroads of all these linguistic gestures, their meaning appears – to which we have been given such total access that that it seems to us that we no longer need the linguistic gestures to refer to it.14

The point is, I think, that the perceptual context involves a total integration of all its aspects. Hence, while linguistic meaning is dependent on the relation of the specific terms to the rest of language, this relation is given focus and stability – that is, definiteness of sense – by the immediate context of perceptual use. The intentions and context of specific usage prevent the dissemination of meaning into an endless play of difference and deferring among signs. Now, the achievement of meaning can establish signs, structures and usages, as permanent and familiar linguistic features. Indeed, these may become so established as to appear as meanings that have come to exist independently of the linguistic gestures through which they are formulated. They represent what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘secondary expression’. He does not provide any significant examples of this (as it were, sedimented) meaning, but I am assuming that he has in mind any basic and familiar identifying terms, phrases and descriptions, in a language. I have considered names already, but it is worth thinking also of more complex, descriptive phrases. Consider, for example, ‘someone has moved the things in this room’. It describes a perfectly intelligible state of affairs. It is a phrase that appears to reach out to find a certain kind of meaning in the world. However, for Merleau-Ponty, it would surely count as ‘secondary’ expression. This is because its affective component is inert – the fulfilment of reaching out and making the world meaningful is embedded in the description, but we are now entirely deadened to its expressive power through familiarity. But at one time the specific identifying terms used in the phrase were brought into existence in some language or other, as was their conjoined usage. They were original expressions whose invention presented the world in new ways, and which were invested with affective fulfilment. And it could be that the phrase might be used in some new narrative context, where the way it is used is invested with an entirely unexpected and novel import. For Merleau-Ponty, this original or ‘primary expression’ arises whenever language is used creatively. This involves using established terms and phrases in new and/or unexpected contexts, or by inventing new terms. Whatever the case, its special repository is in literary language – where the author throws our usual perspective on things out of focus and, in so doing, makes them exist in a new and fuller way for us. It is important to reiterate, that, for Merleau-Ponty, language aims at some kind of complete appropriation of its object, even though it cannot achieve this by dint of its differential structure. Such striving sets language (and its literary form, especially) apart from meaning in other sign systems, most notably painting. Painting is more of an interpretation of the world – a silent language that invites one to recognize meaning

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through following where the work points – a pointing that directs us not to the work’s representational content or ‘meaning’ as such, but rather how this content is brought to emergence in and through the painting. Here we can find vectors of primary expression that are distinctive to it. There is no better starting point for understanding this than Merleau-Ponty’s observation that It is the expressive operation of the body, begun by the least perception that develops into painting and art . . .15

For Merleau-Ponty, perception is inherently expressive. He interprets this as involving, mainly, primary expression.16 In negotiating perceptual depth, our position has to constantly reorientate in response to new demands, and we deal with these by drawing intuitively on bodily resources and the unique perspectives of our personal history. We employ, also, idioms of gesture that are available to other subjects insofar as they share our embodied condition. However, the meaningful arrangement of perceptual depth arising from these factors is transitory, and while it may be stored in the memory of the subject, it is not available to others. The gestures that make paintings, in contrast, draw on the painters own personal experience and a syntax which issues in a visible object. This means that a learnable and thence shareable idiom of gesture results in something encounterable by others, and which can thence inform their own explorations of the shared idiom. MerleauPonty observes, accordingly, that The first sketches on the walls of caves set forth the world as ‘to be painted’ or ‘to be sketched’ and called for an indefinite future of painting . . .17

Painting is, therefore, an idiom of primary expression, which – as gestural and enduringly visible – has a privileged link to all the factors (described at length in Part one) wherein subject and object are ontologically bonded. A special importance is assigned in this respect to that reflexive experience of vision discussed in Part one wherein one sees oneself see, or touches oneself touching. As Merleau-Ponty says of it, Once this strange system of exchanges is in place, we find before us all the problems of painting. These problems illustrate the enigma of the body, which in turn legitimates them. Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. 18

The more specific aspects of this ontological bonding with immediate relevance to painting are suggested in the following. Quality, light, colour, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them. [Indeed]

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Phenomenologies of Art and Vision Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn’t these correspondences in turn give rise to some tracing rendered visible again, in which the eyes of others could find an underlying motif to sustain their inspection of the world. There thus appears a ‘visible’ to the second power, a carnal essence or icon of the first.19

Here we find hints concerning the key visual factors involved in perceptual depth, the intrinsic value of the visible, the shared visibility of the painter and the painted, the world returning our gaze, and activity on the sensible that affirms the self through making its orientations visible to others. We find, in other words, painting located in relation to the flesh and reversibility of the correlated bonding of the see-er and the visible. In this respect, it should be emphasized that the painter’s responses (or ‘equivalences’ as Merleau-Ponty sometimes calls them) should not be interpreted as faded or merely schematic mental copies of things seen. Indeed, they have a profoundly interpretative character – a character that takes the specific form of a stylized bonding. And in this, they continue a tendency that has already begun in perception’s expressive dimension. We are told, for example, that There is meaning when we submit the data of the world to a ‘coherent deformation’. That convergence of all the visible and intellectual vectors of the painting toward the same meaning x, is already sketched out in the painter’s perception. It begins as soon as he perceives – that is, as soon as he arranges certain gaps or fissures, figures and grounds, a top and a bottom, a norm and a deviation, in the inaccessible fullness of things . . . For each painter, style is the system of equivalences that he sets up for himself . . .20

In effect, these observations identify style’s role in articulating perceptual depth. Such depth involves a complexity of integrated aspects. These consist of states of affairs, their components and the distinctive perspectives on these opened up by the percipient’s immediate orientation, and his or her fund of personal history. This means that the disclosure of perceptual depth’s character must find a role for individual articulations of it, since these play a necessary role. Painting is of utmost significance here. Vision has a privileged role in the presentation of perceptual depth. And as we saw earlier in this section, painting is a mode of gesture that realizes personal expression through the making of publicly accessible visible artefacts. From these points, two conclusions can be drawn. First that style in painting is the public presentation of personal expressive vision, and second, qua visible, the painting’s style must also embody more general factors concerning the ontological significance of vision. By presenting these at the level of the visible itself, painting is an exemplar of flesh/reversibility. This can be illustrated by an interesting example which Merleau-Ponty considers. It is the brook in Renoir’s The Bathers. We are told that Because each fragment of the world- and in particular the sea, sometimes riddled with eddies and ripples and plumed with spray, sometimes massive and immobile

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in itself – contains all sorts of shapes of being and, by the way it has of joining the encounter with one’s glance, evokes a series of possible variants and teaches, over and beyond itself, a general way of expressing being.21

Here there is a give and take between subject and object of perception such that the former elaborates selective possible variants of the object’s present appearance, and in so doing, allows the artist’s own creative potential to be realized. On these terms, through the painter’s visual interpretation, the being of the object is refined so that its new appearance is not just one among others, but rather one that, through its untoward configuration, solicits and elicits elaboration from the viewers who encounter it. Now it may seem that these points, and many of the immediately preceding ones, amount to no more than painting as a personal interpretation and elaboration of the visible. Why should it be regarded as anything more? In what exactly does painting’s general ontological significance consist? The answer to this is provided by the central feature of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to painting, namely the reciprocity of the visible and the invisible. In respect of the question what is the painter’s task in painting, say, a mountain, Merleau-Ponty answers To unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it makes itself a mountain before our eyes. Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, colour, all these objects of his quest are not all together real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual existence. In fact they exist only at the threshold of profane vision; they are not ordinarily seen. The painter’s gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing, what they do to compose this talisman of a world, to make us see the visible.22

On these terms, then, the painter is concerned with recapturing and/or elucidating, the conditions whereby some state of affairs has become visible in his or her perception. This means operating with the very conditions of visibility itself – those powers of light, shadow, colour, and the like, which are constitutive of how states of affairs appear in vision. However, while these features are constitutive of visual appearance, our commonplace experiences of the visible ignore them in favour of mere recognition. Merleau-Ponty presents these points even more forcefully, as follows. Painting: Gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a ‘muscular sense’ to possess the voluminosity of the world. This voracious vision reaching beyond the ‘visual givens’, opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man in his house.23

Here, Merleau-Ponty is emphasizing painting’s relation to perceptual depth. This consists of the integrated aspectual complexity of states of affairs and relations between them, arrayed in meaningful relation to the embodied subject’s immediate and possible

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visual orientations, and potential for movement through the perceptual field. The meaningful aspect of all this centres on the recognition of what kind of state of affairs is present, and their significance for our immediate or longer-term practical projects. This involves selective interpretation. We focus on some meanings, and do not attend to others. In particular, the actual visual character of the phenomena, qua visual is most often ignored. In one sense, this is all to the good. For, if we constantly attended to the texture and fabric of visible appearance, we would be so overwhelmed by stimuli as to have our powers of decision paralysed. But, of course, something is lost as well. We share the same flesh as the visible – in all the senses described earlier. And one of the factors involved in this is experiencing ourselves as emerging to self-consciousness in, and through, actions within the visible. This is our uniqueness as a species. Now, while in the course of normal perception we overlook this bonding, matters are different with painting. When the painter works, he or she returns us to our undivided existence within the visible. This is done through exemplifying his or her own interpretative ‘take’ on generally accessible visual features of the depicted state of affairs. The resulting work models a shared bonding between see-er and seen, and between see-ers in general, wherein the immense continuum of textural detail and relations, which vision organizes into discrete forms, is presented as the matrix of individual visibilia. We see the ‘invisible’ lining which makes the appearance of recognizable visual things or states of affairs possible.24 The invisible extends also to the representation of moving objects. Sometimes the image will attempt to identify phases in a process of movement (Merleau-Ponty gives as examples, here, Marey’s photographs, Cubism, and Duchamps’ La Mariee). More often, it will attempt the representation of movement per se – even though it is a static, physically two-dimensional medium. It is this latter strategy which is of most interest to Merleau-Ponty. In this respect, he assigns a key role to the body, but on a surprising basis. According to him, movement is shown best through visually incongruous relationships between represented body parts. As he puts it, The picture makes movement visible by its internal discordance. Each member’s position, precisely by virtue of its incompatibility with the others (according to the body’s logic) is dated differently or is not ‘in time’ with the others; and since all of them remain visibly within the unity of one body, it is the body which comes to bestride duration.25

For Merleau-Ponty, photography merely perpetuates that onrush of moments which the actual passage of time closes up immediately. It negates the overlapping, overtaking, arrangement of body parts in painting’s virtual metamorphoses of time. However, This is what painting, in contrast, makes visible, because the horses [i.e., the galloping ones in Gericault’s Epsom Derby] have in them that ‘leaving here, going there,’ because they have a foot in each instant. Painting searches not for the outside of movement but for its secret ciphers . . . All flesh, and even that of the world radiates beyond itself.26

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On these terms, then, the painting of movement involves a temporal dimension of invisibility. This is because the internal parts of the represented state of affairs are out of sync with the whole in such a way as to visually suggest an imminent transformation of gesture – of positional states that are not yet visible. Here, movement is represented not through a ‘correct’ and static momentary image, but rather through one whose internal inconsistencies are unstable, and thence suggest vectors of motion. In these various ways, then, painting enables the structure of vision to be made visible in both spatial and temporal terms. The artist, in the act of painting, and through perceiving the finished work, sees what is distinctive to his or her own style of seeing, and evidence, also, of his or her own status as one who is visible to others. Reciprocally, the audience sees how generally recognizable, ‘shareable’ spatio-temporal states of affairs are, nevertheless, arranged, and given even more particular inflections by the personality of the see-er. The very fact that the work has been made means also that their vision has been solicited to look at the work – which makes them, in principle, visible to others as, ‘one who is looking at that work’. Now there might appear to be an ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the invisible. It could be asked, for example, whether the invisible relates to factors bound up with the artist’s perception or imagining of visible things per se, or only with how these appear in the painting of them. Or perhaps, we cannot separate these? I would suggest that this last point is, in fact, Merleau-Ponty’s position. Painting develops the role of personal interpretation to perception, and extends this through the presentation of specific kinds of visually possible states of affairs. It may be that these have been perceived by the artist; it may be that they are purely imaginary. But in either case, the painting sets forth possibilities of appearance. No matter how idiosyncratic its style is, if the work is a picture, it will contain shape and colour combinations mediated by lighting, distance and angle of view, in relation to the observer, which are consistent with the virtual appearance of a specific kind of state of affairs. Indeed, the fact that this is shown through painting rather than through ordinary perception means that we are more likely to notice the visual conditions of the state of affair’s appearance. In seeing the painting, we, at the same time, see the represented visual possibility at the ontological level of emergence to perception. This being said, in attending the painting, we address not only what is presented, but also how it is presented. All visual phenomena have their invisible dimension of textural details and relations, but the painter does not copy these but rather uses them as the materials with which he or she works. All the key factors in visual appearance – colour, shape, depth, light, shadow and the like are not merely aspects of what is seen; rather, they are ‘dimensions’ of visibility which the painter adapts, extends and modifies to create more specific visual differences and relations. The painter is what might be called the internal artificer of visible being. He or she interprets vision using the visible’s own ontological features. In this respect, we will recall Merleau-Ponty’s emphases on reversibility/flesh. The see-er and the seen are part of one another’s full definition; they are immersed in one another. This is exactly how we should see Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the relation of painter and painted. The painter not only discloses the visible conditions of

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a possible state of affairs, but brings it into being by a personally expressive working of the very structures that determine visual appearance in general. The painting and that which is painted are inseparably bonded. Each is part of the full definition of the other – the painting focuses the visual richness of the painted (whether it is actual or just an imagined visual possibility) and thence lets it exist in a fuller way; and, reciprocally, the painted (as actuality or possibility) summons the painter’s creative act into being through its visual promise, and provision of an avenue to expression. The strongest statement of Merleau-Ponty’s position here comes in the following passage. Pictorial depth (as well as painted height and width) comes ‘I know not whence’ to alight upon, and take root in the sustaining support. The painter’s vision is not a view from the outside, a merely ‘physical-optical’ relation with the world. The world no longer stands before him through representation; rather it is the painter to whom the things of the world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible. Ultimately, the painting relates to nothing at all amongst experienced things unless it is first of all ‘autofigurative’. It is a spectacle of something only by being a ‘spectacle of nothing’, by breaking the skin of things to show how things become things, how the world becomes world.27

This is a profound and striking characterization. The painter is given birth to not by societal contexts but by the visible itself. The painter’s vocation may have such contexts, but the gift, the need and the patience to paint, is something that emerges through embodied subjectivity’s reversible identity with the visible, qua flesh. Vision and visibility give rise to painting. Whatever a painting represents, it first and foremost represents itself as expression that makes the visible visible to itself. In so doing, it does not, as it were, grab at things; it generates them from the voluminosity of their visual appearance and its manifold possibilities. Merleau-Ponty develops this approach in detail through analyses of colour and line. I will consider colour in the next section (in relation to Cezanne) but his phenomenology of line can be dealt with now. There is a traditional conception of line which sees it as mainly bound up with properties of the visible object itself – namely, its contours, or de-limiting boundaries with other things. However, for Merleau-Ponty, this conception is challenged by modern painting, and maybe even painting in general. As he puts it, There are no lines visible in themselves . . . neither the contour of the apple nor the border between field or meadow is in this place or that . . . they are always on the near or far side of the point we look at. They are always between or behind whatever we fix our eyes upon; they are indicated, implicated, and even very imperiously demanded by the things, but they themselves are not things.28

Merleau-Ponty’s point here is that the line is not an existent, per se, rather is a key factor in how things are made visible to us. Even though the lines do not exist, they

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pick out features whereby we achieve orientation in perception; they are appearances within appearance that define and emphasize salient areas within perceptual depth. One of the important features of painting – especially modern idioms – is that the line is no longer tied to its indicative emphasizing function. This is not a loss. In MerleauPonty’s words, It is simply a matter of freeing the line, of revivifying its constitutive power . . . For henceforth, as Klee said, the line no longer imitates the visible; it ‘renders visible’; it is the blueprint of a genesis of things. [Indeed,] The beginning of the line’s path establishes or installs a certain level or mode of the linear, a certain manner for the line to be and make itself a line, ‘to go line’. . . . Making its way in space, it nevertheless corrodes prosaic space and its partes-extra-partes; it develops a way of extending itself actively into that space which sub-tends the spatiality of a thing quite as much as that of a man or apple tree.29

The point is, then, that line can function as factor from which visible structure per se is generated and explored. Such explorations will play off against one another. A line disposed in such and such a way here will take on a different significance if it is linked or juxtaposed with a line of another character. And this dialectic will continue and transform as line plays different roles between work and work and artist and artist. Indeed, it will subvert the traditional conception of line (even in the familiar perceptual function described above). This is because line can not only constitute recognizable forms, but also indicate vectors of possible space occupancy or motion, or the axes of orientation in a body that would enable it to achieve such occupancy. (Though Merleau-Ponty does not mention it, futurist ‘lines of force’ work in this way.) This opens two equally valid general approaches to the line. On the one hand, like Klee, artists might explore it as a constitutive factor in the genesis of the visible, through the generation of matrices of line that are given more exact character only subsequently, through the title that is given to them; or, on the other hand, they might focus and concentrate on traditional subjects by compressing space into emphatically linear forms, as in the work of Matisse. Merleau-Ponty is led, accordingly, to the following conclusion. Whether it be representational or nonrepresentational, the line is no longer a thing or an imitation of a thing. It is a certain disequilibrium contrived within the indifference of the white paper; it is a certain hollow opened up within the in-itself, a certain constitutive emptiness – an emptiness which as Moore’s statues show decisively, sustains the supposed positivity of things. The line is no longer the apparition of an entity upon a vacant background, as it was in classical geometry. It is . . . the restriction, segregation, or modulation of a pre-given spatiality.30

Line, then, has come to function as a constitutor of spatial forms from spatiality as such. It does so through its capacity to both define enclosed space and to open up its absence. This has the effect, of course, of erasing the rigid distinction between

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figurative and non-figurative painting. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty will not even allow Malraux’s distinction between ‘objective’ traditional representational art and ‘subjective’ non-figurative work. Both idioms are driven by making visible that correlation of the objective and subjective unity which is given its most complete expression within vision itself. Through painting, one can constitute a recognizable kind of visible something, or constitute a something which represents only the visible’s self-constitution. In the final analysis, however, these are different aspects of the same power of expression. Given Merleau-Ponty’s sustained and searching theory, how then might we characterize the ultimate relation between painting and Being? In the first instance, his notion of Being collapses the modern distinction between primary and secondary qualities. This means that colour (and by implication, light) is assigned the same importance as such things as shape, mass and position. More generally, the subjective unity of perception, ‘raw feels’ and the like are not secondary functions of space-occupying masses, but are the features which give such masses determinacy, and allow Being to appear as a world. All these factors accentuate the centrality of vision as the great presenter of the ‘thereness’ of things. It is enabled by, and itself enables, a complex network of integrally bonded aspects, organized around the viewing subject’s orientation. Within this, each visual quale takes on its distinct character by its coordination with other senses, its actual relations to things seen and the possibility of movement through, and action upon and from them. The infinite continuum of all see-ers and what they see, however, is not an overwhelming space, because it has a principle of cohesion – in the form of reversibility/ flesh. Though Merleau-Ponty does not describe it in such terms, this is in effect, logic of being, wherein the visible dimensions, and heterogeneous textures and relations are focused by the orientation of the viewing subject. Each visible thing thus emergent to perception qua individual is a kind of fruition or bursting out from a horizon of integrally organized invisible aspects. This means that it not only acts as a dimension insofar as it is dependent upon, but also serves to actively modify those invisible networks and relations which it is emergent from. Painting is well placed in relation to this. As we have seen, for Merleau-Ponty, the artist creates with the visible; hence, in making paintings, he has to engender things whose unity at every stage of their making has to take account of how the individual stroke or form is correlated with all the other elements in a process of reciprocal correlation. We are told that Because depth, colour, form, line, movement, contour, physiognomy are all branches of Being, and because each entwines the tufts of all the rest, there are no separated, distinct, ‘problems’ in painting, no really opposed paths, no partial ‘solutions’, no cumulative progress, no irretrievable options.31

Painting, therefore, is a supreme expression of the holistic logic of the perception of Being – the fact that all the aspects of reversibility/flesh mutually imply one another. Through painting, it is affirmed that ‘Vision is the meeting, as at a crossroads, of all

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the aspects of Being.’32 And that ‘it is impossible to say that here nature ends and the human being or expression ends’.33 I have, then, expounded the general structure of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to painting. This structure is explored by him in a number of specific and extremely important directions. I shall address first the affirmatory emphasis he gives to Cezanne, and his very critical stance towards ‘classical’ perspective.

Part three Merleau-Ponty’s first extended discussion of painting is the essay ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, published in 1945. As one might expect from its title, the essay focuses mainly on Cezanne (though Da Vinci is addressed also). I shall expound now some of its main themes as they relate to Cezanne directly. It is interesting that Merleau-Ponty’s celebrated contemporary Sartre gives great emphasis to the existential circumstances and orientations of artists’ lives (especially in his essays on Tintoretto).34 Merleau-Ponty’s approach is rather different, and assigns a more restricted role to such circumstances.35 In the first part of ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, he traces the difficulties of Cezanne’s personality but rejects the interpretation that would see the paintings fundamentally in terms of how they express their creator’s personality. Instead, we must recognize that, while Cezanne’s personal history is necessary to his painting, his free creation in making a painting results in an artefact that is of more general significance. Such things as psychoanalysis can assist in the understanding of the artist’s motivations, but, even in this quite specific sphere, they cannot be conclusive. Merleau-Ponty, accordingly, shifts the focus of investigation to a phenomenological footing – beginning with Cezanne’s important Impressionist predecessors. We are told that Impressionism was trying to capture, in the painting, the very way in which objects strike our eyes and attack our senses. Objects were depicted as they appear to instantaneous perception, without fixed contours bound together by light and air . . . The colour of objects could not be represented simply by putting on the canvas their local tone, that is, the colour they take on isolated from their surroundings; one also had to pay attention to the phenomena of contrast which modify local colours in nature.36

Hence, The result of these procedures was that the canvas – which no longer corresponded point by point to nature – afforded a generally true impression through the action of the separate parts on one another.37

However, through being orientated towards atmospheric effects and breaking up tone, Impressionist works tend to lessen the weight and palpability of the things they

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represent. Cezanne’s works after 1870 become extremely important in relation to this. He tries to find the object behind the atmosphere, and, instead of breaking the tones, offers a gradation of colours distributed progressively across the object. This allows the painting to stay close to the object’s form, and to the light that falls on it. In some cases, this involves doing away with exact contours, and giving colour priority over the outline. This has a very different result from Impressionism. The object is no longer covered by reflections and lost in its relationships to the atmosphere and other objects: it seems subtly illuminated from within, light emanates from it, and the result is an impression of solidity and material substance. 38

Cezanne returns us to the object, in other words, without wholly dispensing with the Impressionist aesthetic. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty goes on to argue that these specific artistic strategies are of more general significance – overcoming dichotomies in the relation between nature and art. In this respect, Cezanne’s license with contours after 1870 has already been noted. Merleau-Ponty makes much more of it – in the context of broader revisions of perspectival and pictorial arrangement that are widespread in Cezanne’s work between 1870 and the 1890s. The unstable contours and perspectival inconsistencies serve a purpose. We are told that He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization . . . We see things; we agree about them; we are anchored in them; and it is with “nature” as our base that we construct our sciences. Cezanne wanted to paint this primordial world, and his pictures therefore seem to show nature pure, whilst photographs of the same landscapes suggest man’s works, conveniences, and imminent presence.39

According to Merleau-Ponty, what Cezanne has realized is that perspective as it is lived in immediate perception is not a geometric or a photographic one. Hence, the perspectival inconsistencies and unstable contours of Cezanne’s painting – when seen in the context of the work overall – are not visible as inconsistencies. Rather, they contribute to the impression of visible things and states of affairs, as emerging within perceptual depth. Continuous outlines tend to over-objectify the shape of the thing, and the tracing of single outlines, tends to diminish our sense of the inexhaustible character of depth. It follows, therefore, that The outline should . . . be a result of the colours if the world is to be given its true density. For the world is a mass without gaps, a system of colours across which the receding perspective, the outlines, angles, and curves are inscribed like lines of force; the spatial structure vibrates as it is formed. [At this point, Merleau-Ponty quotes Cézanne without citing the source] ‘The outline and the colours are no longer distinct from each other, as you paint, you outline: the more the colours

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harmonize, the more the outline becomes precise . . . When the colour is at its richest, the form has reached plenitude.’40

It is important to emphasize that, in these passages, Merleau-Ponty is not just pointing out Cezanne’s ability to evoke tactile values or make things look solid. Indeed, the primordial perception which Cezanne addresses is one where there is no separation of perceptual capacities, or individual qualities in objects. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, The lived object is not rediscovered or constructed on the basis of the contributions of the senses; rather, it presents itself from the start as the centre from which these contributions radiate. We see the depth, the smoothness, the hardness of objects . . . If the painter is to express the world the arrangement of his colours must bear within this indivisible whole, or else his painting will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the unsurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real.41

For Merleau-Ponty, then, Cezanne’s painting is manifestly of a kind that has an especially intimate bond with the nature of perception. Indeed, there is a sense in which ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’ anticipates (in the foregoing passage, especially) the relation between painting and the reversibility/flesh of the visible which has been shown to be so important in Parts one and two. For it is clear that the essay understands Cezanne as making the visible visible to itself through painting. Now it is quite clear that in ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, Merleau-Ponty often moves from talking about Cezanne himself, to painting in general (the immediately preceding quotation being an example). Indeed, one cannot help be struck by the fact that the general theory of painting described in Part two of this chapter is suspiciously akin to Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of Cezanne. Could it be, therefore, that he has derived the key to painting in general from the work of one artist? If this were the case, Merleau-Ponty would be at fault. For the whole burden of argument in ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’ falls on showing what is special about Cezanne – what separates his work from that of other artists. Fortunately, Merleau-Ponty does not fall into this trap. In ‘Eye and Mind’, for example, it is argued that There is clearly no one master key of the visible and colour alone is no closer to being such a key than space is. The return to colour has the virtue of getting somewhat nearer to the “heart of things,” but this heart is beyond the colour envelope just as it is beyond the space envelope. The Portrait of Vallier [from Cezanne’s last few years of life] sets white spaces between the colours which take on the function of giving shape to and setting off, a being more general than yellow-being, or greenbeing, or blue-being.42

On these terms, Cezanne’s painting between 1870 and the 1890s is not the prototype for painting per se. It is an idiom that employs colour to evoke the primordial level of perception. There are other ways of doing this, and in his last works, Cezanne pushes towards some of these through innovations of the kind just cited by Merleau-Ponty.

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Modern tendencies are especially rich in the diversification of painting’s evocation of perception, and Merleau-Ponty is especially attentive to work by Klee, Matisse, the Cubists and Giacometti, among others. These artists are all seen as leading us back to the relation between vision and things. However, all this being said, Cezanne and his legacy do present a problem for Merleau-Ponty. It is the fact that while not being the prototype of painting, Cezanne and the moderns are, for Merleau-Ponty, in effect, more authentic painters – precisely because they are true to the ontology of the visible in its emergent character. But ‘more authentic’ than whom? To understand this, it is necessary to consider Merleau-Ponty’s sustained and intense critique of linear or (as he more often terms it) ‘classical’ perspective. The critique is given its most concentrated theoretical articulation in a rather unhelpful form – namely a discussion of Descartes’ optics in part III of ‘Eye and Mind’, where Merleau-Ponty is at pains to show how these optics work by, in effect disengaging the mind from the body, and allowing the former to sort out the visible. Classical perspective is seen as an expression of this sorting. The discussion of Descartes is lengthy and of great specialist interest. However, Merleau-Ponty presents more direct and incisive critical points about perspective in the ‘Indirect Language . . .’ essay, and, especially, The World of Perception (a book based on radio talks given by Merleau-Ponty in 1948). In this last-mentioned work, we are told what the painter of classical perspective is orientated towards. he strives to find a common denominator to . . . perceptions by rendering each object not with the size colour and aspect it presents when the painter fixes it in his gaze but rather with the conventional aspect that I would present in a gaze directed at a particular vanishing point on the horizon, a point in relation to which the landscape is then arranged.43

Indeed, When our gaze travels over what lies before us, at every moment we are forced to adapt a certain point of view and these successive snapshots of any given area of the landscape cannot be superimposed one upon the other. It is only by interrupting the normal process of seeing that the [perspectival] painter succeeds in mastering this series of visual impressions and extracting a single unchanging landscape from them.44

Merleau-Ponty’s point in these remarks, then, is that classical perspective is not at all true to our perception of the world. It arranges things in an equal and static way, offering a state of affairs to the viewer that coagulates local and monocular viewpoints into a single, absolutely containing space. Merleau-Ponty admits the historical importance of classical perspective, but insists that it is only one idiom of pictorial space among others, and even among its practitioners, it has been explored in very different ways. Now, it might be thought that this critique is intended primarily to overcome the prejudice that linear perspective has a kind of ‘objective’ validity or truth to how things

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are seen. This is clearly his intention. Unfortunately, Merleau-Ponty does not leave things here. His critical points are often followed by remarks contrasting the restricted nature of classical perspective with the achievements of Cezanne and the moderns. Of Cezanne and his legacy, we are told, for example, that they have striven to recapture the feel of perceptual experience itself. Thus different areas of their paintings are seen from different points of view.

Indeed, those who look closely will get the feel of a world in which no two objects are seen simultaneously, a world in which being is not given but rather emerges over time.45

More generally, the notion of a single unified space has been replaced by the idea of a space, which consists of different regions and has distinctive bodily features and our situation as beings thrown into the world . . . man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things, because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.46

It is quite clear that for Merleau-Ponty, this modern space is the truer one. Therefore, its expression in painting must be truer than that based on ‘classical’ perspective. MerleauPonty is committed, accordingly, to a distinction between an ontologically authentic form of painting (exemplified by Cezanne and the moderns) and an inauthentic idiom based on ‘classical’ perspective. I shall now offer a provisional assessment of MerleauPonty’s general theory of painting, and then consider the important critical points raised by his treatment of Cezanne and classical perspective.

Part four Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception and the primacy of the visible have been expounded at length in earlier parts of this chapter. Any ambiguities or difficulties were, hopefully, covered then. Suffice it to say, I know of no better account of the embodied subject’s basic modes of inherence in Being. The theory of painting was seen to follow directly on from the visible’s meaningful and expressive structure. In the relation between its own formal fabric and represented visible things (or optical illusion, in the case of abstract works), it sets forth the holistic integration of all the factors involved in perceptual depth – the relational arrangement of things in space, their correlation with the viewer’s orientation and the personal style which informs perception. By this means, vision’s inherence in the visible is realized in an idiom whereby it becomes visible to itself.

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Now, it might be claimed that the very fact that we need such a complicated theory as Merleau-Ponty’s in order to understand painting surely means that its ontological structure is of no more than specialist philosophical interest. However, the real point is that this is much more than a theory. The mere exposition of it does no justice to the phenomenon it describes because the experience of the ontological structure in question (though Merleau-Ponty does not use the exact terms himself) is an intuitive one with a partially ineffable content. He tells us that If I accept the tutelage of perception, I find I am ready to understand the work of art. For it too is a totality of flesh in which meaning is not free, so to speak, but bound, a prisoner of all the signs or details, which reveal it to me. Thus the work of art resembles the object of perception: its nature is to be seen or heard and no attempt to define or analyze it, however valuable that may be afterwards as a way of taking stock of this experience, can ever stand in place of the direct perceptual experience.47

Anything that we experience is situated and becomes intelligible from a nexus of related and surrounding meanings. In painting, however, we encounter a complex whole which manifestly engages familiar capacities and centres on familiar relations. However, it blends them in ways whose integrated significance is only intuitively recognizable and even then, only partially. One can think what it is to be visible. But to understand it in the fullest sense can only happen from the inside – and even then only when the experience is, in some way, segregated off from that of everyday visibilia. Painting’s expression of the visible offers such experience. It has the character of presenting our visible bonding with the world – but as a bonding whose making visible through painting involves, itself, a kind of bonding with the bonding. Seeing ourselves seeing in this context is intuitive and felt, rather than discursive and reflective. It is the truth of vision par excellence in that it can only be experienced through direct perception. Now precisely because the experience of painting brings sensory structure and meaning into an inseparable and mutually enhancing experience, it has an aesthetic character.48 The aesthetic experience is not some remote or dreamy immersion in aesthetic properties or qualities whose ultimate character cannot de defined. Neither is a case of simply responding to ‘significant form’. The great strength of Merleau-Ponty’s theory (even without him making explicit use of the aesthetic as a concept) is that it shows how, in painting, form is able to become significant in its own distinctive way. Indeed, it points towards the more general truth that the aesthetic experience of art is one which draws on all aspects of our being. However, it is the very breadth of painting’s aesthetic and ontological scope which, in the final analysis, shows Merleau-Ponty’s theory to be somewhat distorted and narrow in central respects. To establish this claim, I shall, consider the cases of Cezanne and his legacy, and classical perspective. First, given Merleau-Ponty’s theory, one can understand why he might treat the former as authentic and the latter as inauthentic. Cezanne and company evoke the emergent character of visibility (Cezanne emphasizing colour, other artists emphasizing

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line or whatever). Classical perspective, in contrast, conceals these foundations through its rigid spatial structure. Both sorts of painting share the basic ontological grounding of the reciprocity of visible and invisible, but inflect it differently. Let us suppose that the case is exactly as Merleau-Ponty presents it. Unless additional truth criteria are involved in painting, it follows that Cezanne and company’s work is better than the practioners of classical perspective. This need not be a rigid hierarchy, but there is an inescapable hierarchical implication of sorts. If the ontological grounding of painting was merely a theoretical fact, this would not be the case – it would not matter aesthetically that one work was truer to the nature of visibility than another. However, as we have seen, for Merleau-Ponty to experience visibility made visible through painting involves aesthetic rather than reflective or analytic criteria. The hierarchical implication, accordingly, must stand. Or must it? There are some general issues which must be raised here, but as a means to them, we must start by questioning Merleau-Ponty’s actual interpretation of Cezanne. As we will recall, it centres on the loosening of contours and apparent perspectival inconsistencies in his work between 1870 and the 1890s. For Merleau-Ponty, the significance of this is through its evocation of the viewer’s mobile role in the actual visual perception of things. However, it is important to note that there are other things, besides, going on in Cezanne’s painting between 1870 and the 1890s. To show this, consider Cezanne’s Portrait of Geffroy (Figure 5.1). Merleau-Ponty observes that Geffroy’s table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped.49

Now one can acknowledge Merleau-Ponty the aptness of this description and of the other features that he observes in Cezanne’s work. However, his reading of them as evoking perception’s emergence and ‘primordial’ natural ground is not the only explanation of why pictures appear as they do. There is a further quite remarkable feature that Merleau-Ponty never considers, but which is a definitive feature of just about all of Cezanne’s paintings between 1870 and the 1890s, and after. It is a feature already noted in my discussion of Wollheim in Chapter 1, namely that in Cezanne’s generation of form through colour, the loosened contours and perspectival inconsistencies have a paradoxical effect – they emphasize the bulk and plasticity of things in a way that harmonizes with the two-dimensionality of painting as a medium. This means that the ‘inhuman’ appearance of human and other forms which Merleau-Ponty notes is not sufficiently explicable as an evocation of primordial perception. Rather, their appearance is changed through being adapted – in an unfamiliar way – to the planar structure of the medium. Indeed, in the very last phase of Cezanne’s art from around 1900 to 1906, the plasticity of the represented subject matter seems to be wrenched into planar passages and transitions and pulled towards the picture plane per se. We are led, thus, to the major point. The major weakness of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of painting is that it scarcely considers the nature of the medium in terms of its pictorial

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Figure 5.1 Paul Cezanne, Gustave Geffroy (between 1895 and 1896); oil on canvas: H. 110; W. 89 cm. Source : Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Gift of the Pellerin family, 1969 © RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski.

structure. His attention is confined almost exclusively to the painter’s perception and equivalences, and the style-embodying product of gesture. But painting is an idiom of pictorial representation, or, when abstract, allusive representation that works through optical illusion.50 It is governed by complex conventions over and above the ontology of the visible. This means that when the world is represented in a painting, on the basis of pictorial or abstract convention, its significance, qua visible, is changed. Through being adapted to conventions of pictoriality, visible things are presented under conditions that indeed, embody, but also go beyond the making visible of vision. We have a transformation, rather than a translation of vision into visible terms.

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Given this, it can be argued that Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Cezanne – even if it is appropriate – must also negotiate the means (namely harmonizing three-dimensional plasticity with picturing’s two-dimensional planarity) whereby this is achieved. But in negotiating the planar emphasis, other issues must be brought into play, and these take the meaning of Cezanne’s work to a more complex level. Not least of them is the fact that in his accentuated integration of plasticity and planarity, he is giving radical emphasis to a factor that is basic to all picturing. It involves a relation that intervenes on visual perception, and gives it a new meaning. By identifying what this involves, we will find that Merleau-Ponty’s approach to classical perspective is also rather one-sided. As a starting point for these further explorations, it is useful to consider one of Merleau-Ponty’s other points about Cezanne’s painting of Geffroy. After talking of the perception-evoking ‘distortions’ in the work, he tells us that It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and tend toward the geometric perspective.51

Merleau-Ponty talks here as though painting has the misfortune of freezing emergence even while evoking it. But what if this is a liberation of sorts? What if it is central to the ontology of making a picture? This is indeed the case. To show it requires a lengthy analysis of an aspect of pictorial representation already alluded to, but which has been significantly neglected by most philosophers, including Merleau-Ponty – namely its fundamental planar structure.52 It is sometimes thought that this feature occurs only in works with classical perspective. However, it is, in fact, a universal feature of picturing. This is because picturing involves placing or inscribing marks on what has the appearance of being a two-dimensional surface – even though in strictly physical terms, it is not. This appearance or (as I shall call it) virtual two-dimensionality means that figurative content, of necessity, is projected between two notional planar boundaries. The first is a background plane against which the main pictorial shape or group is defined. This plane can be entirely neutral through being left blank, or it may involve a shallow visual network of secondary figures that enable the fuller recognition of the main subject. A second plane is involved through the main represented three-dimensional figure or group setting up a virtual distance between those edges of the figurative content which appear to be furthest from the viewer (and which ‘touch’ the background plane), and those which appear to be nearest. The edges closest to the viewer here define a notional surface plane. The appearance of distance between the background and surface plane is what gives a picture its virtual depth. Indeed, if a three-dimensional form is fully modelled and placed in spatial relation with other items, it is likely to inflect this depth with secondary planes arising from the spatial content’s parallel or oblique relations to the frontal plane. We now reach the decisive point. Rendering in a planar format cognitively enhances the picture’s subject matter in a number of ways. I shall emphasize just one. In general terms, individual items or states of affairs are best perceived visually, with both viewer and object being stationary and with the object perceived from a frontal viewpoint that

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is neither too near nor too far away from the viewer. Pictures embody these relations in an interesting way. As Merleau-Ponty emphasizes again and again, in visual perception, the viewer is mobile. Even if the body is in a physically stationary position, there will always be such things as slight head and eye movements. An entirely stationary viewing position is difficult to achieve and maintain over any length of time. Indeed, even visual perception itself involves attending to a figure defined against a ground – a relation which is constantly shifting and reconfiguring in terms of new contents on the basis of our changing cognitive and practical interests. In making a picture, however, the figure–ground relation is organized and fixed on the basis of the planar structures just described. In this way, the artist presents the subject matter from an absolutely stationary frontal viewpoint vis-à-vis any notional viewer. This means, of course, that even if the pictured subject is supposed to be in motion, rendering it in a planar structure means that any appearance of movement is suspended in a virtual immobility. The planes hold and stabilize the subject and make some of its aspects available in a fixed way that cannot be attained by ordinary visual perception. Pictorial representation intervenes upon normal perception by creating immobile figures and groups whose selected shapes, lines and shading resemble similar features in the subject matter. By being represented, the subject matter is both referred to, but, also in a sense ‘bracketed off ’ attention, from the flow of real life. ‘Virtual immobility’, as used here, is different from photography – which involves an image captured from the causal impact of a subject matter in real time. Pictorial content, in contrast, occupies an idiom of virtual space that is wholly created by the artist. Whereas the content of the photograph came into being through a sequence of previous events, and, after the photograph was taken, continued in a network of further real events, the picture does not have this embeddedness in the real passage of time. All that it does is present an appearance of its subject matter where the passage of time is not a condition of presentation. This ‘presentness’ is a key feature of pictorial representation. It creates a consistency between the subject matter’s appearance and the frontal viewpoint of a notionally stationary observer. A picture might suggest temporal motion in its figurative content (as we saw in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the ‘invisible’ earlier), but motion is not a structural feature of picturing in the way that it is (albeit in different ways) in film, video or photography. In effect, pictorial representation releases its subject matter (in virtual terms) from the constraints of mutability – from necessary location in real-time’s rigid flow of causal actualities. Time is involved directly with the picture only in the physical act of making the picture in the first place, or of perceptually scanning it. Through its absolutely stationary ‘presentness’, the picture actively separates the subject matter from the normal conditions under which things of that kind are perceived. The importance I have assigned to the plane can be extended (as I have shown at length elsewhere)53 to more marginal varieties of visual representation such as mapping, 360-degree images and even Cubism. However, the main conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing is that, through presentness’s magnificent reciprocity

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of sensory presence and created meaning, a symbolic transcendence of the limits of finitude is embodied at the level of the visible. This is simultaneously an aesthetic of what we are, and how we might wish to see. In picturing, we make the shifting world of visual appearances answer to us, through capturing the timeless present of an idealized viewing position. These considerations place Cezanne in an interesting light. Earlier, I noted the centrifugal power of the plane in his final works. It might be argued that, there, the power of the frontal plane ceases to be a idealizing cognitive factor alone, and is presented, rather, as an overt action upon, and transformation of the represented subject matter. The usually invisible primal power of picturing to transform (rather than perception’s power to emerge) is what is made visible to vision, here. If this interpretation is correct, then the rise of Cubism, and, eventually, abstract tendencies, is an entirely logical development of such an ontological switch. I turn now to a further often misunderstood aspect of pictorial representation, namely the way the recessional depth set up by a basic planar structure is given unity. (This will allow us to see why Merleau-Ponty’s critique of classical perspective is so misplaced.) First, in the same picture plane, different items are sometimes represented in proximity to one another but without any suggestion that this should be taken to represent proximity. In the absence of supporting visual cues, we take these just to be pictures of objects that happen, say, to share the same page in an artist’s sketch-book. A step beyond this occurs when objects presented in the same plane are given different sizes and are correlated in a way suggestive of different positions within a shared represented spatial location. Of decisive significance here is when these correlations allow us to identify relations of in front and behind vis-à-vis the objects’ relation to one another. In many cases, this relational foreshortening will not be wholly consistent, but will, nevertheless, involve enough visual cues to establish the idea of the objects being represented as sharing the same spatial location. (This feature can be found in works as different as Pompeian frescoes, and modernist painting which diminish and/or distort perspectival accents.) If relations of above and below can be distinguished systematically from in front and behind, just by looking at the work itself, then we have the basis of pictorial syntax. The most developed form of this syntax is linear (or, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, ‘classical’) perspective – where all orthogonals converge on a single shared vanishing point, and where the sizes of objects diminish in strict proportion with one another (the nearer they approach this point). Such a perspective is often taken to have a privileged status by virtue of its ‘truth’ to our visual perception of spatial recession. I shall argue that perspective is indeed, a privileged pictorial idiom, but not on the grounds posited and rejected by Merleau-Ponty. He claims that the linear idiom congeals the lived perspective, and in order to represent what is perceived, adapts an index of deformation which is characteristic of my standpoint. Yet by this very artifice, two-dimensional perspective constructs an image that is immediately translatable into the optics of any other point of view and, in this sense, in an image of the world as it is or a configuration of every possible perspective.54

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This is a peevish characterization, whose content can actually be given a very different interpretation. The real importance of classical perspective is its systematic visual presentation of possible positions in three-dimensional space within the constraints of a two-dimensional planar medium. In any viewing of the subject’s experience of ‘real’ physical space, appearances reconfigure, and do so in strict and systematic correlation with changes of the viewer’s position. The key term here is ‘systematic’. Immersion in the spatial world is governed by physical laws which apply just as much to the visual perception of space as they do to physical bodies themselves. Of course, in our sensori-motor orientations, we are not aware of this systematicity in reflective terms; rather it is an intuitively known truth that informs our every orientation and action. It is, in Merleau-Pontian terms, one of those key dimensions of invisibility that are the ground of how things become visible. Now the key to linear perspective’s privileged status is how completely it expresses this systematicity. Its visual content is organized in relation to the vanishing point, in an exactly calibrated and gradual convergence. This implies the possibility of an unlimited systematic continuation of visual space beyond the edges of the picture, and beyond the horizon. The suggestion is that, if the viewer were to enter the work, his or her movements within that space would always elicit corresponding and exact variations in how things appeared to him or her. Viewer and viewed would be linked in a systematic correlation continuable ad infinitum, reconfiguring with each change of position. As we have noted already, the systematic correlation of viewer and viewed is not something explicitly expressed in our ordinary visual engagement with the world. We are immersed in that world through binocular vision, and negotiate it intuitively in our successive repositionings. In contrast, linear perspective explicitly declares the immanent systematicity of space. It presents a monocular planar immobilization of spatial items and relations and of the observer’s viewpoint. In this way, the systematic character of such relations is bracketed off from their usual submersion within the practical demands of visual perception. It is made present. This means that linear perspective does not ‘correspond’ with the process whereby we see visible things, rather it invests spatial systematicity itself with the character of visual presentness. An aspect of that which is normally invisible is thus made visible to vision. Merleau-Ponty privileges the mobility of the embodied subject in the emergence of perception. But there would be no mobility or emergence in any intelligible sense, unless the structure of space had a systematic character. This is just as ‘primordial’ as the other factors. Now it should be emphasized that the presentness of spatial systematicity can only be realized visually through linear perspective in picturing. We may see different possible routes through the immediate field of visibilia, we may imagine such routes, but our reflective comprehension of these possibilities emerges only in a piecemeal way. The perspectival image, in contrast, presents and arranges these in a simultaneous ideal array. It allows us, in Merleau-Ponty’s parlance, to ‘have’ the systematicity of relations in space ‘at a distance’. Ironically, in another somewhat peevish characterization,

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Merleau-Ponty actually stumbles on the broader ramifications of the perspectival image. He claims that It gives subjectivity an axiomatic satisfaction through the deformation which it introduces into appearances. But since this deformation is systematic and occurs according to the same index in every part of the scene, it transports me amidst the very things and shows them to me as God sees them.55

Indeed It gives me knowledge that can be obtained from a human viewpoint by a God who does not get caught in finitude.56

Exactly, perspective not only makes the normally invisible systematicity of visual space visible, but does so in a way – as noted above – that involves a simultaneity that is not accessible in ordinary visual perception. We have a reality that informs ordinary vision, but expressed in an idealized way. It may be apt to describe this as the human viewpoint of ‘a God who does not get caught up in finitude’, but this could be regarded positively – as vision set free from finite constraint (I shall return to this example, a little further on). Again, in other words, we have an aesthetic of both what we are and how we might hope to see. Merleau-Ponty does not assign due value to the latter. I have argued, then, that basic planar structure per se, and its two main principles of syntactic unity – namely relational foreshortening and linear perspective – all serve to stabilize and make present the systematic unity of visual space in a way that is not available to ordinary visual perception. The picture heightens the way in which we attend to its visual content, and is thence a cognitive enhancement of vision; but through this, it is significant also as a mode of acting upon that content so as to change its relation to us from that which would be the case in ordinary visual perception. Given this analysis, one could say that Merleau-Ponty’s contrast between the authenticity of Cezanne and his legacy, and the perceptual inauthenticity of classical perspective is entirely misplaced. All painting makes vision visible to itself but does so under different aspects. And since pictures adapt the visible to the demands of a two-dimensional planar medium, this involves also the transformational cognitive and aesthetic effects just discussed. A final critical point must be raised in relation to these issues. It is interesting how small a role (in contrast to Sartre) imagination plays in Merleau-Ponty’s account of painting.57 He does make a number of remarks which acknowledge its importance and that of painting’s connection to imagination.58 But these are not developed. Such as they are, they indicate that Merleau-Ponty’s main interest is in imagination as an ontological concept. This would converge on the fact that, because perceptual depth involves a sense of other possible perceptual orientations and positions, it follows that we must be able to project what these might be like perceptually – a capacity that would centre on imagination rather than thought alone.

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However, we also use imagination in the sense of ‘flights of fancy’, and, surely, these – as associational streams intruding upon, and/or taking us out of, mundane perception – have an important role in experience. Indeed, this opens key links to picturing that Merleau-Ponty does not consider at all. They centre on modal plasticity. This is the picture’s capacity to represent in a way that cross divides between possibility and actuality, and, indeed, to even represent things and states of affairs that could not exist in reality. We can, for example, create images of flying elephants or creatures with the head and torso of a man, but the body of a horse. Indeed, pictures can create any kind of possible visual item, but then link it to other items or place it in circumstances in ways that could not actually happen. This magical way of transforming things in visual terms is one of the reasons why, of course, picturing develops into art. Pictures can be sources of visual information, but through them, we can also indulge our imagination to a most powerful degree. Picturing’s modal plasticity allows the creator to symbolically reorganize and re-make visual reality itself. Through this, picturing is not only a release from the constraints of the real, but also a symbolic means of creating the world as one wills. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty’s remarks about classical perspective and the human view of a God who does not get caught up in finitude casts an interesting light on modal plasticity. For, on the one hand, as we have seen, such representation makes the usually invisible systematic structure of spatial relations visible to vision, but at the same time, it gives us an aesthetically ideal symbolic transcendence of these limits – as though we were starting a visual exploration that would eventually embrace the connectedness of all spatial states of affairs. This is the magic of perspective. It can have its own reality-defying modal plasticity, but this is derived from an idealized presentation of that systematicity which is intrinsic to our reciprocity with Being. Now, of course, it might be pointed out that literature also has modal plasticity in that a writer can evoke many a situations that could not exist in reality. However, the key difference is that while literature operates exclusively at the level of the linguistically driven imagination, the picture presents its content at the level of immediate visual perception. It is this level of perception (and the information about space that it provides) that is the major basis of our normal orientation towards reality. Hence, transformations of the real brought about at this level – as picturing does – are likely to have much more disturbing impact in terms of modal plasticity. I have argued then that Merleau-Ponty is right to assign ontological and aesthetic significance to painting, but that he does not consider the role of conventions governing pictorial representation and, indeed, abstraction.59 They give this dimension a different significance by transforming visible appearances through planarity and the organization of recessional structure. By neglecting this, Merleau-Ponty gives undue significance to Cezanne and the moderns, and undue criticism to ‘classical’ perspective. As do all paintings, these tendencies make different aspects of vision visible, through, at the same time, extending it into more ideal visual ‘presentness’. They embody an aesthetic of what we are, and how we might wish to see. They embody an aesthetic symbolic transcendence of finitude.

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Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, emphasizes Cezanne’s hints of a mobile viewer. These might be interpreted as signs of perception’s emergent character, but equally, they can be regarded as junctures of blending between three-dimensional things and the medium of painting, that aesthetically idealize perception. And while perspectival space may have exactly the features described by Merleau-Ponty, we have seen that they have also a much deeper significance – again bound up with idealized conditions of perception. In order to complete our understanding of Merleau-Ponty on painting, it is necessary to consider, now, the way in which he understands the relation between painting’s ontology and its historical being in general.

Part five Merleau-Ponty posits a ‘historicity of death’. It constellates around the museum’s understanding of art. In his words, The museum adds a false prestige to the true value of works by detaching them from the chance circumstances they arose from and making us believe that the artist’s hand was guided from the start by fate. Whereas style lived within each artist like his heartbeat, . . . the museum converts this secret, modest, nondeliberated, involuntary, and, in short, living history into official and pompous history . . . The museum makes the painters as mysterious for us as octopuses or lobsters. It transforms these works created in the fever of a life into marvels from another world . . .60

Indeed, this historicity is ironic or even derisory and made of misinterpretations, for each age struggles against the others as against aliens by imposing its concerns and perspectives upon them. This history is forgetfulness rather than memory; it is dismemberment, ignorance, externality.61

Merleau-Ponty does not make the objects of these diatribes as specific as they need to be. Clearly, the ‘museum’ in question, here, is one which ‘manages’ the history of art as a kind of romantic narrative of suffering heroes, driven by powers of genius beyond the comprehension of anyone other than the artist himself. One artist’s style succeeds another, each individual or school inevitably succeeded by other individuals and schools. Art is presented as a kind of episodic adventure story.62 Now this kind of mentality has long been abandoned by most museums and – most certainly – by art history as an academic discipline; so it might seem that Merleau-Ponty’s diatribe is out of date. It is not. To see why, it is first noted that, by and large, he is respectful of art history as an academic study, because of its clarifications of the contexts in which paintings are painted. This can enhance our appreciation of

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the works’ living historicities by allowing us insights concerning how his or her style came to be. However, since Merleau-Ponty’s death, and from the 1980s especially, a reductionist form of ‘social history of art’ has developed (influenced by post-stucturalist theories of the ‘text’ and genealogical understandings of ‘discourse’ derived from Foucault). It reads painting fundamentally in terms of how – directly or indirectly – it exemplifies race, class or gender attitudes, and, ultimately, power relations in a society. It is assumed that painting is meaningful for the most part, as a consolidation of dominant white, male, middle-class, heterosexist values. The failure of previous painting to match up with contemporary ‘correctness’ in how these attitudes are presented is used as a ‘critique’ of canonic values, and even of the concept ‘art’ itself.63 Even, in its less-extreme forms, the social history of art finds it difficult to understand painting’s historical being, except in terms of contextual factors such as how a painting came to be created, the social values which it exemplifies, who it was intended for and how it was, and has been, subsequently, received. It is imagined that the only alternative to this approach is an ‘a historical’ formalism which tries to explain painting’s aesthetic value through ‘significant form’ – a notion which has little explanatory value. Now, it could be argued the social history of art functions by – in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase – ‘imposing its concerns and perspectives’ on painting, rather than by understanding how a work’s empirical circumstances of creation, and documentary functions, are enabled by the ontological structure of visibility. The social history of art can reveal important contextual historical truths about painting, but if they take this to be the whole story they are wrong. The question arises, then, as to what other sort of historical truth might be available here? How is painting’s ontology historically realized? Merleau-Ponty answers this through his notion of an ‘historicity of life’. In his words, This is the historicity which lives in the painter at work when with a single gesture he links the tradition that he carries on and the tradition that he founds. It is the historicity which in one stroke welds him to all which has ever been painted in the world, without his having to leave his place, his time or his blessed or accursed labor. The historicity of life reconciles paintings by virtue of the fact that each one expresses the whole of existence – that they are all successful – instead of reconciling them in the sense that they are all finite and like so many futile gestures.64

The meaning of these cryptic remarks is bound up deeply with points made in Parts one and two. Visibility and flesh are the basis of embodied subjectivity’s bonding with Being in the objective unity of a world. Each meaningful gesture made by the embodied subject is a continuation and a beginning, in that its meaning stems from the inheritance of what it has learned from being embodied, and the new way (determined by the uniqueness of its present articulation of perceptual depth) in which the gesture is expressed. Painting gives a distinctive inflection to this, insofar as, in the making of the work, the reversibility/flesh of the visible is made visible to itself. It is important to clarify the phenomenology of flesh/reversibility. When a painter paints, he or she performs an action that is never exactly calibrated in advance, as part of

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a straightforwardly linear sequence. In placing a single brushstroke on the canvas, great deliberation can be involved and an indefinite number of alternatives, considered and decided upon or rejected, half-considered, vaguely sensed or whatever. In the placing of a single stroke, positioning is determined by a reciprocity between the artist’s sense of the developing whole, and how it might be changed by the next contribution. In this respect, it is useful to recall the six aspects of thematization in Wollheim’s notion of Ur-painting. The act of painting involves all these in reciprocity with one another, as well as with the developing whole. Through this complexity, the artist is immersed in a syntax of meaningful gesture bound up with the unity of the body (in particular the coordination of eyes, arms and hands), and the artist’s own empirical history (in terms of techniques, knowledge of other paintings and more personal concerns). Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that this – in the broadest sense – inheritance of the tradition of painting – is not explicitly reflected upon. It is a stiftung – a foundation or establishment of creativity – which embodies ‘the power to forget origins’.65 It is as if each painting is an attempt to express a truth that, of its nature, always remains to be said, but that – in the very attempt at expression – takes the enterprise of painting further. We are told that A painting makes its charm dwell from the start in a dreaming eternity where we may easily rejoin it many centuries later, even without knowing the history of the dress, furnishings, utensils, and civilization whose stamp it bears. Writing, on the contrary, relinquishes its most enduring meanings to us only through a precise history which we must have some precise knowledge of.66

Merleau-Ponty’s account of the relation between painting and literature is somewhat difficult and problematic (for complex reasons which I shall hope to address elsewhere). However, in the foregoing remarks, he at least means that whereas painting has a level of immediately accessible meaning, writing demands historical knowledge in order for its narratives to be understood in an adequate sense. But why is this? Even allowing for painting’s sensibly immediate presence, we, surely, do not recognize what a picture represents in exactly the same way that we would perceive a real example of the represented thing. Now, as we saw in Part four, Merleau-Ponty does not attend properly to the nature of pictorial convention. The point is relevant here, also. Picturing involves a correlation between shapes and/or colours formed in a two-dimensional medium that resemble the visual characteristics of some kind of three-dimensional item or state of affairs, seen from a certain position. The fact that the resemblance is here manifestly created in a two-dimensional format means that we take it to be a representation, rather than a fortuitous natural resemblance. Picturing is based on a natural phenomenon – visual resemblance – but conventionalized as a use of two-dimensional material. It is important to emphasize that pictorial representation is a ‘one-off ’ convention. Once one has understood it, we can, given any picture, recognize that it is a picture of such and such a kind of three-dimensional thing or state of affairs, even if we do

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not know the exact individuals (if any) who are represented. However, the scope of this claim needs to be qualified. Suppose, for example, that we encounter a picture of the crucified Christ. In order to recognize this content in specific terms, we need evidence that the image is intended as that individual event, happening to that individual person. For someone who is familiar with Christianity, the appropriate knowledge is a familiar part of basic cultural stock. Other individual persons or events that pictures are intended to represent may be more difficult to determine. They may require iconographic investigation, that is, analysis of its relation to some specific source – say, a book, history or a culture’s broader lore. However, while the recognition of a picture’s individual subject matter involves linking it to iconographic sources, recognition of its content at the level of kinds of thing does not. For even if someone does not recognize a picture being of the crucified Christ, he or she can still recognize it as a man attached to a tree. Picturing, in other words, has a relative semantic autonomy. It is this which justifies Merleau-Ponty’s claim that it is meaningful over and above the empirical historical context of its creation. We may not know exactly what something in the work is meant to be, but it is at least describable as a visual entity of such and such a [general] kind. There is one other feature which is also immediately accessible. Painting has a fundamental dual aspect. It emerges from day-to-day routines, studies of other artists, rivalries, financial demands, love affairs and manifold contingencies, but in making a painting, these are transformed – through a ‘subterranean logic’67 – into selective gesture that is the basis of how that painter paints. From a nexus of empirical happenstances, the more universally significant level of style emerges. Hence, Merleau-Ponty observes that When one goes from the order of the world to that of expression one does not change worlds; the same circumstances that were previously submitted to now become a signifying system.68

We must inquire as to the character of the change noted in this passage. In one respect, an explanation has already been given. Painting is an idiom of gesture, bound up with the nature of human embodiment, and learnable at an immediately accessible sensory level. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, it is a syntax, but one which centres upon the spontaneous nature of the physical act of painting – the reciprocal give and take, between what has already been painted and the continuing addition of brushstrokes. However, a problem arises here. Merleau-Ponty not only sees the individual work as something constructed through this reciprocity, but, rather, understands also the relation between the painter and other painters – especially past ones – in similar terms. When working, the painter relates his or her work-in progress to the achievements of other painters, and through this, is able to make it into something new. But this is not an explicit act; it is unreflective, or, better, intuitive. Now while, as we have seen, Merleau-Ponty underestimates the cognitively idealizing role of pictorial convention, in the point just considered, he, ironically, goes to an opposite extreme – by over-idealizing the spontaneity of the act

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of painting. For even if it has the exact character just described, there is no intrinsic reason why it should issue in original work. If an artist has been impressed by another artist, the paintings made by him or her can sometimes end up as no more the imitations of the other artist, even if he or she is not aware of the fact while painting – or only becomes aware of it after the work is completed. And reciprocally, an artist can quite deliberately try to do it as x did it, only to end up producing a work that is very different from x’s. Spontaneity of gesture, in other words, may be intrinsic to the act of painting, but it does not – as Merleau-Ponty seems to assume – have any bearing on whether or not a painting will be original (or, in his terms, be a case of ‘primary expression’). What has to be negotiated here is another factor to which Merleau-Ponty does not give adequate consideration (and which is the same difficulty that I have identified in relation to Wollheim, and Heidegger in previous chapters). It is the link between style and historical difference. By definition, a painting produced by one artist (unless it is an out-and-out copy or forgery) will be different from that of another. But the question is, which differences are meaningful in painting? In this respect, we might find that a painter always does works containing three people, or roses which combine red and yellow colours. Another might represent crows in a highly distinctive way, or always paint sunrises. Differences such as these can help define personal styles, but they are not differences, that in themselves, invest individuality of style with much expressive significance. Merleau-Ponty might answer this by referring us back to that ‘subterranean logic’ from which the individuality of a painter’s style emerges from the unique circumstances of his or her life, but again, this is not enough. What painters can do is determined by the medium and its structure and conventions, as well as with the individual artist’s personal abilities and circumstances. Indeed, the tradition of painting is not just a syntax of gesture, it is one which follows and is constrained by what the medium is, and what it will allow in terms of its development. Just as Merleau-Ponty neglects this dimension in relation to painting’s ontological significance, so too he neglects it in relation to the problem of historicity. I have explored the main questions at issue here in great detail elsewhere,69 but a useful summary of some fundamental points is as follows. Painting as a history and tradition does not just happen through embodied subjects making the visible visible to itself. There are factors that allow the body to negotiate and create visually by means of marking a (virtually) two-dimensional surface. Merleau-Ponty links the syntax of gesture to the body, but this syntax only gets a purchase insofar as two-dimensional surfaces are amenable to certain forms of treatment. These factors are the basis of pictorial media and their conventions of practice and interpretation. For example, the ontology of pictorial representation (be it painting or drawing) constellates around axes of formation which define the basic structure and appearance of pictorial media. On the one hand, one can create a picture either – at one extreme, by marking or incising a surface with line (the linear emphasis) – or, at the other extreme, by placing or incising masses on the surface (the painterly emphasis). On the other hand, when arranging figures in space, one can align them simply in relation to the picture plane (the planimetric emphasis), or make them recede from

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the viewer (the recessional emphasis). And, again, the arrangement of items within the picture can appear to be enclosed by the picture’s edges (the closed emphasis), or to suggest continuation beyond them (the open emphasis). All painters operate within these formative constraints, some work between them in unusual and sophisticated ways, some push them to their extreme and some operate within the limits of what others have already done. It is in relation to how these emphases are negotiated that we determine whether an artist has achieved primary expression. This in turn opens up four basic possibilities of an evaluative kind. These are – neutral historical difference – works that simply reproduce established idioms; normal historical difference – consisting of work where the artist achieves a recognizable individual style; effective historical difference – comprising works where an artist’s individual style opens up inventive possibilities for other artists (and which, like normal historical difference, can operate in two directions – refinement of existing idioms to a high degree of excellence, or innovation and the creation of radically new idioms). Finally, there is paradigmatic historical difference – which centres on works which, through their innovations, redefine the scope of the whole artistic enterprise. (Masaccio’s fully realized perspectival works, and Picasso and Braque’s Cubism have this significance.) Characteristically, these innovations will centre on the formative factors outlined earlier. Now Merleau-Ponty would probably have regarded factors such as these as an aspect of the historicity of death. But they are not. For if one wishes to make concrete what an individual style involves and has achieved, one has to do it in a comparative horizon. Those artists who most significantly develop the formative features stake a claim to stylistic difference which is more significant than those who do not. And these are not merely academic achievements. For innovations and refinements that reconfigure the structural basis of the medium offer new ways of making vision visible to itself. They open up new vistas for expressing the reciprocity of visible and invisible. This is demanded ontologically, as well as historically. For there are millions of pictures most of which exist by never really being noticed. They do not make the visible visible to itself, either because they simply disappear into the banal decorative ambience of their everyday surroundings, or are consumed and discarded once their visual information or attempt at persuasion (in the case of advertisements) has been consumed. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, these are ‘secondary expression’. It follows, therefore, that if a painting is to disclose the emergence of visibility or to make its idealizing significance overt, it must do something to the tradition of painting. Individual style must become meaningful in a way that stands out from mere mundanity, so that everyone comes to see the visible in a new way through what has been achieved. It is only as expressions of those formative factors, and idioms of difference outlined earlier, that painting’s far-reaching significance can emerge through an appropriate, medium-based, comparative context. In art, the aesthetic is energized through the interaction between the painter’s individual style, and the possibilities which this opens up for viewers and for other artists. These factors are essential criteria of primary expression in painting. On the basis of such aesthetic experience, the ontological factors which MerleauPonty identifies become more than ideas. They are expressed in a distinctive way as the intuitive lining to how the painter has handled the medium in this specific work.

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Merleau-Ponty’s theory, therefore, follows the interaction between perception and body in painting, but does not explain the conditions under which the structures of this interaction are disclosed. These centre on an individual work’s relation to painting’s historical depth, and its status as a conventionalized medium of expression.

Conclusion I began this chapter with detailed exposition and elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the undivided immersion of embodied subjectivity in Being, and how the juncture between them takes the form of a world. Objective appearance is correlated with the unity of subjective experience. Special attention was given to the bonding of subject and object of experience, and to the idea of them sharing the same ‘flesh’. The importance which Merleau-Ponty assigns to vision and perceptual depth in this bonding was emphasized and explained. Emphasis was placed, also, on the inherently expressive and stylized nature of perception. It was then shown how painting is a direct expression of all the factors just described through making the inherence of vision in the visible, visible to itself. Painting discloses the holistic integration of all those aspects of Being that are brought together in perception. Attention was then paid to the privileged role which Merleau-Ponty assigns to Cezanne and the moderns in this envisioning of vision, and the negative attitude he has towards classical perspective. It was argued that Merleau-Ponty’s characterizations in both respects were flawed. There is more to envisioning the visible than he countenances, and, in particular, he neglects the vital role of pictorial structure in the creation of painting. This role means that painting not only embodies an aesthetic of what we are, in perceptual terms, but also expresses how we might wish to see. It is an aesthetic image of an idealized cognitive relation to the world. It was argued also that Merleau-Ponty does not understand deeper significance of stylistic difference – as historically realized transformation of the structural bases of painting. Overall, he does not negotiate painting in its full ontological depth as an aesthetic and artistic phenomenon. Now, it is vital to emphasize that the criticisms I have made are constructive rather than negative. Merleau-Ponty ‘gets it right’ about the basic ontological structure of painting, but overstates its scope. In identifying the factors he does not negotiate adequately, I hope to have offered the basis of a more comprehensive theory. In the following chapters, further additions will be made. As a starting point, it is useful to consider the relation among picturing, vision and intersubjective relations in much more detail than Merleau-Ponty offers. For this, the work of Lacan is an unexpectedly fruitful source of phenomenological insights.

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6

Subjectivity, the Gaze and the Picture: Developing Lacan

Introduction It would be possible to further develop the approach taken in relation to Merleau-Ponty by addressing (as Rudolf Arnheim and others have done1) the connection between picturing and other fundamentals of visual perception. However, in order to understand pictorial representation’s expressive dimension in the most complete sense, it is important to now locate the visual in a much broader context. To this end, I shall, in this chapter, critically address the rich insights which are embedded within Lacan’s treatment of the relations of self, Gaze, and picture. This approach has other advantages. It allows a transition from Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ontologies of ‘thereness’ to expression understood in terms of subjectivity and intersubjective relations. At the same time, however (and in contrast to Wollheim’s subjective orientation), the connection with the ontology of thereness is not lost sight of in how Lacan presents this transition. Lacan’s theory is of further importance, also. For he understands the picture to be an intervention on vision’s relation to the world, in ways that Wollheim, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty do not consider. By focusing on this, the positions worked out in previous chapters can be extended significantly. Now, it might be felt that the depth of Lacan’s writing cannot be appreciated without embracing his elliptical strategies of argument in sympathetic terms (the same issue, which, as we have seen, arises with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty also). Indeed, the whole point of his address is that the object of analysis cannot be revealed through clear discursive steps of argument. Undue deference to Lacan’s elliptical method, however, makes that method unwarrantably authoritarian. It obstructs the understanding of how much his work really explains. This is bad, both in itself, and its broader consequences. For by failing to explain and criticize the discursive implications of Lacan’s claims, much of their great potential is left undeveloped. Again, analysis is demanded. Part one of this chapter, offers, therefore, a detailed exposition of Lacan’s account of the formation of subjectivity. In Part two, I analyse his complex linking of the subject, the Gaze and pictorial representation. Particular emphasis is given to Lacan’s account of how the picture functions as an arrest of gesture.

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In Part three, I offer a critical assessment of Lacan’s general position on subjectivity, and, having freed it from its Freudian connections, finally proceed, in Parts four and five, to work Lacan’s approach into a viable account of the how the Gaze, pictorial representation, and comparative criteria relate to one another.

Part one The starting point for any discussion of Lacan is what is, in effect, his own logical starting point – namely the formation of subjectivity and the acquisition of language. These grow out of what Lacan identifies as the ‘mirror stage’ of the child’s development (between the ages of 6 and 18 months). Before this stage, the child’s experience flows between ‘jouissance’ (selfish bliss) and a sense of the ‘dismembered body’. This latter experience hinges on the fact that while the child’s organs are receptive to stimuli, they have not yet coordinated their function in a unified field. In particular, the pleasure it receives through its orifices serves to project only a sense of being scattered or dismembered. The mirror state transforms this. Lacan declares The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as Gestalt, . . ., but in which it appears to him in a contrasting size . . . that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him. Thus this Gestalt . . . by these aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I at the same times as it prefigures its alienating destination . . .2

An immediate qualification should be made. While Lacan sees the reflection in the mirror as the usual vehicle of insight, it can also arise from the child’s mimetic observation of his or her peers. At the heart of the mirror, phenomenon per se is a twofold misidentification. On the one hand, the child thinks that the image or other is, in fact, itself, and, on the other hand, the image’s embodiment of symmetry and fixed variation of appearance leads it to suppose, prematurely, the unity of the mature body. The reification embodied in this twofold assumption of the ‘specular ego’ accompanies the child into adult life. Always it will imagine itself to have found permanence and substantiality among the flux of phenomena. The mirror stage then centres on a dialectic between the disruptive threat of the dismembered body and the security of the imagined specular ego. This conflict between absence and presence links up with the child’s experience of its mother. Lacan observes that the polar relation, by which the specular image . . . is linked as a unifier to all the imaginary elements of what is called the fragmented body, provides a couple that is prepared . . . to serve as a homologue for the mother/child symbolic relation.3

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The mother’s presence offers the same Imaginary promise of comfort as does the specular ego. This amounts to an awakening of need – for absolute recognition by the Other, to be desired by the Other; which, in turn, amounts to the child desiring to be what the Other desires. In the case of mother, her object of desire is the phallus. Again, it should be noted that we are dealing here with an item that has extreme significance in polar terms. The phallus is a manifest presence, but in its externality, and (in principle detachability) it also bears the threat of loss or absence. This meaning’s broader significance becomes apparent through the role of the child’s relation to the father. Lacan interprets it on the model of the Oedipus complex in Freud, that is, the father forbids the fulfilment of the child’s desire for the mother, and enforces his authority by the threat of castration. We find, therefore, the following decisive conflict. The child has a need for absolute love from the mother – to be the ultimate object of her desire. But the demand in terms of which this need is articulated cannot be satisfied. The father prohibits their satisfaction, and threatens castration. The Other never gives back what the child demands; and thence, the only partial satisfaction which the latter obtains amounts, in effect, to a perpetual crushing of its demand for love. It is this splitting or lack of congruence between the demand for love and the appetite for satisfaction which constitutes Lacan’s technical usage of the term Desire (which henceforth I will capitalize). Desire is the affective energy which henceforth directs the child’s relation to the world. It is, in essence, a lack which seeks out fulfilments that offer only Imaginary completeness and which can never be satisfied. Now the initial direction in which Desire propels the child again hinges on relations of presence and absence. In this respect, Lacan mentions repetitive games in which subjectivity brings together ‘mastery of its dereliction and the birth of the symbol’.4 What Lacan has in mind here is the Fort/Da game from one of Freud’s case histories. Here the child causes a bobbin tied to a piece of string to be drawn in and out of view – accompanying the disappearance and appearances with jubilant exclamation of ‘Fort’ (gone) and ‘Da’ (there). Lacan sees this as a displacement of Desire into a field where it succumbs to an Imaginary control. Specifically in this moment the subject is not simply mastering his privation by assuring it, but, . . . here is raising his desire to a second power. For his action destroys the object that it causes to appear and disappear in the anticipating provocation of its presence and absence. His action thus negatives the field of forces of desire in order to become its own object to itself. And this object, being immediately embodied in the symbolic dyad of two elementary exclamations, announces in the subject the diachronic integration of the dichotomy of the phonemes, which synchronic structure existing language offers to his assimilation . . .5

Here, in other words, a pseudo-mastery of the presence and absence of the mother stimulates the child into the acquisition of language. In so doing, it is also able to identify with the father. For insofar as language is a pre-existent order of meaning, it has the character of authority. It affirms, in symbolic terms, the name of the father.

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The child becomes a subject, then, insofar as it projects an Imaginary specular ego and channels its Desire into the institution of language. It is important to be clear about the scope of this. Lacan deploys various insights from Saussure’s linguistic theory, notably the claim that language embodies a twofold structure or network. The first network, that of signified, is the synchronic structure of the language material insofar as in that structure each element assumes its precise function by being different from the others; . . . The second network, that of the signified, is the diachronic set of the concretely pronounced discourses, which reacts historically on the first, just as the function of the first governs the paths of the second. The dominant factor here is the unity of signification, which proves never to be resolved into a pure indication of the real, but always refers back to another signification.6

Here Lacan is drawing some conclusions similar to those drawn by Derrida in his deployment of insights from Saussure. There is no simple or direct correlation of signifier and signified. Any item in language – and, by extension, consciousness itself – is only present insofar as it is defined against a network of items which are not directly present at the moment of utterance or cognition. This network of potent absences is organized around two associational axes – the metonymic and the metaphorical. Metonymic association is word-to-word linkage. Given any sequence of words, their very conjunction in regular grammatical patterns sets up expectations, or indeed, plays off against elements or conjunctions which could have been employed as alternative ways of articulating the same signified. Metaphor thence emerges as the possibility of substituting one word for another. Hence, in Lacan’s terms There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of its unity, a whole articulation of relevant context suspended ‘vertically’, as it were, from that point.7

Given all these considerations pertaining to the complex structures of language, Lacan is able to reformulate the notion of the unconscious itself in terms other than that of biological drives and instinct. It consists in the effects that are discovered at the level of the chain of materially unstable elements and constitutes language: effects determined by the double play of combination and substitution in the signifier, according to the two aspects that generate the signified, metonymy and metaphor; determining effects for the institution of the subject.8

On these terms, subjectivity is primarily an effect of language itself. Whatever ostensible function particular instances of language use may have, these are sustained and defined by the space of alternative possible formulations, and, indeed, still more fundamentally by Desire. Each linguistic act is, in effect, a repetition of the original demand for recognition from the mother.

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However, just as in the ‘beginning’, the mother cannot satisfy the child’s demand in full, similarly the articulations of language cannot grasp that which is signified in any complete and definitive sense. One cognitive encounter simply engenders the need for another, and so on, in a process of constant generation. Similar considerations apply in relation to the field of volition. We posit objects of desire, but these are only desirable in the context of a network of meaning determined by other objects and desires. And at the heart of the whole network is the original split between need and satisfaction that constitutes Desire. Lack determines all the subject’s cognitive and volitional activity. To pick out the elusive relation of the desired object to this atmosphere of lack and network absences, Lacan uses the term ‘objet petit a’. The key point to gather from this analysis is that human subject is radically decentred, or in Lacan’s terms ‘ex-centric’. The self is substantially the product of an unconscious address to the Other, carried out in a medium – language – which does not allow this address to receive an answer. Indeed, rather than crystallize into a substantial fully self-possessed and self-determining presence, the human subject is constantly driven and reinvented by a Desire which it does not recognize, and a medium which it can use but not control. Given this, it is hardly surprising that, in Lacan’s terms, the subject attempts to, as it were, solidify the flux. One can describe this (using the celebrated triad of Lacan’s ‘mature’ theory) in the following terms. The Real is a kind of heterogeneous flow of Being-as-becoming which is given precarious contours and order by the Symbolic Order (i.e. language and cognate institutions). As Lacan puts it It is the world of words that create the world of things . . . [Indeed] the concept, saving the duration of what passes by, engenders the thing.9

However, the human subject attempts to make this ‘saving’ absolute by investing it with an Imaginary permanence of the sort engendered by its misidentification with the specular ego at the mirror stage. The ramifications of this Imaginary projection are very considerable. Lacan indicates what is at stake here in his discussion of the strangeness of actors’ expressions in those ‘stagnated’ moments when a film is stopped in mid-action: this formal stagnation is akin to the most general structure of human knowledge: that which constitutes the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, and substantially, in short with entities or things that are very different from the Gestalten that experience enables us to isolate in the shifting field, stretched out in accordance with the line of animal desire . . .10

We are thence led to a paradox. On the one hand, the Imaginary’s projection of an ordered continuum of stable concepts and presences enables the world to be controlled and manipulated. It has in practical terms a positive function. On the other hand, such a central framework is, vis-à-vis the Real, an aberration or distortion. This is why Lacan describes the structure of knowledge as ‘paranoiac’. Just as persecution mania involves a ‘stagnation’ of fluid social interactions, so do the categories of knowledge

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involve a stagnation of the fluidity and contingency of the Real. Instead of seeing the symbolic articulations of language as opaque and always-shifting reference points, we imagine them to render the Real as a fixed and well-defined body or essence. It is therefore, the task of therapeutic praxis in psychoanalysis to find a mode of linguistic expression which restores a sense of language’s ultimate fluidity. In this way, the reified projections of the Imaginary (involved in both neurosis and day-to-day living) will be broken up. Such breaking up, however, cannot be definitively achieved. We are finite and always haunted by the anxieties of mortality. Hence, the projections of the Imaginary – no matter how misleading they may ultimately be – at least bring some promise of stability and security. They bear the imprint of resistance to mortality, and thence, empirically speaking, always tend to return. This completes my outline of Lacan’s overall theoretical position. Before tracing the way he deploys it in relation to the Gaze, I shall situate it in a more general intellectual context. Lacan’s approach clearly shares the same worries as Derrida’s in relation to our customary conceptions of knowledge. Both are sceptical, in effect, about ‘logocentrism’. A logocentric viewpoint is one which affirms the possibility of perfect congruence between some symbolic formulation and that relation or item which it seeks to articulate. By extension, such a viewpoint affirms the distinctiveness and integrity of categories of knowledge, and the broader frameworks in which they are employed. Where Lacan goes beyond, Derrida is in his, as it were, diagnosis of logocentrism. For, as we have seen, it is traced to a stagnation of our symbolic articulation of the world, which arises from a vain attempt to arrest our finitude and the world’s transience. Now whereas Derrida offers what is at best a piecemeal and negative response to logocentrism through the deconstruction of specific texts, Lacan’s approach has a more positive character. Therapy for the deluded subject involves attaining a mode of language use which affirms its own differential and disruptive character. Such a usage embodies – though Lacan does not put it in just this way – an authentic mode of existence, wherein the finitude and transience of all things are acknowledged. One might say, indeed, that Lacan’s critique of conventional notions of subjectivity and knowledge is ultimately an ethical one derived from a dialectical ontology of presence and absence. It has extremely close affinities with some aspects of the existential phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Given this analysis, I shall now consider how Lacan understands the notion of the Gaze, and its relation to pictorial representation.

Part two At the level of the ‘scopic’ (i.e. visual) field, we generally imagine there to be a clear and expressible distinction between the one who sees, and that which is seen. This conventional way of reading visuality is described by Lacan as the ‘space of vision’ or of ‘the eye’. It can be mapped by ‘the function of images’. This function is defined by a point to point correspondence of two unities in space. Any such image in visual space can be projected on to another visual surface by

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Figure 6.1 Hans Holbein, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘The Ambassadors’), 1533; oil on oak: 207 × 209.5 cm. By permission of the National Gallery Picture Library.

means of straight lines. In this scheme of things, the viewing subject functions as a ‘geometrical point’.11

Such geometral relations, however, are not the essence of the visible, in that, according to Lacan, they could be completely comprehended by a blind person. The proper dimension of the visible is to be found in another direction. A clue here is provided by Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (Figure 6.1). This work depicts a pair of dignitaries situated in an environment of objects connoting familiar themes of ‘vanitas’ and the transience of worldly things. Lacan suggests that this work is subversive, in that the geometral dimension enables us to glimpse how the subject . . . is caught, manipulated, captured in the field of vision.12

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This is not just a case of us being addressed by the person in the painting, or by the symbolic associations of the objects. Rather, this painting is special, in that across its foreground, Holbein has painted an anamorphic projection of a skull. In the relation between the skull’s distorted appearance (viewed frontally) and its full appearance (when the painting is viewed at an oblique angle), we find that ‘as subjects, we are literally called into the picture, and represented here as caught’.13 The particular force of this experience arises from the fact that the anamorphic image employed here has phallic overtones, which themselves play on associations between the fear of castration and the mortal condition. Holbein’s work thematizes the fact that our relation to the visible, like our relation to the field of Desire, is characterized by lack. There is, in other words, a split between the geometral space of vision and the visible as it is lived in the atmosphere of lack. It is to pick out the fact that Desire organizes our interaction with the visible work that Lacan employs the notion of ‘the gaze’ (a term which henceforth I will capitalize – though Lacan himself does not follow this practice). At the heart of the Gaze, is our immersion in depth and light. As Lacan puts it That which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depth of my eye, something is painted – something that is not simply a constructed relation . . .14

Indeed, geometral relations elide ‘the depth of field, with all its ambiguity and variability, which is no way mastered by me. It is rather that it grasps me . . .’15 Lacan’s point, of course, is that the viewing subject does not simply passively ‘register’ visible phenomena. He or she is immersed in the visual field, and is, as it were, looked at from all sides by other visible things. One can only see insofar as one is visible to the Other. Again, in Lacan’s words in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture . . . It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects.16

On these terms, then, the Gaze is a complex set of relations. It marks our immersion in the visible and the fact that our own seeing is inseparable from us being (at the same time) present to the vision of the Other. We are ourselves a kind of screen or picture for them. However, this complex reciprocity is misunderstood in our conventional attitude towards vision. There is a split between, on the one hand, the ‘eye’ and its ‘space of vision’, which we imagine to be the basis of our relation to the visible; and on the other hand, that shifting interaction between these factors which is the basis of the Gaze. This interaction is, however, disclosed by the picture. Unfortunately, Lacan’s discussions of this topic are profoundly ambiguous and, in some ways, contradictory. Not least of the problems in the former respect is that of whether Lacan’s account of picturing alludes to the experience of creation or that of reception (or both); I shall try to make sense of his position as follows First, Lacan holds that there is at least one decisive feature about the picture. As he puts it

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there is something whose absence can always be observed in a picture – which is not the case in perception. This is the central field, where the separating power of the eye is exercised to a maximum in vision. In every picture, this central field cannot but be absent, and replaced by a hole – a reflection, in short, of the pupil behind which is situated the gaze. Consequently, and in as much as the picture enters in a relation to desire, the place of a central screen is always marked, which is precisely that by which, in front of the picture, I am elided as subject of the geometral plane.17

For Lacan, then, the picture is a perceptual manifold wherein our cognitive exploration is arrested. It thence lacks that mobile centre which organizes our normal relation to the visual field. The separating power of the eye is fixated. The picture is experienced as lack; the geometral continuity between pictorial space and viewers gives way to one which is formed by a relation to Desire. Lacan develops this through two strategies. The first is cast in terms of the following remarks about the painter. He gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. This is the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting. Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze.18

Lacan’s explanation of this effect is, to say the least, tortuous. His major account of it is found in the following passage. What delights us about the picture occurs At the moment when, by a mere shift of our gaze we are able to realize that the representation does not move with the gaze and that it is merely a trompe l’oeil. For it appears at that moment as something other than it seemed, or rather it now appears to be that something else. The picture does not compete with appearance, . . .19

On these terms, when the picture is recognized and studied as a picture, it no longer functions as a ‘trap’ for the Gaze. Rather, we are made curious about the Gaze behind the painting, that is, that of the artist, or the audience to whom his or her works are addressed. There is, as it were, a specular transmission – a yielding up of the normal reciprocity between our Gaze and the world, in order to inhabit that of the artist. We attempt to see as he or she does. Lacan’s second strategy is even more complex. He suggests that a certain kind of painting – expressionism – involves a satisfaction of the Gaze, rather than a laying down of it. However, at each point where he sets off to elaborate this specific connection, he is soon sidetracked into more general issues. When at last the question of satisfying the Gaze is addressed, he couches it in terms that suggest it to have a general significance beyond the specific link with expressionist art. Again, his claims are extremely elusive, but seem to amount to the following. Lacan identifies the brushstroke as a case of

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‘gesture’ rather than of action. To illustrate the point, he considers the example of a threatening gesture. It is not a blow that is interrupted, it is certainly something that is done in order to be arrested and suspended. I may carry it to its logical conclusion later, but, as a threatening gesture it is inscribed behind. It is this very special temporality, which I have defined by the term arrest and which creates its signification behind it, that makes the distinction between the gesture and the act.20

Hence, for Lacan, while an action points ahead to further actions, the gesture is done in order to be arrested and suspended. Seeing the gesture as complete refers us backwards in time, rather than forward. We see it as the termination of a movement. This, according to Lacan, is the significance of a brushstroke in painting. What is puzzling, however, is what our reading of brushstrokes in these terms actually appeals to. Having floated the idea that it ‘satisfies’ the Gaze, Lacan’s major train of thought moves in a somewhat different direction. Specifically, he links the function of the brushstroke to that ‘laying down’ of the Gaze, noted earlier. Consider the following remarks (addressed to the moment when we see and recognize a gesture) This terminal time of the gaze, which complete the gesture, I place strictly in relation to . . . the evil eye . . . The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. The anti-life, anti-movement function of this terminal point is the fascinum, and is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.21

The last remark here needs careful qualification, for the Gaze’s exercise of power here is fundamentally negative. It is the fact that the eye has been ‘made desperate by the gaze’22 which leads to the phenomenon of arrest and termination described above. The ‘evil eye’ is a fixation and focusing of the eye’s normal cognitive powers of discrimination and separation. This, of course, links up to Lacan’s remarks (noted earlier) concerning the picture’s signification of Lack. Indeed, it goes some way towards explaining much that is puzzling in Lacan’s account of the relation between the picture and the Gaze. I shall now consider this in detail. First, we will recall that Lacan describes the picture as a ‘trap’ for the Gaze. This is because in reading it in terms of the virtual space it opens up for us (i.e. as a trompe l’oeil), we are caught in the work. However, if we see it as say a painting or drawing per se, a different relation is involved. The complex reciprocity of the Gaze and the Other is redirected. The picture now arrests our vision. Our cognitive discriminations are fixated upon a gap or a lack constituted by the fact that the space opened up for us by the picture is a static one. It does not move with our vision. There is a suggestion of the Gaze behind the work: of the fact that the picture has been brought forth by the Desire of an Other. We are invited, through the work, to see as the artist did.

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However, this invites several questions. The first is that of whether the laying down of our Gaze in relation to the picture is a case of Imaginary projection or whether it is something deeper. The second is that under what conditions we see the picture as a picture rather than becoming trapped within its trompe l’oeil virtual space. Now the answer to the first question is a function of Lacan’s answer to the second, and this answer consists in his ideas about gesture. For the picture is made. This means that to see it as a picture means to see it as an embodiment of gesture. There may be some styles (e.g. expressionist or impressionist works) where this is more manifest than others, but an origin in gesture is part of the very definition of what a picture is. Indeed, as Lacan observes so true is it that the gesture is always present that there can be no doubt that the picture appears to us as a battle scene, that is to say, as something theatrical, necessarily created for the gesture. And again, it is this insertion in the gesture that means that one cannot turn it upside down – whether or not it is figurative.23

As we saw earlier, for Lacan, the gesture in its dramatic character – as a showing for a viewer – refers backwards rather than forwards. This pertains, as the above comment suggests, not only to the ‘made’ character of the picture but also to its space of contents. It is a kind of totalized bringing forth or disclosure. This (in addition to the work’s virtual discontinuity with immediately perceptual space) serves to arrest and fixate the Gaze’s normal fluidity of discrimination. Now, we will also recall that in the scopic field, there is a split between the eye and the Gaze. We desire to see ourselves from where the Other sees us and vice versa, but these respective viewpoints and the existential space between them are determined by Desire. Hence, we cannot see in such terms except through Imaginary projection. However, in the case of the picture, matters are very different. For the picture shows the termination of an Other’s gesture. It refers, by its very nature, to that which has passed. We cannot hope to fully occupy the Other’s position, for in the picture, the Other is present only as an absence. The Other solicits our attention and invites us to share – but on the basis of acknowledged lack. The message is, as it were, ‘See with me, but do not imagine that this will be an achievement of real substantial identity between the two of us.’ The difference between this and identifying in purely Imaginary terms again rests on the notion of gesture as exemplified in the brushstroke. As Lacan puts it That which in the identificatory dialectic of the signifier and the spoken will be projected forward as haste, is here, on the contrary, the end that which at the outset of any new intelligence, will be called the moment of seeing.24

Hence, in seeing the gesture/brushstroke, we are not carried forward in some false promise of absolute identity with the Other (as is the case with our normal linguistic exchange). Rather, it is made manifest that we are being offered a much more restricted ‘seeing-with’ based on what the Other has already done. What is at work in the viewer’s

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relation to the picture is a reversal and restriction of the usual framework of interchange. Again, in Lacan’s words, Modifying the formula I have of desire as unconscious – man’s desire is the desire of the Other – I would say that it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing . . .25

In the final parts of this discussion, I will return to these claims. Before that, however, Lacan’s overall position and his account of the Gaze must be subjected to close critical scrutiny.

Part three A first point to note is that Lacan himself always emphasizes that he is first and foremost a psychoanalyst. Indeed, the theme of ‘back to Freud’ is a leitmotif throughout this work. There is, however, also a substantial element of philosophical theory present in Lacan, and a useful strategy for critical discussion is to consider the major tension between the psychoanalysis and the philosophy. One of Lacan’s most striking problems is his use of Freud’s account of the Oedipal drama in order to explain the subject’s acquisition of language. What makes this so problematic is that it attributes recognitional capacities (e.g. deciphering the meaning of castration as both biological and social phenomenon) which are the prerogative only of advanced language users. Lacan’s account, in other words, systematically presupposes the very competence which it is meant to be explaining. This is not just a contradiction, it is also characteristic of Lacan’s curious indifference to the constitutive role of embodiment in all aspects of self-consciousness. It is surely (at least in part) through the tension and fulfilment arising from negotiating access to objects at varying levels of proximity to the body that the child maps out its basic relationship with the world. For example, through exploring such relations as foreground/background and proximity/distance, the child is able to form a sense of what presence and absence amount to. Likewise, through its physical manipulation of things – its economy of success and failure in controlling presence and absence – the child learns proto-cognitive patterns of unity, completeness and fragmentation. At the heart of all these reciprocal interactions are networks of need, satisfaction and recognition which are far more primal than those imagined by Lacan in his account of Oedipal trauma. Before all else, the satisfaction of hunger and thirst and the need for physical security drive the child towards the coordination of its sensory-motor capacities, and as a function and enhancement of this, the acquisition of language. Complex strategies of recognition focusing on genitalia awareness, and the need for love, amplify out from this ground – at various stages in childhood, on the basis of individual experience and circumstances. Lacan’s claims, therefore, are not only logically flawed, they are also, phenomenologically speaking, a misrepresentation of the ontogenesis of the subject.

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These points – and some other besides – also vitiate his account of the mirror-stage. For the image in the mirror, and the child’s observation of other children amount to nothing at all, unless the child has already formulated a basic sense of self (as a result of the interactions of body and world described above). Powers of mimicry and identification are a gradual accumulation, rather than a function of some privileged single magical encounter. Such encounters may enhance the accumulation, but they cannot originate it. Further problems accrue to Lacan’s analysis of the specular ego itself. We will recall that it arises from the fact that the subject ‘anticipates’ ‘the maturation of this power’. Such premature cognition of the unity of the body according to Lacan involves a reification of both self and the perceptual field of fluid ‘Gestalten’. The problem is, however, that Lacan does not clarify the scope and significance of the reification. As I read him, his point is that the specular ego is a distortion which is necessary for the formation of subjectivity, but which actually conceals the true ‘ex-centric’ structure of the subject. The problem with this, however, is that by treating the specular ego as reified, Lacan misunderstands the structure of both elements. For in order to have any consciousness of self whatsoever, it is presupposed that the subject experiences itself as a unity. This involves (at least) the capacity to ascribe experiences to oneself on the basis of an ordered reciprocity between our present embodied state and both our recollections of its past and our anticipations of its future. The capacity for self-ascription of experiences, in other words, is centred by our projection of in the broadest sense, body-image. We need, therefore, something like Lacan’s specular ego in order to have any conception of self whatsoever. But where does this leave the supposedly true ‘ex-centric’ self? The answer is – in its true guise – as a secondary philosophical construction. The structures of differentiality, which Lacan identifies as the unconscious, are sets of logical relations which condition the subject’s thought and activity. They are what the specular ego amounts to if viewed in abstraction on the philosophical dissecting table. The self cannot, however, be reconstructed in some ‘ex-centric’ mode on the basis of a re-assemblage of these abstract conditions. Rather, in actual concrete existence, such conditions function within a unified field which is centred on the body in ways just noted. One could summarize these points by saying that only a self that is centred can conjecture the possibility of one that is ex-centric. And this latter possibility is itself only conjectural. Similar considerations apply in relation to Lacan’s analysis of the ‘paranoiac’ structure of knowledge as a ‘stagnation’ of becoming. This stagnation plays a necessary role in enabling us to control and manipulate the environment, but for Lacan, it is clearly a distortion and reification which needs to be loosened up by a therapeutic use of language. Again, however, one can retort that any self-consciousness – including therapeutic uses of language – presupposes a stable experiential schema of categories which reflect and articulate the unity of the body itself. By treating the specular ego and structures of knowledge as intrinsically reified, Lacan misrepresents their positive and prior role in the constitution of subjectivity. In so doing, he also misrepresents the phenomenon of reification itself. For example, to see centredness of self and the stability of categorial framework as constants in the

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structure of self-consciousness is not to see them as immutable in an absolute sense. They are functional unities. The specific forms which they take vary under specific historical conditions. It may be, for example, that in one culture, unity of self is attributed to the soul, or in another, it is seen in purely – even cruelly – materialist terms. Now to affirm the unity of the self in terms of some underlying force or substance is to reify that unity. Likewise if the self is regarded as no more than a mere function of matter. These different modes of reification, of course, can exist in the same culture or even in the same persons. The nineteenth-century factory owner, for example, might well ‘believe’ in the soul while at the same time regarding his workers as little more than mechanisms in the productive process. What this means is that reification is not intrinsic to self-consciousness, rather it is a function of how the necessary unity of consciousness is understood and explained under different historical and social conditions. Contra Lacan, reification is what sometimes happens to the self and knowledge but it is not inherent to them. Its occurrence and density of distribution is a matter for complex analysis in an extremely broad social context, rather than in the private space of Lacan’s problematic theory of ontogenesis. The major problem with Lacan, then (over and above his logical difficulties), is that psychoanalysis leads him into metaphysics of a problematic kind. His decentring of the self and knowledge are not only secondary philosophical constructions, but are ones which elevate reification into an absolute feature of the human condition. Instead of being viewed ontologically as a phenomenon simply emergent from the Real, self-consciousness is viewed as a distortion of the Real and its ultimate flow of Becoming. At the heart of Lacan’s own distortion, here is the fact that he idealizes the body in its sexual being and dismisses its more global functions in relation to the growth of cognition. This also leads him (like Barthes and Derrida) to idealize subjectivity itself. Ultimately, his theory tells us only how a mind contingently attached to a body might ‘construct’ its world. He offers us a picture of the Cartesian subject joined to the body – albeit by the phallus (or lack of it) rather than the pineal gland. Given these extreme difficulties, the question arises as to whether anything can be salvaged. In fact, a great deal can. I shall now address this possibility in the final two stages of my discussion.

Part four The task of salvage work hinges on what is left if we strip away the fantasies of psychoanalysis from Lacan’s work.26 To do this, we will first recall that correspondence of signifier to signified is not a direct one but is a function, rather, of this relation situated in the context of language as a whole. Now, like Derrida, Lacan overdramatizes the significance of this structure. In particular, he neglects the way in which embodiment serves to stabilize meaning and presence. However, this being said, Lacan at least employs the insight concerning language in the right context by tying it to contingency and excess. For while meaning is stabilized

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and centred by reference to the body, it cannot be stabilized in any absolute sense. No matter how fully we grasp a meaning in language or perception, there are other ways it might have been ‘put’ or articulated and there is always more to what we say and perceive than can be consciously grasped at the moment of utterance or articulation. Our cognitive relation to the words is determined by lack and incompleteness. Similar considerations hold vis-à-vis the field of volitional activity. We never simply have desires. Even if Lacan’s technical sense of Desire falls along with his psychoanalytic fantasies, he is right about the basic trajectory of human volition. The particular desire only emerges insofar as it is inscribed within a network of other desires and values of which the subject is not immediately aware. Indeed, since this network is organized and directed by the subject’s initiation into language – an order of meanings which precedes the subject’s particular existence – the individual self-consciousness in its very fabric internalizes this broader social context. Even our most private thoughts and desires embody a position within this wider dimension. It constitutes an Other against whom and with whom we define and refine our sense of self. Since, however, this Other is an infinitely vast network of persons, relations and values, we cannot consciously grasp it in its full depth. The very conditions which give our desire meaning always, to some degree, exceed our control. This means that the subject’s volitional activity is (again) determined by lack and incompleteness. For every particular desire that is realized, a new set of desires are brought into being through that very realization’s broader effects within the volitional field. It is in an attempted overcoming of this lack that the subject adopts strategies which, in effect, reflect the specular ego. Now, as we have seen, something akin to the specular ego is a positive and necessary condition of subjectivity. However, the strategy of objectification which it hinges on, can, under specific sets of socio-historical conditions, be taken in the direction of reification. On these terms, processes and persons are rendered thing-like either through us understanding their unity as a function of something hidden or purely mechanistic, or through us using them, in effect, as a screen upon which we project our own unrecognized desires or fantasies of union. Broadly speaking, the larger and more technologically based a society becomes, the more susceptible it will become to both dimensions of reification. Reworked in these terms, Lacan’s theory appears as a modest and sound variant of existential phenomenology, with some affinities to the ideas of Merleau-Ponty – described, at length, in the previous chapter. It is a position which affirms the function of contingency and excess in the embodied subject’s relation to the world. At the heart of this is Lacan’s view of meaning and desire as generated in a complex dialectic of presence and absence – terms which are mutually dependent in the context of the broader correlation of body and world. Given this rethinking of Lacan, I shall now trace its ramification in relation to his complex claims concerning the Gaze and the picture. First, we will recall that Lacan posits two different dimensions in the scopic field. The first is the geometral space of the ‘eye’. Here the subject’s relation to the field is that of a geometral point; the relation between objects at this level can be mapped out by a point-to-point correspondence between them.

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The other (and more authentically visual) dimension is that of the Gaze. The space of the Gaze is that of the subject’s total immersion in the visual field. It consists of a reciprocity between the one who sees and that which is seen, that is, one only sees insofar as one can in principle be seen by an Other. This position works from a suspicion concerning geometric relations that parallels Merleau-Ponty’s scepticism concerning classical perspective. However, Lacan’s account of the picture’s relation to the Gaze then takes a different direction from Merleau-Ponty, and unveils the complex ontological reciprocity wherein the Being of the individual subject is disclosed to other such subjects. This reciprocity, however, is not an absolute congruence. There is an incommensurability between the figures in the relation, because the existential position from which one sees is determined by the particular patterns of one’s own Desire. One cannot simply swap places with the Other and see exactly as they do. The relation between geometral space and that of the Gaze embodies a split or lack. All our seeing is convulsed by Desire; that is to say, it is not a passive registering of data, but rather a complex network of interpretations and exchanges determined by our own patterns of experience and bodily positioning. However, at the same time, in order to both maximize our control of the visual field and the obtaining of recognition from others, we operate in the dimension of the geometral. That is to say, we project an Imaginary level of clear definition and completeness on to the Other (in the sense of both persons and objects), which, as it were, remakes them in the image of one’s own Desire. The total visual field, therefore, is a dialectic organized around the split between the Gaze convulsed by Desire, and the Imaginary’s attempts to control the Gaze. Now the reworking of Lacan’s theory undertaken earlier can easily be applied to this analysis of the visual field. His position is basically sound, as long as we make two qualifications. The first is that the desire which determines the Gaze should not be understood in Lacan’s psychoanalytic sense. This sense is, in fact, entirely superfluous. Simply by virtue of being finite (i.e. embodied), our visual field is mediated by relations and interests which are distinctive to our own personal history. The Gaze, in other words, is convulsed by ‘desire’ in a broad existential sense. The second qualification concerns the nature and scope of the geometral. This mode of seeing does have the broad function which Lacan assigns to it, but again, we must bear in mind that its degrees of pervasiveness – in particular, whether it amounts to reification or not – is determined fundamentally by socio-historical circumstances – such as the size of a community, and its degree of technological advancements. Given these points, it is useful to consider the way in which the actual split between the eye and the Gaze is itself historically mediated. As I argued in Part three, the functions which Lacan assigns to the specular ego are (if we rethink this ego as a unity of self determined by the body) positive constants in our experience of Being. That network of lack and differentiality (or ‘ex-centricity’) which Lacan privileges, is in fact, centred and stabilized by reference to the body’s present hold on the world. It is a kind of secondary constant. Now the dialectic between these constants is historically mediated; that is to say, in some sets of circumstances, the centred self will, as it were, exceed itself in

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its projections of unity. But reciprocally, in other contexts, the secondary constant of differentiality will colonize the unity of the self. One of the areas where the historical mediation of this dialectic between constants is most manifest is in the history of the visual arts. For example, in medieval art, the syntactical organization of elements in pictorial representation takes two major forms. The first is that of hierarchy, for example, when one figure is bigger than, or above, another, because of its greater importance in the work’s meaning. The second syntactic structure is that of the episodic narrative, where elements in a single pictorial space present different stages in the unfolding of a particular story of religious/moral message. In both cases, pictorial structure is determined fundamentally by desire – in its broad existential sense. The visual message is presented so as to yield the viewer up to the network of beliefs which sustain it, and to prompt appropriate sorts of volitional activity. However, the growth of naturalistic conventions, such as perspective, marks a decisive break with this. Even in works such as Masaccio’s Tribute Money or Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation, which (ambiguously in the latter case) retain episodic narrative, the field of the-Gaze-convulsed-by-desire is constrained by the demands of the unified self. For, as we saw in the previous chapter, the perspectively orientated work projects a reciprocal relation between a systematic continuum of possible three-dimensional positioning and a specific individual viewpoint.27 This means that the work hinges on the implications of the body’s present orientation. Whatever meanings the view is meant to apprehend are presented in a way which explicitly acknowledges that the field of meaning and desire is reciprocally related to the body’s immediate positioning, and those interests which are entailed by and consequent upon this positioning. Note the massive complexity of this example. The self of medieval cultures is primarily that of the disembodied ‘immortal’ soul. It is profoundly reified. However, the artifacts which reflect this ‘truth’ are ones whose structures are determined primarily by desire. Paradoxically, in terms of the cultural field of beliefs and values, the pristine space of the contemplative eye is paramount, but in terms of the field of vision, it is the Gaze which preponderates. With the advent of perspective, this relation is modified. Even though Renaissance societies retain a Christian orientation towards the soul, the importance and interest of the body as – at least – a focus of the self now receives its due in pictorial terms. One might see this as a case of specular ego functioning in its most positive sense. Now the foregoing remarks are only the barest outline of how our revised understanding of Lacan’s account of the split between the eye and the Gaze is exemplified in art history. One could follow the split in more particular terms in relation to the oeuvre of specific artists or the work of specific movements or tendencies. Again, we might be able to see it as embodied in other epochal breaks. It could be argued, for example, that the eventual diminution and abandonment of perspective in Modernist works represent a very radical shift towards a Gaze-oriented art. It must be emphasized, however, that analyses on these lines do not point in any clear evolutionary direction. They may help us understand major contours in art history but their analysis is

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complex vis-à-vis specific artists, tendencies and societies; they also demand that we take account of other constants in experience, arising from embodiment. The nature of some of these constants will become manifest if we now return to the explicit links which Lacan himself makes between the Gaze and the picture.

Part five As we will recall, Lacan ties the Gaze to the picture on the basis of one major claim; a picture arrests our normal perceptual orientation to the world at the moment when we see it as a picture, rather than in terms of the virtual space which it projects for us. Seeing the work as a picture leads in two directions, which, according to Lacan, are different (but which he does not, in fact, adequately separate). The first of these involves an invitation to ‘lay down’ our Gaze. Here, we become fascinated by the artist’s own vision – his or her distinctive way of seeing and interpreting the world. The second direction involves a ‘satisfaction’ of the Gaze. We read the picture in terms of the ‘evil eye’. What engages us is the fact that, viewed as a product of gesture, the picture is an arresting and immobilization of life. In our usual intercourse with the Other, desire is in motion and has a future orientation. In the picture, however, the Other’s desire is brought to completion through its ritual termination in the embodiment of gesture. Now – bearing in mind the general qualifications I have made to his approach – Lacan’s insights are basically sound, and indeed profoundly illuminating. To see why this is so, however, we must interpret the two directions which Lacan outlines, as being, in effect, different logical aspects of the same experience. His analysis might then be recast and developed as follows. In most experiences of the picture, we simply recognize it in terms of the kind of thing it is depicting. We engage with it, in other words, at the level of the virtual space which it is projecting. If we engage with it explicitly as a picture, our relation to it is correspondingly more complex. For our reading of pictorial space is mediated by knowledge that this space is a product of human gesture. It was brought into being and completed by another of our kind. This means that the work, in essence, has the character of showing. To show does not mean ‘to instruct’ – even if the work has, in fact, a didactic dimension. Rather, the work, or the validity of what the work shows, is a function of how it shows it. We have, in imaginative terms, to put ourselves into this way of seeing. Of course, in terms of Lacan’s broader theory, a complete identification with the Other is not possible. Such identifications are projection of the Imaginary, wherein the Other’s identity is reified and remade in the image of our own desires. Again, Lacan’s position is problematic, since (as I have argued previously) the capacity to identify with other human beings is, in fact, a necessary condition of any self-consciousness whatsoever. It is not a distortion in itself. However, it can assume this character, given the appropriate personal and social circumstances. Indeed, there is no way in which such identification can ever be achieved in any complete or absolute sense.

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This is shown quite strikingly in the concrete existential contexts where we seek to empathize with others. Suppose, for example, that we sympathetically identify with the suffering of a loved one. Here there is a social pressure to identify, and a frustration at the fact that one cannot fully achieve it. In this, and all normal existential contexts, the capacity to empathize is restricted by the social and personal factors which surround its exercise. One is not one’s own master in the situation, unless, of course, one simply uses the Other as a screen on to which one’s own desires are projected. It is these background considerations, vis-à-vis identification, which give Lacan’s approach to the picture its special force. For the picture does not simply tell us how someone interprets the world, rather it shows it at a level which engages out sensory/ imaginative and rational capacities in an inseparable interplay. We are invited to inhabit the Other. However, as I argued in Chapter 1, there are crucial differences between this and the normal existential context. For, through its origin in gesture, the picture is in its very essence a showing – an invitation to see as the Other has seen. The past tense here is decisive. For the Other who created the picture is not literally attached to it. He or she is not present in a way that would incur those pressures and frustrations which surround the normal exercise of empathy. Indeed, as Lacan so rightly emphasizes, since the work is a product and embodiment of gesture, it is something what has been brought to completion. It is given to the viewer with a totality and finality that is not possible in those cases where we seek to emphasize directly with a person. What all these points amount to is that in empathizing with an artist’s vision, we see the world from his or her viewpoint but on our own terms too. This is not some distorting colonization of the artist’s desire by the viewer. Rather the artist literally and metaphorically projects a screen upon which the viewer’s fantasies can be directed and clarified by the pictorial structure. The work is a vision of things which, qua product of gesture, has already been accomplished. This means that the viewer elaborates experiential possibilities created by the artist. Through the fulfilment of his or her own desires, the artist enables us to extend and discover our own. In this example of the reciprocity of elements in the Gaze, there is a relative freedom for both parties involved. In his analysis of the laying down and satisfaction of the Gaze through picturing, then, Lacan is, in effect, delineating a distinctive mode of empathy that is the prerogative of visual art. To enjoy it does not logically presuppose knowledge about the artist’s biography or the work’s circumstances of production (though we may know such details, and they may serve to enhance or to inhibit our enjoyment). Rather, our enjoyment of the work focuses on how things are made to appear. Through its continuities and contrasts with our experience of the world, we are able to realize our own fantasies. Lacan’s delineation of this – in effect – aesthetic mode of empathy raises a couple of further points. The first is that his theory points us firmly towards some of the reasons why art has a history. Contextualist approaches tend to reduce art to a ‘field of signification’ and to understand it primarily as a reflection or consolidation of broader social tendencies. The status of the picture as an object – as something which completes a body of gestures – is correspondingly diminished. But this contemporary

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consumerization of the picture and productive process is something to which Lacan himself does not succumb. Not only is he orientated towards the major constants in picturing, such as its embodiment of gestures, he also relates this (allowing for my revisions of his position) to constants in experience itself. One of the most notable of these of course is that split between the ‘eye’ and its geometral orientation and the Gaze-convulsed-by-desire, which I discussed in Part four. However, there are other such constants involved. I have argued, for example, that empathy – in the basic sense of a capacity to identify with one’s fellow human beings – is a necessary condition of self-consciousness. Without it, the subject would not be able to participate in that network of gestural and linguistic exchanges wherein self-consciousness is attained. (Even psychopathic personalities have this capacity albeit in an arrested mode.) Now, as we have seen, Lacan implicitly links the making and reception of pictures to a distinctive aesthetic mode of empathy. This is not merely some luxurious experiential commodity. Pictorial representation is an activity which has evolved in many different cultures over a vast time scale, and often on a wholly indigenous basis. It answers human needs. These needs, of course, are often bound up with purely material and biological necessities converging upon procuring the means of subsistence, shelter and procreation. Picturing plays a role in this insofar as it facilitates communication, and consolidates group identity through its function in such things as religious and social ritual, and magic. However, as I have shown in preceding chapters, there is much more to the significance of pictorial representation that these purely functional uses. For why is it that the picture is regarded as having use-value in such contexts, why is it regarded as having a potency that expression in ordinary terms of language alone does not? The answer is, because the picture has an intrinsic fascination which exceeds its use-value. This fascination is rooted in its capacity to express and develop structures which are necessary to self-consciousness itself. Empathy is one such capacity, insofar as to be conscious of ‘self ’ entails that one recognizes oneself to be a member of a species of other such embodied beings. The evolution of this capacity is a function of complex patterns of social interchange, but within this interchange, certain activities – such as picturing – play a privileged role. With a vividness that eludes the ordinary uses of language, they show the likeness and the differences of the artist’s vision in relation to the viewer’s own conception of self and other. The aesthetic empathy arising from pictorial representation, in other words, is a key element in the formation and sustenance of a necessary sense of shared species-identity. Some of Lacan’s other claims also point in the direction of constants in experience. To develop these in detail would require much more space than is available here. However, I shall at least indicate one broad direction of analysis. Lacan emphasizes the fact that the picture embodies a terminal moment; it is a series of gestures brought to completion. The viewer’s vision is arrested by this. Now, in addition to those factors cited by Lacan, other features can be involved in such a process. Among them one might cite the fact that in the creation of a picture, choices and decisions which are individually contingent are transformed in relation

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to the finished work. Being just this particular picture entails the existence of just this temporal passage and spatial disposition of gestures which went in the process of creation. The ‘arrest’ or freezing of life involved in the pictorial embodiment of gesture, is in fact, an idealized aesthetic response to the supreme constant in human experience, namely finitude. Here finitude is overcome by finite means. The transience and contingency of the creator’s productive moments are aesthetically idealized in a more heightened mode of being. This mode of being, however, is not that of a mere object. In the picture, experience is represented in a way which enables others to learn from it. Through being objectified, it is able to recur indefinitely. (I shall return to this issue in the next chapter.) The possibilities which Lacan points us towards explain why art is entitled to a history over and above inclusion in some reductive global mishmash of the ‘history of representation’ or ‘history of discourse’ type. Whatever other functions it may serve, the artwork engages with relations that are structurally central to self-consciousness and its knowledge of the world. It discloses and transforms fundamental aspects of our visual perception of Being, and the Being of self and others. The growth of the concept ‘art’ and the notion of the ‘aesthetic’ mark a phase when this deeper aspect emerges to the fore and supplants the dimension of functional significance. However, there is a crucial question here (which we have already encountered in a different guise). Lacan does not clarify the issue of whether all pictures function positively in relation to the pleasures of the Gaze. One presumes that there are many – perhaps, indeed, the vast majority – which engage the eye alone. What Lacan lacks here (once more) is a proper sense of historical difference (a difficulty which – as we have seen in previous chapters – also besets Wollheim, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty). For if a work does arrest the Gaze in the fullest way, it is surely because of its historical situatedness in diachronic terms. Only a work that is in some way original (individually or within an original oeuvre) can stand out in a way that demands the viewers’ attention. It must have the character of historical difference – in the sense that I have described in earlier chapters (most extensively, of course, in my critical discussion of Merleau-Ponty). This means that the work is not simply different from other ones, but rather that its difference amounts to a significant refinement or innovation within an artist’s oeuvre and the tradition of the particular medium.28 The most substantial instances of such differences, of course, will be ones which mark some experiential constant being mediated in a new way by means of a radical innovation in terms of the artistic medium. For example (as we saw in the preceeding chapter and in Chapter 1), Cezanne’s work after 1870 centres on a systematic affirmation of the picture-plane which, nevertheless, does not diminish the plastic qualities of the subject matter. The relation between figure and ground (which is an essential structure of self-consciousness and of pictorial space) begins to be rethought in terms which, in effect, embody a kind of merging between the nature of the medium and the three-dimensionality of the represented subject matter. From this shift, a whole host of broader implications flow concerning the relation of both artist and viewer to both pictorial and existential space. From these, in turn, arise questions of both an aesthetic and political nature.29

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My conclusion, then, is as follows. Lacan’s theories cannot be used to justify various radical strains of relativism. Those aspects of his work which point in this direction – such as the ex-centricity of the self and the paranoiac structure of knowledge – turn out in fact to be deeply flawed. Indeed, if his work is rethought so as to bring out those aspects which are philosophically viable, a very different Lacan emerges. This is especially the case in his treatment of the relation between the Gaze and the picture. Here Lacan evokes the reciprocal Being of intersubjectivity at a level of complexity that is unmatched by any other thinker. His other great achievement is to emphasize the decisive significance of the picture as an arrest of gesture. Lacan’s key realization here is that pictorial structure transforms our seeing of Being by bracketing off spatial appearance from the temporal flux. Insights of this sort, mediated by an understanding of effective historical difference, allow us to elucidate key theoretical concepts in art history.

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7

Dimensions in Time: Dufrenne’s Phenomenology of Pictorial Art

Introduction Mikel Dufrenne’s Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is a masterwork of the very highest order, with a scope and richness that has received nothing like the attention which it deserves.1 His theory of pictorial art is especially deep, and extends into areas that the other thinkers considered in this book fall short of. For reasons to be made clear in due course, Dufrenne’s theory of pictorial art centres on painting. In this chapter, his basic theory is expounded at length. It is then critically reviewed, and developed in directions which he himself does not undertake. More specifically, the chapter is organized as follows. In Part one, I consider how Dufrenne emphasizes a specific – originary, as I shall call it – notion of spatio-temporality as central to human experience and to painting. Attention is paid, then, to his distinction between the ‘pictorial object’ and the object that is represented. (This distinction centres on Dufrenne’s important analyses of the temporal structures of painting, most notably the link between our perceptual scanning of a work, and the imaginative evocation of a distinctive ‘duration’ that is internal to the pictorial object.) Part two analyses, in detail, how Dufrenne links the full realization of the pictorial object qua painting to a historical account – using analogies from music (namely harmony, rhythm and melody). The account centres on how the development of oil painting is an ontological realization of that which is essential to painting, as such (namely colour and light), and a release of it from subordination to outline drawing. Part three critically reviews Dufrenne’s main ontological claims in detail. It is argued that his account of the pictorial object’s distinctive temporality is left worryingly vague. To clarify and develop it, his idea of the pictorial artwork as a ‘quasi-subject’ is clarified. Next, Dufrenne’s insightful link between the perception of painting and the process of its artistic creation is given first a substantial clarification through the use of examples, and then, a substantial further development through arguments based on the distinctive, relatively open basis of spatial unity in objects. Some important additional arguments are then made in an area that Dufrenne does not consider directly, namely pictorial art’s relation to the physical character of time. (It

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should be emphasized that all my developments of Dufrenne’s position centre on the importance of some perceptions and experiences being subject to the will in a way that other such cognitive states are not.) In Conclusion, I critically review Dufrenne’s linkage of painting’s ontological realization to a historical narrative based on the importance of oil painting. It is shown that while the narrative has truth and is a real step forward, it conceals more fundamental difficulties that have cropped up throughout this book.

Part one Dufrenne propounds a theory of originary time and space. The theory is presented in a very condensed way, and draws upon Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and, most notably, Kant. The gist of the argument is that time and space are, in primordial terms, mutually inseparable horizons which we inhabit, and from which our more objective understanding of time and space is constructed. As Dufrenne puts it, Any voyage through space – including the drawing of a straight line – leads us back to ourselves and to the act of a successive synthesis through which selfconsciousness is established. Space can be ordered only according to schemata, that is, by acts, such as counting, in which a subject engages itself and mimics, in time, determinations in space.2

Reciprocally, ‘without the spreading out of space as the locus of objects, we would also think nothing, as there would be nothing to think.’3 It may seem odd to think of temporality as constituted by self-consciousness, but Dufrenne’s claim can be justified – if one adds a qualifying argument on his behalf. In this respect, one might emphasize that while things come into being and pass away independently of the will, the only way, nevertheless, in which they can be related to their (no-longer existing) past and (not-yet existing) future states is through the recollective and imaginative activity of a self-conscious being. Such a being, indeed, becomes conscious of itself through its connective cognitive movements in apprehending, and acting upon, spatial items and states of affairs. Time qua process, in other words, is independent of the subject, but temporality in the fullest sense – time in all its dimensions – exists only through the subject’s actions upon spatial things, and through the self-consciousness that both emerges from and determines these actions. All the factors described here exist in a state of reciprocal dependency.4 It is this mutual inseparability of time and space which is at the heart both of Dufrenne’s theory of painting and his emphatic use of musical concepts in its analysis. For, while musical works have a temporal orientation and pictorial art a spatial one, both involve an enhanced reciprocity of time and space. Indeed, while the originary character and mutual dependence of time and space are not usually remarked upon in our day-to-day lives, Dufrenne intends to show that this is basic to the experience of the pictorial work qua aesthetic object.

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Now, for Dufrenne, painting is an art of space insofar as it presents its colours on a surface in a way that allows the aesthetic object to be perceived in a single look. There is a mundane sense to this, in that, according to him, when perceiving what a picture represents, we directly reconstitute the object so represented, and negotiate it, in effect, as we would a real object of that kind.5 In this context, Dufrenne states that the Renaissance striving for perspectival exactness is a kind of pointless worry, in that we can ‘perceive’ the ‘real’ object represented in the picture without difficulty. Indeed, he emphasizes that the real ‘pictorial object’ (as opposed to the one represented) is well advised to turn away from illusionistic content and – as in modernist works – affirm the two-dimensionality of the picture-plane. This attitude, is quite close, of course, to Merleau-Ponty’s worries about perspective,6 but goes rather further than him in its attentiveness to the importance of the two-dimensional picture-plane. Indeed, in relation to the modern return to planar awareness, he affirms further that ‘Such a decision founds the very possibility of painting.’7 These sentiments amount to the recognition that modernist works exemplify the pictorial object, and thence factors bound up with the general essence of painting rather more directly than more traditional idioms. Indeed, Dufrenne emphasizes that since the pictorial object is incarnated in, and inseparable from, design and colour, it is the bearer of meaning and expression that range beyond mere perception of the object represented.8 This distinction between the pictorial object and the represented object is of the most decisive significance for Dufrenne’s approach, in that (as we shall see in due course) it is the former that is the basis of painting qua aesthetic. To understand the pictorial object in greater depth, we must now focus directly on what is most distinctive about Dufrenne’s theory of pictorial art, namely its complex understanding of temporality. There are, as I see it, four aspects to the theory – with different levels of individual importance. They might be summarized as follows: 1. 2.

3. 4.

A time that is involved with the specific subject matter represented (i.e. whether it is presented as moving or as motionless) An ‘objective time’ consisting of both the actual historical period or date in which the painting was created, and the picture’s physical existence as a material object enduring through time The time involved in perceptual/ocular scanning of the painting (where the perceiver is otherwise motionless) A time or ‘duration’ which is internal to the picture qua created. This is the distinctive temporality of pictorial art.

I shall now explain these levels in more detail. The least important – in Dufrenne’s terms – is that which is bound up with the represented subject matter of the picture. Such represented time can be significant in various respects, but does not take us beyond the routine experience of time that would mark ‘real life’ perception of the kind(s) of object(s) represented.

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Level (2) – the picture’s position in ‘objective time’ – is also of secondary importance for Dufrenne. Pictures are created at such and such times and are part of an ongoing historical practice of picture-making. However, according to Dufrenne, this does not belong to the picture’s substance because knowledge of its circumstances of historical creation and transmission is not involved in its aesthetic effects.9 Painting is in objective time also, as an enduring physical thing – subject to decay and other depredations, Dufrenne claims that the work does not bear such time ‘within itself ’. Rather, the time that is internal to it in a philosophically interesting sense is one bound up with ‘the structure of the painting.’10 The entrée to this decisive pictorial temporality is provided by movement – which is introduced through Level (3) of pictorial time – the perceptual or ocular scanning process carried out by an otherwise stationary observer. For Dufrenne, such scanning is a catalyst that activates Level (4), namely a much deeper sense of movement and time involving a ‘duration’ that is internal to the pictorial object. As he puts it, It is by this movement of the look that the object appears . . . [and] is an object for us and penetrates our intimacy.11

Indeed, this ‘burgeoning movement’ within the spectator ‘corresponds’ to the gestural and compositional movement involved in the perceived painting’s creation, and which is embodied, immanently, in its very matter. Such immanent temporality consists of a movement in lines and colours, as if lines and colours were not simply trajectories in an inert space but awakened to a life unique to them. The plastic element vibrates as if it retained something of the movement of the hand which placed it on the canvas.12

On these terms, in other words, there is felicity between the time of perceptual scanning on the stationary observer’s part, and his or her sense of the work having been brought into being through a process of creative compositional activity sustained by gesture. The process is evoked in imaginary terms, through visual scanning of the stationary work. Dufrenne continues, pictorial space becomes temporalized when it is given to us as a structured and orientated space in which certain privileged lines constitute trajectories that, instead of appearing to us as the inert residue of some movement, appear as filled with a movement realized in immobility.13

For this virtual mobility (my term, not Dufrenne’s) to be realized, we need ‘a consciousness which is capable of deciphering the work and thus of breaking the spell which holds movement captive. Such a movement requires that movement be first of all lived by the spectator.’ Indeed, ‘Time must . . . intervene in the subject as well as in the object, and the subject is given priority in this respect . . .’14

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As we have seen, already, Dufrenne introduces the term ‘duration’ to signify this mode of distinctively pictorial internal time (a mode whose Bergsonian linkage I shall consider in Part three of this chapter). In effect, it is a time that we evoke, through imagination, as a sense of the picture’s emergence into being – its realization of a specific dynamic strategy of compositional/gestural creation. In an interesting note, we are told that, ‘Pictorial space is . . . a degraded duration but one which remembers having been duration.’15 It is through those who perceive the work qua pictorial, of course, that this remembrance of duration is realized. The sense of an inner temporal momentum or duration to painting is, according to Dufrenne, manifest especially by unglazed modern works where the brushstrokes appear, and are sometimes an overtly constitutive pictorial element. Indeed, even when such a gestural factor is not manifest explicitly (as in the ‘pure drawing’ of artists such as Matisse and Picasso), Dufrenne holds that such economical work, nevertheless, involves movement – through the deliberate geometrical quality of its straight or sinuous lines. (In this respect, we will recall his earlier emphasis on the schematizing – or temporal successiveness of perception through which we recognize the linearity of the line, and, in so doing, intuit ourselves, also, as the subject performing the operation.) Dufrenne is emphasizing, then, the importance of a sense of movement in the spectator’s perceptual scanning. The physical movement involved is a catalyst and vehicle for more imaginative evocation of the painting’s gestural/compositional passage into being. It is important, here, to observe Dufrenne’s distinction between this imaginative movement and the representation of movement, as such, in a picture. This distinction is one that underlines the very special character of picturing’s internal duration. We are told that The movement of the represented object is an arrested movement. It goes from motion to immobility. The movement of the pictorial object, in contrast, is a congealed movement which tends to unfold. It goes from immobility to motion . . . Such immobility is the end of a movement and retains a certain vibrancy. We could almost say that immobility magnifies this movement by fixing and suspending it . . .16

This manifestation of the creative gesture’s duration in the work is not only a ‘movement-from’ but also a ‘movement-toward’. The work involves, in other words, expression and, thence, meaning directed towards another. Expression, of course, is common to all the arts, but, according to Dufrenne, in temporally realized arts like music, the actual sensuous movement through real time serves to mask this movement-toward meaning. The spatially realized, immobile arts, in contrast, embody this movement in a more open and immediate form. Ironically, they allow the duration internal to the artwork to be experienced without distraction (a point that is, unfortunately, asserted rather than argued by Dufrenne, but which can be justified on grounds that I shall consider in Part three of this chapter).

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We are now in a position to negotiate Dufrenne’s other major transition. It is his confirmation that the pictorial object and its duration are the basic features also of painting as an aesthetic object. In his words, This movement of a work’s elements towards meaning is a movement toward the accomplishment of the aesthetic object. It directs itself not towards a final chord of resolution, as in the temporal arts, but toward the state of accord which composes the work and presides over its unity. The use of the vanishing point is not to order perspective but to draw various lines towards it and visibly certify the unity of the design. In the same way, colours ordered around a few principal hues, as around a keynote, produce a harmonic unity in their assemblage together.17

On these terms, the work is not just a configuration that allows its gestural/compositional emergence to be imaginatively evoked, per se. Such evocation converges upon that which is tacit in every phase of the picture’s creation, namely the striving to exist in a completed spatial configuration. Certain structural features in art – such as the vanishing point in perspective, or dominant colour harmonies – are controlling compositional factors in the realization of this end, thus opening specific avenues of perceptual exploration and a zone of final destination, simultaneously. Dufrenne suggests further that in such duration ‘the truth of the pictorial object is not a relationship of the self to something else, but a relationship of the self with itself. This relationship initiates temporality’.18 I will analyse this cryptic notion in more detail, in Part three. For present purposes, it is enough to say that Dufrenne is clearly linking the aesthetic object, here, to that originary space and time described earlier. In this respect, we will recall that he emphasizes the importance of schemata in the process – such as the line drawn successively, thus temporalizing space and spatializing time, and, through this connective activity, enabling awareness of self and object. Both subject and object of experience are reciprocally dependent on each other’s duration. Now, in the case of mundane objects, there is no question of this shared duration becoming an explicit factor in our engagement with them. However, with aesthetic objects, it is different. In the present case, the spectator’s perceptual and imaginative schematizing of painting’s duration should be understood, itself, as an exemplification of originary space and time in their reciprocal dependence (factors that, again, I will return to in more detail in Part three of this chapter). Having outlined the notion of the pictorial/aesthetic object and its distinctive temporality in the form of duration, Dufrenne offers some further characterizations of how painting embodies this distinctive temporality. These characterizations centre on an analysis of the structure of the pictorial object, and, in particular, the compositional factors that determine the particular character of its unity. It is here that he most extensively deploys musical concepts in relation to pictorial art, linked to an interesting historical narrative.

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Part two Dufrenne starts with the notion of ‘harmony’. For him, this centres on the all-important dimension of colour. The pictorial object contains ‘harmonic schemata’ ‘which seem to preside over its composition and affect the choice of colours, their role, and their treatment.’19 By this, I take him to mean that each artist has a distinctive way of combining colours, and that colours themselves modify one another on the basis of different principles of combination and juxtaposition (such as the ‘laws’ of colour harmony, and the significance of primary colours). Some of the details here are filled in as follows: A painter decides on the relative importance of his colours by choosing his scale and then decides on the manner of treating them, either by modelling them, that is, by multiplying their various hues and tints from warm to cool. Colours are modulated for the purpose either of animating various areas of the canvas and articulating the design by means of colour or of obtaining the greatest intensity of colour.20

All this has a single aim, namely – a ‘unity in diversity’ that is expressed through light. Light is a kind of melodic reality that transcends harmonic organization, even though it is emergent from it.21 Light, in other words, should be regarded as emergent from colour harmony and as something created by the painting itself, over and above its representation of any actual external light source. Indeed, light is more than just the unity which results from colour harmony; it is the possibility of a more overall unity that calls upon the artist to realize it through such harmonies. As Dufrenne puts it, eloquently, ‘It is the sensuous a priori of the work by which the work can become a theatre of movement.’22 The emergence of this sensuous a priori of light appears most manifestly when painting is not tied to its imitative function, and when colour is not subordinated to drawing. It is under such circumstances that light appears as emergent and inseparable from, colour. Now, in emphasizing painting’s foundation in harmonies of colour and the emergence of light, Dufrenne might be taken as making a conceptual point about what is necessary to painting qua painting. But wisely, he emphasizes at even greater length how this conceptual basis of painting as a medium requires considerable historical development in order to exist in its fully realized form. It comes to exist only as the outcome of a specific cultural struggle.23 For Dufrenne, this centres on a contest between outline drawing and colour, and ends in the emancipation of colour and light. He asserts that the traditional function of drawing imposes a sense of ever more exact representation as the ‘entire vocation’ of art, and that ‘This prejudice controlled painting in the West for a long time.’24 On these terms, colour was tolerated, basically, as a means of filling in outlines in a way that suppressed painting’s own fundamental orientation towards colour, and its physical

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basis in the brushstroke. Through this, painting is made subordinate to the directing influence of ‘ordinary perception’ where cognition merely recognizes the thing perceived, without dwelling on the conditions of its colouring, and the like. Indeed, colour perception for its own sake demands both concentration and analysis, because we normally only perceive colours in the context of those phenomenal wholes of which they are the aspects. Like Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne regards Cezanne as the decisive figure in the liberation of colour.25 But his account differs from Merleau-Ponty’s in that he offers a relatively detailed – if extremely speculative – historical narrative leading to Cezanne. In a nutshell, the narrative holds that ‘for colour to be constituted, drawn form must be disposed of in favour of the form of colour. An object must be created which will demand perception rather than interpretation . . .’26 This (supposed) perceptually orientated affirmation of colour centres on a technical revolution, namely the invention of oil painting. A medium such as fresco appears more finished than oil painting because its water base evaporates without residue, and has to be done relatively quickly. But this virtue of water-based paints is taken by Dufrenne to have corresponding defects. For example, he takes it to involve no ‘menacing pitfalls’ that would challenge the artist to more sustained and detailed work. Indeed, this is even more the case insofar as erasures and retouchings are not possible in fresco.27 For Dufrenne, fresco also involves a limited range of colours and, through emphasizing the wall on which it is painted, is subservient to architecture. It amounts to little more than bas-relief. In contrast to this, Oil confers a substantial and manipulable reality on colour. The painter can dig into his materials . . . Colour is no longer an ephemeral and weightless matter, a sort of sensuous quality which the eye barely grasps. It is now embodied in a thick and unctuous matter to which our hands can relate as easily as our eyes.28

As well as the rise of oil painting, the emancipation of colour requires, according to Dufrenne, a significant theoretical intervention in the form of theories explaining the systematic basis of colour combinations, harmonies and contrasts. This is of particular importance in the modern period, but should not be understood as merely putting a theoretical ‘programme’ into operation. Rather, Dufrenne holds that reflection on colour arises from a pre-reflective engagement with it, and – all importantly – is then returned to the pre-reflective level, as an aspect of the artist’s own personal artistic habits and routines.29 We have seen, then, that Dufrenne argues that the emergence of colour – through oil painting – is the great, historically sustained, progression that emancipates painting from drawing, and allows an idiom of perceiving it that is authentically perceptual, rather than based on ‘interpretation’. From all this, it is clear that Dufrenne assigns a much more central role to the diachronic history of painting as medium than does Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger. The status of this historical narrative is somewhat vague, and some of Dufrenne’s points are, at the very least, extremely contentious (as we shall see in the Conclusion to this chapter).

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However, we must recall that he is talking about painting and not just pictures. And while drawing may be the factor common to all pictures, it would seem that if we want to understand what is distinctive about painting as a medium, then we will have to pay special attention to colour. The question is, is he right about the exact character of its necessary role? In particular, is he right to base his narrative on colour’s overcoming of drawing? Fortunately, Dufrenne goes on to explore these difficult questions in further detail. He does so through the concept of ‘rhythm’. If harmony is the principle of movement in painting, then, Dufrenne holds, ‘Such movement is ordered by rhythm and thus manifests a duration which is born of the animation of space.’30

Such harmonic colour choices and forms are brought into a rhythmic compositional unity. As Dufrenne goes on to say, rhythm belongs to drawing in the same way that harmony belongs to colour. Colour in itself, as harmony strives to grasp its essence and to give it form, cannot constitute a pictorial object. Drawing gives form. Only drawing gives consistency to an object, only drawing establishes discernable and measureable relationships in space where colours can be measured, contrasted, and grounded, and only drawing distributes these relationships and proportions into an order which requires movement. Thus drawing is irreplaceable.’31

These are very important points. For, as we have seen, Dufrenne’s historical narrative tends – in its initial aspect – to present drawing as a pictorial factor which has to be overcome in order for colour, and thence light, to be liberated. However, we now see that it is only outline drawing’s dominance of colour which has to be challenged. Once that dominance has been overcome, a more general sense of drawing now takes its place as one decisive aspect of the pictorial object, rather than its main focus. Specifically, it is recognized as the basis of pictorial rhythm. Dufrenne seems to understand ‘drawing’ in this context as the facility for composing and arranging in virtual space as such, rather than in terms of those particular diagrams and sketches which realize this strategy (or ‘plan’ as he rather unhelpfully terms it). Understood in these terms, the function of drawing in the larger compositional sense is integrated as an aspect of colour. Drawing becomes an art as soon as the sign is embodied in it through colour, that is, as soon as the pencil line, even without the aid of shadows which strengthen it, becomes black in colour and animates the paper, which then becomes white in contrast. Drawing then culminates in painting, where form becomes colour without ceasing to be form.32

We have, in other words, to understand drawing as an idiom that operates with colour – even if only black – in its delineation of contours. Seen in this way, we read the lines not in terms of the mere thing they delineate, but as pictorial realizations with an interest

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in their own right. It might seem that this strategy merely reverses the hegemony of drawing over colour. However, Dufrenne’s point is that only through seeing drawing as colour can we recognize its distinctive contribution to the structural conditions of pictoriality. As he puts it, ‘Drawing is the structure of the pictorial object, and as such it can never be suppressed by colour.33 Just as Dufrenne talks of harmonic schemata, so does he talk also of rhythmic ones. The uncovering of such schemata is evidence that a work has come about as a result of making (rather than, say, the accidental marking of a plane surface). There are two types of schemata – ‘formal’ and ‘typal’. The former consists of drawing in the compositional/constructive sense that we have just considered. Such schemata serve to animate ‘plastic form’. Typal schemata are more literally ‘pictorial form’ – and are involved closely with painterly style. (Indeed, in a footnote he links this distinction to that made by Wolffin between linear and painterly, albeit without thinking through the wider ramifications of Wolfflin’s point).34 We are then told that ‘Formal schemata, furthermore, establish the general architecture of the work, the orientation of its lines of force, and the distribution and balancing of its masses.’ Indeed, ‘A law for the generation of form can be found in every work of art, more or less, deeply dissimulated but always as an active ingredient.35

The law, in question, centres on rhythmic schemata – specifically as a kind of principle of repetition, through which a dominant spatial structure or motif is reiterated again and again, in modified form and/or proportions through the subdivisions of the work. By this means, form is given to movement, and vice versa.36 It is not immediately apparent how this should be understood phenomenologically. Many paintings involve elements of repetition, but whether this is as central as Dufrenne asserts is highly contentious. However, he extends his points further by introducing the notion of ‘melody’ – which – a little further on is given a section of text to itself. Logical rhythm measures the growth of the aesthetic object and manifests the way it has been composed, not its total effect. The melodic elements which result from the subject of the work will eventually mask the rigor of formal determination and restore the fantasy and exuberance of life.37

It is clear from this that rhythm concerns structural formal organization of the painting, and that melody is the way in which these features are directed, and achieve accord and coherence in the unity of a particular painterly style. Of clear importance in enabling melody (without being identical to it) are the typal schemata. They guide the organization of the ‘properly pictorial’ elements. More specifically, These elements are to be classified according to either the intensity or the hue of their tonalities. The schema of relief or outline distributes light and dark and arranges their interaction so that the light planes will propel the dark planes toward

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the spectator and the dark planes will drive away the light planes indefinitely until another dark plane is pushed forward.38

Overall, then, the rhythmic schema regulates the unfolding of pictorial elements. It creates a sense of depth through its animation of these elements, and allows a transition from the represented object to the pictorial object. In these presentations, the spectator plays an essential role, but his or her look is strictly directed by the painting’s rhythmic schemata. In Dufrenne’s words, the spectator ‘connives with the picture. In one and the same movement, the thing gives itself to him, and he opens himself up to it.’39 The final aspect of Dufrenne’s theory of pictorial art has already been introduced in the course of explaining rhythmic schemata. It is that of melody. In painting, the meaning of melody is the total effect produced by the aesthetic object – an effect which presents only to perception and which cannot be sufficiently accounted for in analytic terms.40 There are no schemata for melody, because whereas pictorial harmony and rhythm are structural factors, melody is emergent from them as the work’s distinctive overall accord, or individually unified character. It is, in essence, what Dufrenne has earlier called ‘expression’. Melody in music is grasped more easily than in painting because it is constituted by themes with temporally successive structure. In painting, however, the unity of the work is emergent to perception, in more immediate terms (an issue that I will explore further in Part three). It is this overall unity that is the melody of the pictorial object qua aesthetic. Overall, then, Dufrenne’s theory of painting is one that emphasizes the reciprocity of spatial and temporal factors in the pictorial object. This object’s distinctive duration ‘resides in the internal movement by which the work unifies itself in order to appear and deliver its song’.41 Such time is not a dimension of the objective world but rather a temporal or world ‘atmosphere’ within the work itself. This involves a relation of ‘the self with itself ’ which constitutes the pictorial aesthetic object as a ‘quasi-subject’.42

Part three It is now time to review Dufrenne’s theory of painting. The most immediately striking point is the very fact that, in contrast to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, the aesthetic as a concept is given more emphasis. Dufrenne also separates himself from these thinkers through his emphasis on two key factors – first, a general ontology of the pictorial object that constellates around the notion of duration, and second, the full embodiment of this ontology through the historical emancipation of colour and light from drawing. Painting’s aesthetic status is a function of the relation between these two dimensions. I shall review them in turn. First, as we have seen, for Dufrenne, we engage with painting in the deepest sense when our perceptual scanning of the immobile finished object is continued, imaginatively, through evoking the work’s gestural and compositional origins and progression towards its final state. Whereas the representation of some object or event in time renders its subject immobile, our perception of the pictorial object does the opposite. Now, while this is a perfectly intelligible contrast, everything hangs on the

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character of the imaginative evocation involved here, and its relation to the finished immobile work. Clearly, there is a temporal process involved, but how should it be understood? It is significant that Dufrenne, himself, gives great emphasis to the painting’s status as a ‘quasi-subject’. As noted earlier, this is taken to involve a relation of ‘the self with itself ’. He does not clarify whether the self in question, here, is that of the artist, or the observer, or a more general sense. However, it can reasonably be interpreted as the general sense – by virtue of the link between the painting and that originary notion of space and time which I discussed at the start of this chapter. Originary space and time are founded on the fact that it is only in relation to the presence of self-conscious embodied subjects that things might be said to have a past or future that, in some sense, exists in the present. Time exists beyond the subject, but it is only through the subject’s activity that time is connected, its past retained and future anticipated. Now, to evoke the pictorial object imaginatively as the culmination of creative trajectories of gesture and composition is to experience it as a kind of thematization of originary time. Unfortunately, while this is clearly Dufrenne’s position, he does not offer any grounds as to why we should regard this insight as compelling. An argument can be constructed on Dufrenne’s behalf here, as follows. Trajectories of emergence through gestural and compositional activity – and, thence, reference to a specific temporally connected creative past – are implicit in the very recognition that something is a painting. And in any imaginative engagement with the work (be it the artist’s or the observer’s), such a past is evoked. The reason for this is that while objects, as such, can only be experienced as temporal in the fullest sense through the subject’s connective cognitive activity, most such objects do not make us in any sense aware of this activity. It is something that simply happens in the course of our perception of things, and, as such, is so familiar as to generally pass unrecognized in explicit terms. Our imaginative evocation of painting’s duration, in contrast is subject to the will. As a physical object, we are only aware of it as an object insofar as we, at least tacitly, refer it to its past physical states and anticipate the possibility of its future ones. However, paintings are things whose recognition as paintings is a recognition that these things have been created through sustained gesture and composition, directed towards a future of active engagement with spectators. We may not bother to take account of this. Our perception may be simply of the painting as a physical object. But if the painting has aesthetic significance, it invites us to evoke its temporal dimension in imaginative terms. Such evocation is something we can choose to do, or not. There is an extra dimension of invited meaning wherein, if we choose to evoke it, our normal subjective connections of time are experienced in a free way – rather than as something which we have to go through whether we like it or not. In our aesthetic perception of the picture, then, there is a free harmony between the explorative temporal/perceptual possibilities that the pictorial object offers us, and that connective relation to time that is implicated in the unity of our own self-consciousness (and, of course, in the unity of self-consciousness, per se). On these terms, the picture

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is a ‘quasi-subject’ in the way that it correlates the creative activity of the artist, and an enhanced experience of his or her and the spectator’s experience of originary time. Now, the exact focus of this correlation is, of course, the pictorial object’s duration. In my exposition of Dufrenne’s position, I have presented his own words as far as possible, and have interpreted them as holding that duration is experienced through the imaginative evocation of the picture’s emergence into being through gestural/ compositional activity. Again, however, Dufrenne does not fill in any further details of this. Like other phenomenologists, he tends to fall back on a strategy of insistent repetition. The question arises, then, as to the more specific terms in which we should understand the imaginative evocation of pictorial duration. One superficially relevant interpretation must be ruled out immediately. The Croce–Collingwood theory of art famously identifies the artwork with our imaginative recreation of the artist’s own creative expressive states.43 But this is not at all what Dufrenne’s account of painting centres on. For him, we do not recreate the artist’s subjective states but rather evoke, imaginatively, those avenues of composition and correlated gestures that culminate in the finished painting. Another superficially viable interpretation of this should be dismissed, likewise. Dufrenne is not, I think, holding that we literally imagine brushstrokes accumulating on the canvas one by one, or even in sequences or groups. Such imaginative activity could never hope to recreate the actual passage of gesture that is issued in a specific painting, and even if we – as it were – concoct a totally imagined synthesis of a work’s imagined passage into being, this will not centre on some part-extra-partes accumulation of brushstrokes (though such imagining may, of course, play an incidental role, or roles.) It is clear that Dufrenne wants to ground his account of the spectator’s activity on those ‘harmonic’ and ‘rhythmic’ factors to which he gives such emphasis. The former, we will recall, centres on harmonies and relations of colours, and the latter on the animation of form through drawing so as to create depth. More specifically, this latter feature emphasizes the distribution and balance of relations and proportions of form and of masses, as well as the quality of outlines and tonality. Now, in order to take Dufrenne’s account beyond mere speculative insight that one can accept or reject as one desires, it is necessary to provide him with two levels of supporting argument. The first is a sustained phenomenological analysis of some specific paintings (something that is rather lacking in Dufrenne’s own exposition). This will clarify in more detail the kind of activity involved in the spectator’s perceptual scanning. The second step is to offer an account of the unity of the spatial object as such, which is able to connect the creative act of painting and the spectator’s perception of the finished work, in concrete ontological terms. For the first step, we might consider a watercolour of 1875 by John Brett (Figure 7.1). It is of Ynys Mon (Anglesey). The dominant masses are background hills that define an elongated middle-distance expanse of coastline, including a small bay. This expanse enters the picture from a high point at the viewer’s right, diminishing in height and detail, in very gradual terms, as the viewer’s gaze follows it leftwards and into the distance (simultaneously). The expanse

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Figure 7.1 John Brett Ynys Mon, 1875; watercolour: 33 × 16.5 cms. Source : private collection.

appears to be actively (but discreetly) extending itself into the sea. This movement is accentuated both by the tranquillity of the sea and the hard-edged precision with which the geological features of the cliff-faces are rendered. In turn, this precision suggests a process of crystallization (through which the appearance of movement into the sea is invested with a restrained monumentality). Brett’s picture has a pale tonality with a colour scheme tightly calibrated across a close range of light blues and whites. A wonderfully restrained overtone of drama is added through spasmodic areas of intense shadow and the unexpected reflection of the red sun on the cliff-face, as well as on the sea. These features connect with the sparse and sharply defined forms and masses to define an overall ‘melody’ of pure and austere beauty – cohering with a broader suggestion of the cold of early morning. Let us consider, now, a very different work – an oil study from the 1890s, by John Byam Shaw (Figure 7.2). The work is almost certainly intended to illustrate Thomas Hood’s poem Love. It is very much a late-Romantic painterly flourish, where the exuberant vitality of Love’s transporting gestures is played off against those more supplicant or helpless ones of her ‘victims’. This inner-momentum of gesture and its reciprocation are enlivened by the fresh overall light level of the work and the airy transition from one tonal area to another. The emphasis on colours of lighter hue gives further emphasis to the work’s dynamic melody as a celebration of one of the most powerful life factors of all. This being said, there may also be a sense in which the exuberance of the work seems a little contrived or theatrical. But here one must take into account the fact that the compositional and colour strategies of the work are most likely intended to exemplify a broader narrative meaning. Hence, if we link the painting to Hood’s text, then another level of compositional emergence comes into play, which (though Dufrenne scarcely gives it its due) can have its own importance in how we realize the picture in imaginative terms.

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Figure 7.2 John Liston Byam Shaw, Study for Love, 1898; oil on canvas: 37.5 × 27.5 cms. Source : private collection.

As a final example, I shall consider a very small abstract work entitled Frames – by Mojca Oblak, 2008 (Figure 7.2). The work constellates around triangles or lozenges of undifferentiated, somewhat flat, areas of colour. This basic format is arranged in ways that open up a wealth of perceptual gestalts akin to the Necker cube – wherein one can see triangles or lozenges as opening the interior of one cube, or, under an alternative perceptual aspect, the exterior surfaces of another. In this particular work, a number of such gestalts are evident. There are further strong optical effects suggesting that the work’s overall geometric structure is tipping towards the viewer, or, under another aspect, is moving in contrary directions, or, under another, is even crumpling up the pictorial space. The black shapes both enclose and declare the passage of lighter triangles and lozenges. They act, also, as a foil to alternative directions of optical movement suggested by the light blue and ochre forms (respectively), and as a visual reinforcement to the main formal coordinating factor – namely, the small orange triangle, with its small – but insistent – frontal address to the viewer. This modest small work effectively illustrates a general feature of abstract or partially figurative paintings. It consists of the way in which the specific character of colours and shapes, and the relations between them, set up complex optical illusions of movement and dynamic interaction at various levels – illusions that enable, and are enabled by, the overall unity and formal accord of the work. (These, of course, are the features that I discussed at length, in Chapter 2.)

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Figure 7.3 Mojca Oblak, Frames, 2008; acrylic on canvas: 8 × 8 cm. Source : private collection.

Now these three examples show how one might enjoy an imaginative sense of painting’s emergence from gesture, not by imagining the gestures themselves, but rather, by attending to dominant vectors of colour relations and compositional structures and proportions, and (where appropriate) intended narrative effects, all of which were brought into being by gestural activity. The relation between these and the overall effect is a dynamic one – of movement – even if, as in the Brett picture, the scene depicted is actually one of great stillness. In perceiving any painting as a painting, in other words, there is a tooing-and-froing from the work’s overall ‘melody’ to the compositional means which sustain this. My examples have emphasized that these compositional means do not involve form and colour considered exclusively as form and colour. Rather, such factors interweave with, and are inseparable from, description of the kind of object represented, its structural characteristics, and, in some cases, narrative meaning. (I will return to the broader significance of this, a little further on.) We can now add the clinching, second level of argument, in support of Dufrenne. In the examples just described, I have shown how our perceptual scanning of the pictorial object embodies complex levels of movement. What needs to be shown now is exactly how this is congruent with the painter’s gestural/compositional activity. What is it that pictorial perception and creation share at all levels? What bonds them ontologically? The answer is a convergence upon the distinctive unity of the spatial

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object per se. The ontological unity of such an object can be comprehended through perceptual exploration that, in contrast with temporally realized phenomena such as events, or musical works, does not have to follow a rigidly linear successive time-order in terms of how its constitutive parts or aspects are apprehended. We can scan the object from left to right or vice versa, up to down or vice versa and from whole to parts or vice versa. The key point, in other words, is that our perceptual comprehension of a spatial unity is subject to the will in a way that our perceptual comprehension of an event-based phenomenon is not. The time-order involved in space-perception is, as it were, free and layered, rather than rigid and linear. Now these points not only characterize our perception of spatial things but, also, where relevant, their creation. A painter creates the pictorial object through different stages, giving emphases sometimes to one area of the work, and sometimes to another. Characteristically, general outlines and beds of colour will be laid in first. But these are not absolute criteria, and, in any case, the more decisive factors in creating the unity of the picture will be how the emerging whole is organized around the formation, distribution and proportioning of decisive structural features (of the kind described in my examples). The unity of the painting qua spatial thing means that, at the level of pictorial creation, these can be negotiated in a relatively open way vis-à-vis the order in which they are done, with the artist relating them to the projected final state, and modifying them or that projected state, as the work progresses. On these terms, in other words, when the spectator scans structural features in the pictorial object, tooing and froing between them and the completed whole, he or she is engaging in perceptual activity that has some kinship with the painter’s actual creation of the work. Both activities are organized around a sense of what is structurally decisive for the pictorial object qua spatial unity. Spectators and artists have similar or (in terms of the finished work) exactly shared objects of perception, but ones whose exploration involves a relatively free temporal engagement for both. It is, accordingly, this shared level of broad intentional objects and temporality that justifies Dufrenne’s linkage of the spectator’s perception of painting to the activity involved in its creation. Through this, his major insights are made the more compelling. Matters can be taken even further by thinking around one of the dissimilarities between spectatorial activity and pictorial creation. The spectator’s activity starts from the finished work, whereas the painter’s activity relates to a notional, gradually emerging, final state. However, even in these differences, both spectator and creator share an important dimension of imaginative freedom. The spectator begins from the finished work and the painter aspires to it, but in both cases, the relevant activity seeks to connect, imaginatively, something which is immediately present to something which is not. Just as the unity of the painting qua spatial object is relatively open in the sense described above, so too is the imaginative content realized en route to its intentional destination. Indeed, the very fact that the shared having of an (non-present) intended destination involves different termini means that the duration of painting has a further special quality. The work’s final configuration engages the spectator in activity where the past is the intended destination (through evoking the work’s compositional coming-to-be) and subsumes, also, the artist’s different, en route projections of the work’s future destination – that is, anticipations of how it might appear when finished.

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This coexistence of active relations to past and future in the painting means that its duration has some kinship with human experience, and this is another reason why Dufrenne is entitled to regard the work as a ‘quasi-subject’. Indeed, it embodies both the artist’s self-creation and the possibility of spectatorial self-discovery and experience of originary time. The harmonious relation between all these factors is the basis of our aesthetic experience of the work. There is a shared openness of perception in both creation and spectatorial engagement – which constellates around formal structural factors, and imaginative projection – and which can be enjoyed for its own sake, through the self-discovery and cognitive rejuvenation that it offers. Indeed, this kind of enjoyment can remain open and free, through the emergence of new possibilities of cognitive exploration. These develop in correlation with our own changing experiences – changes that can alter the foci of what engages our perceptual attention to the work. Having developed and strengthened Dufrenne’s position, two questions are raised by my strategy. First, the directedness-towards-unity-of-structure, and relatively free temporal involvement, shared by the perception and the creation of painting are surely applicable in equal measure to photography and sculpture (qua spatial arts). Indeed, these media are often colour based – especially from the late twentieth century onwards. In what, then, does painting’s distinctiveness consist? In respect of photography, the spectator’s perception of it is determined by its spatial unity. But photography, by definition, secures its image through mechanical reproduction, with gesture playing only a mediating role, at best, and composition serving to orientate instantaneous creation of the image – rather than to sustain its gradual emergence. With photography, in other words, the spectator’s perception does not evoke the work’s gestural/compositional emergence in temporally sustained imaginative terms. There is no significant shared dimension here. The case of sculpture is rather different. By definition, sculpture is orientated towards the realization and presentation of specific idioms of three-dimensional space. All that is necessary to this is the use of physically three-dimensional, space-occupying material. Colour may be used in presenting the surfaces of some such material, but sculpture qua sculpture – in contrast with painting – does not have to use it. And even in those cases where it does, it is not colour qua colour – as the visual texture of appearance in space – that secures the uniquely sculptural task of realizing physically three-dimensional material. Colour is simply a feature of how that material appears to vision. It may be essential to the appearance of an individual work, but it is not the basis of its status as sculpture. On these terms, in other words, the evocation of sculptural creation does not have to involve reference to colour, and when it does, it is mainly as evidence of the physical three-dimensional mass that sustains it. In the case of painting, there is an opposite vector of perception. Both spectator and artist are concerned, necessarily, with how the physicality of paint and plane surface declare colour, and the broader pictorial effects, consequent upon it. The perception and creation of sculpture and painting, therefore, involve a qualitative difference of orientation even though both media are negotiated in the same flexible perceptual and temporal terms of spatial unity.

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The second problem that my development of Dufrenne’s position might appear to raise is that of formalism. I have emphasized the way in which the perception and creation of painting converges upon formal structural features of visual appearance. Surely, this would make Dufrenne’s position into a mere formalism, when we would be expecting something rather more substantial from a phenomenologist. Now it is true, that Dufrenne’s own exposition – left undeveloped – might imply this limited outcome. However, in my examples, I have tried to emphasize the ways in which descriptions of harmonies and optical movements should be interpreted as weaving in and out of structural features of (where appropriate) the things they represent. Even in the case of abstract works, the sort of optical movements and relations I described are ones that can be shown (as we saw earlier, and in Chapter 2)44 to be charged with associational meanings that make them into an allusive form of representation. The point is that painting’s presentations of appearance are ones that take up an active stance in relation to our own experience of the world. They are not mere savourings of pleasing colours and shapes; they are virtual remakings of reality’s appearance – with better or worse outcomes, on the basis of the individual work’s achievement or lack of it. This being said, it is possible to go even further beyond formalism, by considering some dimensions of pictorial meaning that Dufrenne points towards but does not follow up. These dimensions centre on time’s originary, subjective organization, but are related much more closely to factors grounded in time’s actual physical character. An important clue, here, is Dufrenne’s use of the term ‘duration’ in reference to the pictorial object’s internal time. In using the term, Dufrenne is quite explicitly evoking Bergson.45 However, he does not explain this connection in any detail, or, indeed, develop it significantly. Fortunately, the connection can be developed – in ways that flag some of the deepest levels of picturing’s existential significance. The task might be performed as follows. For Bergson, duration is Being’s fundamental temporal character – as it exists independently of those arresting mechanisms of analysis and reassembly that characterize human cognition. This cognitive activity allows the cosmic flow of Being to be understood in terms of discrete phenomenal units or sequences of such units. However, while analysis and synthesis in terms of such units enable Being’s duration to be controlled and directed, Bergson holds that it does not disclose duration’s ultimate character – as an unhaltable temporal flow of heterogeneous spatial contents, coming into, and passing from, existence. There is, however, an alternative to our usual strategies of analytic cognition that Bergson posits. Through ‘intuition’, one can try to think oneself into, or identify with, an object’s or state of affairs’ own distinctive idiom of duration. However, Bergson is not clear on the circumstances under which one might know that this experience had been successfully achieved. It is here that Dufrenne’s use of duration becomes significant. Painting is a spatial object that presents to cognition as a discrete thing. However, the fact that it is a painting rather than just a spatial object, among others, means that we do not see it as we would a mere thing. To even recognize it as a painting is to recognize that its present discrete spatial character has only emerged through

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complex gestural/compositional processes of the kinds described earlier. The finished work – even if finished to the degree of concealing its brushstrokes – is an open secret. And the secret it makes manifest is that which is concealed by most spatial things – namely that they are not simply there, but are active embodiments of many different processes and stages of becoming. This is our intuition of painting’s being. Bergson’s ‘duration’ is an attempt to articulate this processual dimension, and even if one does not care for the vitalist metaphysic which his notion of duration founds, the fact of such a processual dimension – a flow of coming-to-be and passing-away that determines all finite things – cannot be denied. One might argue, then, that our intuition of painting discloses the process-orientated mutability of spatial things in a distinctive way. The processes that bring things into being, and lead them to change and pass away, are usually elided through the object’s immediate and discrete idiom of space-occupancy. The space-occupancy of painting, however, is one whose gestural/compositional origins declare mutability, while, at the same time, offering a symbolic transcendence of it. This transcendence arises through the creative conflict between our imaginative engagement with the painting’s gestural/ compositional structures, and the fact that it is terminated in an immobile thing. In symbolic terms, the mutability of all things is overcome here, to the degree that the realm of process through which the work is created is now complete. As a real thing, the painting itself continues to be physically mutable, but considered as a painting, it is the culmination of a dynamic that allows the process(es) of its becoming to be re-enacted imaginatively in potentially endless terms. There is a kind of possibility (if not actuality) of eternal recurrence here. Such symbolic transcendence of mutability links to other existential factors. In this respect, it is unfortunate that Dufrenne, himself, explicitly downgrades the importance of the physicality of painting. For, surely, that perceptual immobility which founds painting’s symbolic transcendence of mutability is underwritten by its very physicality. In perceptual terms, we do not, for the most part, perceive this aspect of the work, but it is surely the case that such perception is mediated by knowledge that representational content is projected from brute inanimate, physical material. We do not mistake the picture for what it represents. There is a subtle dialectic here.46 Our destiny, qua finite, is to return to the inanimate. There is no choice about this. We die, and return to particles of matter. But in the painting, meaningful gestures – expressive of thoughts and feelings – are brought to completion in inanimate physical material through the exercise of choice. Here, the components in our destiny are placed in a relation that does not issue in death and dissolution, rather the inanimate becomes the bearer and declarer of a more enduring individual way of perceiving the world through the embodiment of vision in a material object. One can also look at this from the obverse position. All life has emerged from the domain of inert physical material, a fact over which we have not the slightest control. However, in painting and sculpture, the investing of brute physical material with spiritual meaning is something that is done through choice – it is subject to the will, in a way that the emergence of spirit from matter per se, is not. We find here, again, a symbolic overcoming of something ultimate. In painting, the inanimate becomes

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animated by meaning, but this time by choice, rather than evolutionary accident. And while sculpture’s embodiment of such emergence is all the more dramatic through being achieved in hard stone and/or other substantial material, painting’s achievement of it is, in a sense, the more poignant. This is because life is, as it were, suspended from its material base only in the most precarious terms. Painting likewise inhabits its material only as a surface, and one which is fragile enough to be erased or torn by the vicissitudes of life. It is the idiom of art with the most affinity to what we are as embodied subjects – whose subjectivity is a precarious emergence from the physical realm. The temporal factors and the symbolic overcoming of them, which I have described, are, of course, not an explicit aspect of our aesthetic engagement with painting under normal circumstances. However, they are present as intuitive features. They are factors in general subconscious to painting that is deeply implicated in the intrinsic fascination of representation (a fascination noted as early as Aristotle, but not explained much by subsequent philosophy). That Dufrenne does not move in the directions just indicated is due to the fact that his notion of originary spatio-temporality is too subjective in orientation. The mediation of the subject is necessary for space and time to be related to past and future, but, of course, much more is involved. In the final analysis, we are of time and subject, necessarily, to the depredations that it effects. My additions to Dufrenne’s position show that this necessary subjection finds a symbolic resistance, through painting. I turn now, by way of Conclusion, to a critical consideration of the other main aspect of Dufrenne’s theory. It is his account of how painting requires the historical emancipation of colour and light in order for its full ontological potential to be realized.

Conclusion Dufrenne’s historical narrative of painting’s ontological emancipation offers something that is not found in any of the thinkers considered earlier in this book. He not only links his theory of painting to historical factors, but does so in a way that integrates the two dimensions. However, there is one difficulty that Dufrenne might appear to share with Merleau-Ponty. His account is especially sympathetic to modernist painting insofar as such painting expresses the medium’s ontological fundamentals – colour and light – more manifestly (on the basis of the spectator’s imaginative engagement with the work). Now, it was argued that Merleau-Ponty is committed to a least tacit affirmation of modernist painting – especially Cezanne’s – as, in effect, more authentic, in ontological terms, than traditional work. This is a danger for Dufrenne too, insofar as he sees the emancipation of colour and light as the driving factor in the historical development of Western painting. He asserts – as we have seen – that these features are fully realized in modernist work. Does this mean, then, that modern painting is the more authentic in ontological terms, by virtue of this fuller realization? Or should we say, rather, that it is a mere empirical fact that the appearance of such works is

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more conducive to the perception of those features that constitute it as a pictorial, and thence aesthetic object? Now, whereas Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the disclosure of visibility as the ontological basis of painting, and rather misunderstands other key features, Dufrenne does not generate his theory from such a narrow base. Indeed, as we have seen, he shows at some length that the emancipation of colour and light can only take place through the rhythmic structures which constitute drawing in its general sense, and – though Dufrenne does not say this himself – we might even argue that such structures tend to be rather more manifest in features such as perspective than they are in more painterly modernist works. Traditional works, in other words, need not be penalized within the terms of Dufrenne’s theory. However much modernist works may declare colour and light, this ontological emancipation is one that is inseparable from drawing – understood in its fullest sense. We can, accordingly, treat his favouring of modern works as an empirical point concerning the perception of painting’s relevant aesthetic aspects, rather than the culmination of a narrative of authenticity. The question of outcome aside, let us consider whether the dynamic structure of Dufrenne’s general historical narrative can be justified. There is an at least prima facie case for holding that it can. For insofar as painting is different from drawing, it seems logical to assume that it cannot be judged by the same criteria as drawing, or be hierarchically subordinated to it. However, as we have seen, Dufrenne claims that the tendency of painting in the Western tradition has, in fact, been the victim of such factors. Colour was tolerated as something which could fill in the space declared through drawn outlines. It was treated, in effect, as a supplement that simply makes the outline more accessible to ordinary recognitional perception. Though Dufrenne does not provide evidence to substantiate these claims, the evidence is there. Pre-modern painting in the West was dominated by concepts such as ‘disegno’, or the Ideal – which emphasize the factors bound up with ‘rhythmic schemata’ – determining space content, distribution and proportion. These were the factors most widely regarded as giving painting its intellectual rationale. In them, colour, as such, takes on a mainly secondary role.47 However, we must now consider Dufrenne’s other major points. They are his claims that the development of oil painting, and the emergence of colour theory, allowed painting to be emancipated from its subjugation to drawing. In terms of the former, it may seem very prescriptive to suggest – as Dufrenne does – that fresco is much more limited than oil painting is. Surely, it all depends on who is holding the brush? But actually, there is some ontological substance to Dufrenne’s position. For over and above questions of individual skill, fresco has temporal and spatial constraints determined by the character of the medium, in a way that oil painting does not. And, in positive terms, oils offer much greater scope in exploring the possibilities of drawing itself, as well as those of colour and light. This culminates, as Dufrenne emphasizes, in a transformation of the relation between colour and drawing. Through oil painting, colour is no longer subordinate to drawing, but neither is it a sufficient basis for pictorial space. For this, we need, in addition, drawing – understood not in the sense of defining objects and states of affairs by contours, but in a more structural sense of arranging masses and forms in relation to, and in proportion to one another. Through

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this, the possibilities of working in colour, and thence, the possibility of painting itself, are realized in the most complete way. The question of whether – as Dufrenne claims – theories concerning the nature of colour were involved in this transformation is more complex, and is not of direct philosophical importance.48 What is of the most direct importance is the significance of Dufrenne’s account of the emancipation of colour and painting. It is an example of how ontological possibility is realized by historical development. This is exactly where Dufrenne goes so far beyond the other phenomenologists. There is, however, a significant problem in his theory. For, while the rise of oil painting is the physical vehicle of semantic and syntactic advances in the pictorial object’s logical scope, in the final analysis, what is decisive are these advances themselves rather than their enabling physical medium. Fresco may have its limitations, but it was the vehicle for innovations in foreshortening, perspective and colouring, which oil painting extends, rather than qualitatively transforms. Indeed, it is not easy to identify a pictorial factor that could only be achieved through oil painting (chiaroscuro is perhaps the best bet here). The upshot of this is that, by an odd reversal, Dufrenne explains a philosophical point – painting’s full realization through colour and light – through what is only an empirical historical truth about the main physical vehicle of this realization. But need this disparity worry us? The answer is, ‘yes’. Oil painting is decisive, but the historical narrative that Dufrenne constructs around it cannot do useful work. In assessing the artistic importance of different individual artists, what is important is how they use oils to achieve new possibilities of semantic and syntactic structure, not the fact that they use oils, as such. The emancipation of colour and light has to be understood within general innovations and refinements that extend the aforementioned structures. In order to engage with this, Dufrenne would have had to offer a great deal more explanation of how the rhythmic, drawing-orientated schemata organize those of colour. This would have required not only considerable historical analysis, but equally, much more detailed explanation of what the term ‘schemata’ actually amounts to in the context of colour harmony, and visual rhythm. The problem here is that – like all the theorists discussed earlier – Dufrenne cannot identify criteria that explain just how a picture is able to engage our aesthetic attention. He points us towards the structural factors that are involved in aesthetic perception, but these factors are intrinsic to almost all Renaissance and post-Renaissance paintings simply by the fact of being paintings. Of course, we can, in principle, look at any painting in aesthetic terms, and know what features should be the focus of aesthetic attention. But the decisive question is why do some works seem especially felicitous in aesthetic terms, in a way that others do not? In this respect, it is not enough to say that non-aesthetic works are ones that fail to draw imaginative attention to their gestural and composed character. We need criteria that can explain such failure. And it is difficult to see how such criteria might operate except through reference to a comparative critical context, of the kind described in previous chapters. This is directly implicated in an equally fundamental shortcoming in Dufrenne’s narrative. It centres on the way his fixation on oil painting elides a deeper structural

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diachronic factor. In this respect, it is fashionable to regard cultural differences between different forms of pictorial representation as no more than differences. But the development that Dufrenne emphasizes amounts to much more than this. Painting involves the placing of coloured marks on a surface, and it is quite clear that the structural sense of drawing and its organization of colour achieved through oil painting massively expands the scope of the medium’s virtual appearance and content. This means that the artist working at this level has a possibility of choice in how he or she represents things, which artists who are tied to other levels of pictorial development do not. The key point, here, is that the exercise of such choices are ones that can extend the logical scope of painting as a medium through those criteria of historical difference that I described in earlier chapters (notably Chapter 5). Dufrenne’s emphasis on oil painting shows that Western artists have this choice. But he does not show which of their choices count most in showing how painting, as a medium, can be taken to new levels of significance – over and above mere difference of style and culture. Dufrenne is sidetracked by the main empirical, enabling factor, in this development. What is lost, in other words, is an opportunity to reveal pictorial art as a distinctive symbolic form, with the possibility of progressive articulation based on comparative criteria related to the history of painting’s development as a medium.

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Conclusion A Preface to Post-Analytic Phenomenology

Considered in concert, the discussions in each chapter of this book reveal astonishing cognitive depths to artistic meaning in pictures and sculptures. My discussions of each thinker, are, in fundamental terms, complementary to one another, insofar as each emphasizes different aspects of how the many-layered ontological reciprocity of embodied subject and Being, and our subjective sense of that relation, finds expression in the visual arts. This provides a comprehensive and viable account of the intrinsic significance of picturing and sculpture. Of course, to be comprehensive is not to be definitive. Maybe a cleverer scholar than myself could synthesize all this material in an integrated phenomenology of the visual arts. Such a work would address the different media of the visual arts, as well as the sort of material introduced in the present work. Even in the absence of this grander project, it is hoped that at least one thing has been established. It is that the phenomenological tradition can show how picturing and sculpture as art forms engage with some of the deepest factors in the human condition – the ones that define who and what we are, and our relation to Being. As we have seen, this profundity of intrinsic meaning does not simply pour out of the relevant thinkers through the mere linking of ideas and conclusions. Its emergence requires sustained analysis – in the form of interpretative exposition, critical appraisal and analytic reconstruction. I shall now summarize some of the most important (mainly expository) points of each chapter, before addressing the more general problems that my analyses have raised, and the supplementary arguments necessary for their solution. I will then look, finally, at some deeper issues involved that argue the need for a post-analytic phenomenology. The book started with an investigation of Wollheims’ understanding of painting per se, and emphasizing the importance of his notions of Ur-painting and twofoldness, and weaknesses in terms of his understanding of style and expression. It was argued specifically that Wollheim leaves these notions too much at the subjective level. I showed, however, that in relation to abstract art, at least, his theories could be put to further use as the starting point for an understanding of how such art gets its meaningfulness from the relation among the ‘presumption of virtuality’, optical illusion and transperceptual space. This last notion provided an especially important bridge to the phenomenological tradition. The chapters on that tradition are intended to establish ‘expression’ on ontological rather than subjective grounds alone, by approaching phenomenological

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thinkers in an analytic way. Such an approach is intended to do justice to the full measure of their arguments, rather than merely deploy a few of their ideas and conclusions. The chapters on Heidegger emphasized his treatment of the artwork as something thingly with a privileged relation to the disclosure of Being. He was seen to assign great importance to the ontological dynamics of the strife of world and earth in the setting forth and secluding of Being. His treatment of sculpture was shown to be more specifically focused on the sculptural work’s overcoming of space through the embodiment of elemental place. In my discussion of Merleau-Ponty, the significance of painting was analysed in relation to the body. This relation centred on key notions of flesh, reversibility and the reciprocity of the visible and the invisible. It was shown how these give painting a distinctive ontological significance. Attention was also paid to Merleau-Ponty’s complex discussions of the historicity of painting. We then saw how in Lacan’s work, emphasis is switched to the way in which picturing embodies the constitution of the subject, and intersubjective dynamics of vision and Desire. It was emphasized, also, that he understands how picturing has a transforming effect on human experience. Finally, I considered Dufrenne’s important clarifications of the complex role of temporality in the ontology of painting as an idiom of visual art, and, specifically, assigned a significant role to the aesthetic and historical dimensions as decisive factors in painting as expression. Each chapter raised, of course, substantial critical questions as a result of my interpretative expositions. Each of the phenomenologists, for example, had reservations about space understood in ‘classical’ or mathematical terms. I pointed out – especially in relation to Merleau-Ponty – that perspectival space has a significance over and above the mere mathematicization, and, as it were, equalization of spatial positions. Linear perspective expresses the systematic nature of the subject’s reciprocity with the world qua-positioning, and does so in a way which no other pictorial structure can. The means whereby it achieves this is through a radicalization of the planar and recessional structures that are common to all idioms of picturing. Structures of this kind do not arrest the motion of their virtual content in the way a photograph freezes an instant in time. Their role is rather to de-temporalize the way in which visual states of affairs appear, by presenting them under a single aspect. Through this ‘presentness’, the process of visual perception is idealized. Lacan and Dufrenne both understand something of what is involved here (in partial terms, at least), through his idea of the picture as an arrest – not of virtual content but of the artist’s creative gestures. This arrest means that what is represented appears to us in a way very different from that of its appearance in immediate vision. The upshot of these points is that visual art does not simply disclose the visual perception of Being. It transforms it into idealized aesthetic structure. Vision is embodied in spatial forms whose spatiality overrides the dynamics of that constant temporal change under which spatial aspects are normally experienced. This means that their visual spatiality is made accessible qua visual and spatial to a heightened degree. Wollheim, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty do not negotiate this transformation, and Lacan negotiates only a single aspect. Dufrenne alone takes us further, but needs

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radical supplementation. The reason for the restrictedness of these viewpoints, is that, for all these thinkers (with the exception of Wollheim), in the final analysis, visual art is understood mainly as an expression of our basic relation to Being, that is, as perception of ontological truth primarily, rather than an aesthetic and artistic visual transformation of it. Indeed, with the exception of Dufrenne, aesthetic and genuine artistic criteria scarcely function at all in the theories considered. But the significance that Wollheim, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Lacan assign to visual art is impossible without them. And even Dufrenne stops short of the right position through his misunderstanding of how aesthetic criteria are mediated by comparative historical factors relating to style and the medium. The fundamental problem at issue throughout the book is this. All the thinkers considered see the visual artwork as presenting a meaning that cannot be separated from its individual sensible embodiment. But this is very different from the vast bulk of our visual judgements. Most of these involve us recognizing that some particular visual form is an instance of such and such a kind of thing. In such cases, the precise individual configuration of the thing judged, qua individual, is not a part of its meaning. We are interested only in the kind-identifying characteristics that this individual thing bears. In the case of judging particular people, we do, of course, address their individual appearance. However, this is most often for purposes of identifying the individual concerned. And if we remark on more exact aspects of their appearance, it is usually for some further communicative end, rather than for its own sake. But here is the supreme difficulty for all the thinkers considered. The vast majority of visual forms made in pictorial (and, admittedly to a lesser extent) sculptural formats are not artistic. They do not disclose anything over and above than the specific ‘message(s)’ which they are created to communicate. These messages are either factually indicative – telling us what such and such a place or such and such a person is, or is like, or they are persuasive – in the sense of attempting to get us to buy things or take up such and such an attitude to the thing represented. Images of this kind – qua images – have some ontological significance. But they do not engage us in terms of it. We simply absorb the ‘message’ without paying attention to how the message has been formed, or the deeper ramifications of how this particular work embodies its medium. In order for painting and sculpture to achieve expression based on the ontological factors described by the phenomenologists, we need, accordingly, a very different idiom of judgement. We need, in fact, the visual work to engage us aesthetically, as a work of art. Aesthetic judgement centres on how the individual visual configuration sets forth its kind-identifying characteristics, and, more important still, how its style of presentation in rendering these characteristics embodies the perceptual interests and orientations of their creator by presenting a possibility of experience for others. By achieving such individual style, visual art is able to disclose Being in all the ways described earlier, that is, in aesthetic rather than just philosophical terms. The artwork embodies an individual way of experiencing ontologically significant factors. Our chosen thinkers, in concert, therefore, present the ontological basis of pictorial and sculptural expression, but they do not do justice to the comparatively grounded stylistic dimension, which allows this basis to be aesthetically experienced, as art.

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This problem relates to some broader ones, of far-reaching significance. As far as I can tell, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Dufrenne believe that we can separate art from mere representation on the basis of a distinction between pre-reflective and reflective judgements. The disclosive power of visual art engages us pre-reflectively, while the recognition of its more instrumental significance involves reflective judgement. However, the distinction between pre-reflective and reflective judgements is mainly logical rather than phenomenological and has no decisive bearing in the aesthetic context. In practice, almost all our visual judgements are pre-reflective and intuitive in that they are made without us having it before our mind explicitly ‘that this is a yellow flower’ or whatever. Likewise, while aesthetic judgements may engross us psychologically, they can surely occur also when we are reflecting more explicitly on why it is that we find a work so profound in its expression (in this respect, there are surely ‘Eureka!’-type moments of explicit insight that are aesthetic rather than intellectual). It must be emphasized also that the pre-reflective and reflective judgements do not exist in total isolation from one another. Far from it. Every judgement is orientated by vast sediments of knowledge based on perceptual experience and material learned through reading, conversation and the like. It is this tacit cognitive core that gives orientation and substance to judgement irrespective of whether it is intuitive or explicit and reflective. Now in the case of the cognitive core involved in judging works of visual art, it is quite clear that for Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Dufrenne, much as they appear to privilege the pre-reflective nature or intuitiveness of visual art, their accounts tacitly presuppose complex knowledge of sameness and difference vis-à-vis artistic styles. This knowledge distinguishes works of aesthetic and artistic significance from those which are merely of functional significance. Such discrimination logically presupposes a horizon of critical comparison which can be subjectively or objectively orientated. The subjective horizon means that, in judging visual art, a person is guided mainly by what he or she has actually experienced. The objective orientation is when the one making his or her judgement allows it to be informed by experience which recognizes that he or she is not the sole arbiter of the aesthetic and artistic, and actively seeks out new experiences, and critical assessments and discussions of visual work. It should be emphasized that what I am describing here is not the academic study of art history, but simply the conditions of informed viewing. These conditions depend on a cognitive core that comprises a horizon of critical comparisons. It is when a work stands out in relation to such a comparative horizon – when it innovates or refines in relation to established styles – that its aesthetic and artistic significance is energized. A critical horizon of this kind informs all the thinkers I have considered (albeit with different emphases and weightings) in an unrecognized way. They suppress its full significance. The reason for this is, I think, a fear of reducing visual art to mere intellectual recognition. My point, however, is that this is all it can be unless we bring in the work’s aesthetic and artistic significance. But this, as we have seen, necessitates the key role of the comparative horizon in mediating our judgement of the work’s individual visual appearance.

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I am placing emphasis on this critical point because, by neglecting it, all the thinkers I have considered suppress the idea of visual art as a historically developing symbolic form. The history of art is not just one of different styles, it is of styles which have a cumulative significance. The nature of this cumulative significance has great importance for individual works. Those that play a major role in it open up new possibilities for other artists, and, in opening upon new possibilities at that level, they also open up new possibilities for disclosing and transforming our visual perception of Being. I turn, finally, to the great unrecognized problem that undercuts the whole tradition of existential phenomenology (and peripherally related tendencies such as Bergsonism). The problem is this. Analytic thought is seen as something of a barrier between the subject and Being because it involves disassembling some given qualitative whole, and reconstructing it without any hope of achieving the same level of unity as characterized by the original. However, in the absence of the analytic attitude, there is no way in which rational human consciousness could be separated from more animal recognition and a rigid tie to immediately given stimuli. The process of analysis and synthesis is just as much a part of our perception of Being as any amount of primordial, pre-reflective contact. Indeed, it actively structures that pre-reflective activity as a cognitive core – a fund of habituated experience based on many different ways, and levels, of taking qualitative unities apart and reconstructing them. Now the making and interpretation of visual art involve many such different kinds of analytic thought. These are embedded in the intuitive character of such activity; they are part of its orientating cognitive core, and must be given their due. This is why I have emphasized the role of the comparative critical horizon as a necessary orientating factor. As I suggested in earlier chapters, every artist – in relation to the developing qualitative unity of a given work – makes decisions, revises them, tries something new, modifies it, starts again from fresh or whatever. It must now be emphasized that, central to this, is a complex reciprocity of analysis and reconstruction rather than a merely successive taking apart and putting back together, or mere gradual placing of marks on a surface. Likewise in our interpretation of a work. We relate it to tradition, seeing it as adding to or merely repeating it. We bring it under one category only to find it does not fit, and so try it under another until we find something that helps us understand why this individual work is worthy of our attention. It may be, of course, that the work is seen as inaugurating a new category of its own – a new artistic tendency which others can develop also. The point to gather from this is that in aesthetic and artistic judgement, we cannot make, in phenomenological terms, a clear distinction between analytic and pre-reflective thoughts. They are distinct logical categories, but in the practice of making and interpreting art, they become extremely fluid. The idealizing aesthetic effects that I have identified in visual art are examples where this fluidity becomes focused and harmonious. We do not just recognize something factually, but are engaged in a pleasing interchange of intuitive insights and explicit analyses that merge in and out of one another in a many-layered whole of experience.

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In phenomenological terms, the making or interpretation of visual art involves a reciprocity of analysis and synthesis that transforms our relation to Being. The change of styles in art in diachronic historical terms is a very important example of this. We are thus returned to our starting point. There I argued that phenomenological approaches to painting and sculpture would benefit from interaction with analytic thought. As well as using Wollheim as a starting point, this analytic orientation has been used to not only clarify but actively develop the positions of all the relevant thinkers whom I have discussed. They are now much more than what they were before, and our understanding of the intrinsic significance of the visual arts has been clarified. Each thinker gives us great chunks of those ontological factors that help provide an answer; and my critical analyses both strengthen them and show the issues still to be resolved. In particular, I have demonstrated finally how this resolution involves reference to analytic factors that are implicit in artistic creativity itself, and in the comparative horizon whereby an artistic style stakes its claim to individuality. The moral is clear. There is great scope for a post-analytic phenomenology that overcomes the limitations that I have indicated in the field of philosophical aesthetics. There is room also (as I shall argue elsewhere) for a general post-analytic approach that will allow phenomenology to reassert itself as a philosophical method.

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Notes

Introduction 1 I have explained the intrinsic fascination of the image at length, in general terms in the Introduction to, and in Chapter 1 of my book (2009) Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame), Stanford, Stanford University Press; and in the more specific context of modernism, in (2012) The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style, London and New York, Continuum. Each chapter of the present work will elaborate further aspects of the visual arts’ intrinsic significance. The three books are intended to be complementary. The earlier works involve (mainly) close phenomenological analysis of specific visual art media, or of historic individuals and tendencies, while the present work addresses the impressive body of phenomenological interpretation that visual art media have engendered. 2 Most contemporary discussions of ‘the image’ either avoid the intrinsic significance problem by emphasizing its broader communicative functions in the context of societal history and transformation or distort it through an over-poetic evocation of its ontology. The works of Jacques Ranciere and Jean-Luc Nancy, respectively, are examples of these tendencies. (See, for example, Ranciere’s [2007] The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York, Verso, and Nancy’s [2005] The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort, New York, Fordham University Press.) Ranciere explores the image’s diverse cultural contexts and its relation to different forms of text, so as to emphasize its problematic status in contemporary understanding. His work offers, specifically, an interpretation of its cultural status, and contexts of consumption and distribution. The image is treated by him as, in effect, a complex cultural commodity. However, the deeper ontological factors that enable the image to take on its cultural roles are either overlooked or significantly understated. Nancy’s ‘ground’ of the image is restricted in rather different ways. Consider the following passage – ‘the distinction of the image – while it greatly resembles sacrifice – is not properly sacrificial. It does not legitimize and it does not transgress: it crosses the distance of the withdrawal even while maintaining it through its mark as an image. Or rather: through the mark that it is, it establishes simultaneously a withdrawal and a passage that, however, does not pass. The essence of such a crossing lies in its not establishing a continuity: it does not suppress the distinction. It maintains it while also making contact: shock, confrontation, tete-a-tete, or embrace’ (The Ground of the Image, p. 3). Here, and in most of his work, Nancy tends to characterize the ontology of the image anthropomorphically. Of course, images are the product of human agency, but once they are made, an anthropomorphic approach makes inanimate material appear to act with conscious intent – as in the ‘sacrifice’ alluded to in the above passage. Such anthropomorphism is the nearest that Nancy takes us to the intrinsic significance of the image. The problem with this approach, however, is that while it may lead us to think about images in a poetic way, it does not of itself explain the ground of their

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significance. In effect, the quoted passage comes down to this. Images are different from the visual reality they represent, but have a closeness to it that is different from other idioms of reference. The image appears to have continuity with the visual realm that is represented, but actually is manifestly different from it. These points touch on some relevant factors but do not even begin to elaborate the deep and complex ontology which is at issue. Furthermore, it should be emphasized that the rest of Nancy’s text offers little further illumination. The vast amounts of work done on the relation between images and the gendered gaze since the 1980s might seem to furnish such arguments. (See, for example, Griselda Pollock’s (2003) Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art, London and New York, Routledge.) However, the critical standpoints involved in these and related approaches are based mainly on the reduction of visual meaning to models derived from written or literary texts. The transformative effects of pictorial and sculptural media on narrative and ideological contents are not considered. A sustained philosophical critique of this entire approach can be found in Chapter 1 of my Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame). This position is developed also in Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame). A further – more general – philosophical critique of the deconstructionist variety of relativism (in Derrida and others) is one of the overriding thematics of my book Philosophy after Postmodernism: Civilized Values and the Scope of Knowledge, London, Routledge, 2002. An outstanding work in this respect is Dominic Lopes’s (1996) Understanding Pictures, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Other important works include Robert Hopkins’s (1998) Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press and Flint Schier’s (1987) Deeper into Pictures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. His most important work remains The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, (1981) Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. See especially Chapter 1 of Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt (2007) Oxford, Oxford University Press. Richard Wollheim (1987), Painting as an Art, London and New York, Thames and Hudson. Dominic Lopes’s book (2007) Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures, Oxford, Oxford University Press, sounds as though it will take us in the right direction, but does not pull it off. Lopes proposes a ‘mimesis thesis’ that posits a congruity between the scene-presenting experiences that pictures elicit, and ‘face to face’ experiences of their subjects. The problem is that this congruity is, as far as I can see, left unexplained. Lopes does not fill in the ontology of the picture in terms of the conditions that enable the congruity. A similar gap is left between the expressive significance of pictures, and the factors that enable them to be expressive. He regards these latter factors as complex. Indeed, they are – and invoke considerations that take us far beyond a notion of expression rooted in simple emotional states such as joy, sorrow and the like. Lopes leaves another gap between the notions of the aesthetic and the artistic. One would have thought that any notion of ‘evaluating’ pictures would have to negotiate these, but, if anything, Lopes, separates them without examining their areas of overlap. In Sight and Sensibility, p. 85, Lopes notes the ‘existential anxiety’ of Munch’s The Scream, without following up the much wider ramifications of this.

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10 It may seem odd to involve Lacan in the phenomenological tradition, but I will show some affinities in detail, in the course of Chapter 6 of the present work. 11 A case in point here is Andrew J. Mitchell’s (2010) Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Mitchell makes some interesting connections among Heidegger’s ideas, other thinkers and relevant sculptors. However, Heidegger’s most important piece of writing on sculpture (which I will analyse at length in Chapter 4) is treated as little more than a repository of scattered insights. Heidegger’s own text, however (as will be shown later), is developed in a way that stresses, explicitly, its own continuous structure of argument – even making apologies when, for the sake of brevity, it has, to make jumps in its progression. These apologies are hardly surprising. For the very progression of Heidegger’s argument is structurally connected to the meanings which he elicits from the sculptural work. Mitchell, however, does not even consider this structure. By failing to do so, he elides the extraordinary depth of understanding that Heidegger brings to sculpture’s distinctive ontology. There are, of course, many other works which do ample justice to their chosen thinkers’ more sustained arguments. Ted Toadvine’s book (2009) on Merleau-Ponty and the Philosophy of Nature, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, for example, is an outstanding critical exploration of the structure and scope of Merleau-Ponty’s theory. Martin Dillon’s (1998) Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press; and Julian Young’s (2001) Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, also offer sustained and imaginative interpretative analyses which negotiate fully the argumentative substance of their subject’s work. 12 Galen Johnson’s fine book (2010) The Retrieval of the Beautiful; Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, is a case in point here. What gives this book its depth are presentations of themes and ideas from Merleau-Ponty in unexpected contexts that illuminate the continuing significance of beauty. However, the Merleau-Pontian ideas themselves are not analysed in any great detail. For example, the notions of flesh, depth, vision and reversibility are cited and conjectured upon (pp. 30–2) but without their complex multi-aspectual individual characters and interrelations being explored in really substantial terms. 13 I have had direct experiences of this in circumstances where my conclusions concerning a phenomenological thinker were simply rejected, without the slightest attention being paid to the careful arguments and analyses which were the basis for them. The protagonists of this attitude, as far as I can tell, have become so immersed in the orthodoxies of phenomenology-talk as to lose all sense of philosophy as a robust form of argument that does not let obscure or oracular positions go unchallenged. In one especially memorable example, the problems which I raise in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s misunderstanding of linear perspective in Chapter 5 were dismissed on the grounds that his mistakes on this topic were no more than ‘dialectical tensions’. It goes without saying that the pious individual in question offered no account of the relation between dialectical tension and simply getting it wrong. Perhaps, it comes down to a rule of thumb – if in doubt, assume that the great and the good emanate dialectical tensions, whereas the rest of us just make cock-ups. 14 Again, there are many notable exceptions to this. Toadvine’s book on Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature also offers an especially rewarding critical analysis of the concept of nature (albeit one which takes a very different direction from the present author’s approach). 15 See, for example, Chapter 9 of Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame).

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Chapter 1 1 Richard Wollheim (1987) Painting as an Art, London and New York, Thames and Hudson. This is by far his most detailed treatment of the artistic status of painting. Other important relevant works by him include (1980) Art and Its Objects (Second Edition), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, and (1973) On Art and the Mind, London, Allen Lane. A further key source is the collection (2001) Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression, ed. Rob van Gerwen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. This collection includes an essay by Wollheim ‘On Pictorial Representation’ and a ‘Reply’ to the other contributors to the volume. The former essay explores the correlated notions of seeing-in, and twofoldness; the other philosophical contributions address this correlation, mainly, or that of expression, without addressing the question of how painting becomes art, per se, in any detail. Wollheim’s replies accordingly do not allow him to extend the position set out in Painting as an Art in directions useful to the present work. The critical points I make in this chapter, in contrast, focus on the art question, and offer very different and more radical avenues of critique than other contributors to the aforementioned collection. 2 Interestingly, as we shall see, it is these which are the ultimately weak links in his theory. 3 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 18. 4 Ibid., p. 20. 5 Ibid., p. 21. 6 Ibid. It is important to emphasize, however, that the standing-out from, and seeing-in, does not hinge on a real physical relation – the paint marks that make one thing appear in front of another thing do not have to be in front of it physically speaking. The key effect is wrought at the level of appearance. 7 Ibid., p. 22. Such distinctively pictorial meaning is understood by Wollheim as a feature that cannot be explained by reference to rules, codes or conventions, or other general features of the symbol system to which the picture belongs. Such general features modify pictorial meaning in certain cases, but they are not the major determinants of meaning. To hold that they are is to reduce pictorial meaning to that of language. 8 For an alternative phenomenological approach, see Nigel Wentworth’s (2001), Phenomenology of Painting, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 9 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 23. 10 Ibid., p. 26. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 27. 13 Ibid., p. 35. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 36. 16 Ibid., p. 45. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 46. 19 Ibid., p. 52. 20 Ibid., p. 80. 21 Ibid.

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 88. See Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 85. Ibid., p. 357. Ibid., p. 52. Among analytic philosophers of art, Dominic Lopes, also, has at least touched on the possible significance of historical factors indirectly, through his recognition that originality can play a role in evaluating pictures. However, he seems to regard it as non-aesthetic insofar as it is centred on non-perceptible properties. We are told that ‘the reason why attributions of originality are not aesthetic is that human visual experience cannot represent pictures as original’ (2005) Sight and Sensibility, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 114–115. The problem with this is that it reduces the aesthetic to a mere pleasure in the way things appear to the senses. But our experiences of the aesthetic surely involve some cognitive characterization. For example, our aesthetic pleasure in a picture or seashell can be energized by the way in which originality (in the former case) and novelty (in the latter case) present aesthetic form under a new and refreshing aspect. This does not mean that we enjoy the picture or shell aesthetically because we ‘attribute’ originality or novelty to them, but because, rather, these relational features offer a deeper experience of the aesthetic. (If this were not the case, the aesthetic would become boring.) The cognitive depth of the aesthetic experience of art will be the major focus of the present work. 32 It is, for example, one of the recurring themes in my book (2007) Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt. I give it a similar high profile in (2003) The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4

Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 46. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid. See Richard Wollheim (1980) Art and Its Objects (Second Edition), pp. 12 – 21. (It should be noted that the second edition comprises the first one, supplemented by new essays). 5 Rob van Gerwen highlights this, very effectively, in his editor’s Introduction to the collection (2001) Richard Wollheim and the Art of Painting: Representation and Expression, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 2–3. 6 Kendal Walton, in contrast, does see the importance of optical illusion for abstract art, but does not develop the insight. His points can be found in (1993) Mimesis and Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, pp. 52–54. 7 Interestingly, Wollheim notes and considers this phenomenon in several of his works, without thinking through the deeper implications of it. See, for example, Art and Its Objects (Second Edition), p. 15.

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8 Hans Hofmann, ‘The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts’; included in (2002) Hans Hofmann, ed. James Yohe, New York, Rizzoli. This quotation, p. 46. 9 These remarks are from the ‘Working Notes’ to Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous book (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphons Lingis, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, p. 257. 10 In previous works – most notably Phenomenology of the Visual Arts, Chapter 6, I have used the term ‘contextual’ space, rather than ‘transperceptual’. I now prefer the latter usage, as the former is rather too general. 11 The account offered here is, again, a revision of the levels of ‘contextual space’ set out in Phenomenology of the Visual Arts, Chapter 6. It should be emphasized that there is a great deal more work to be done in terms of refining our more exact understanding of transperceptual space. The best strategy would be one that could justify its analysis into different levels on conceptual grounds rather than through empirical description.

Chapter 3 1 Martin Heidegger (1975) ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ included in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper and Row, pp. 15–87. A good general discussion of this essay in the context of Heidegger’s developing thought can be found in Chapter 6 (‘The Greatness of the Work of Art’) of Robert Bernasconi’s (1993) Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press. Substantial discussions of Heidegger’s aesthetics can be found in Joseph J. Kockelmans’ (1986) Heidegger on Art and Artworks, Boston, Martinus Nijhoff, and Dordrecht, Lancaster; and Julian Young’s book (2001) Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Kockelmans’ work is profound and searching and has a masterly grasp of the place of the essay within Heidegger’s oeuvre, and of the rich body of interpretative material which it has engendered. These interests are especially marked in his analysis of the essay’s structure of argument. However, such depth of exposition means that Kockelmans’ approach is necessarily restricted in terms of opportunities for developing the broader aesthetic significance of Heidegger’s points. And, of course, it is not focused primarily on the essay’s relevance for the visual arts. These, however, are the factors which my account emphasizes. Some of them are also at issue in the differences between my approach and that of Young. He addresses the ‘Origin . . .’ essay mainly as a source of accumulating insights (whereas I follow its structure of argument much more closely). This reflects a significant difference of orientation between us. For, while his analysis tends to emphasize the role of ‘The Origin’ within the developing thematics of Heidegger’s own thought, my interest is in the way in which his complex analytic strategies specifically illuminate visual art’s cognitive depth. Young’s discussion is also somewhat more orientated towards literature, while mine has an exclusive concern with visual idioms. This being said Young’s general approach is refreshingly clear and critical in a way that many exegetical approaches are not. Of particular importance is his discussion of Heidegger’s later reappraisal of key Modernists such as Klee, Braque and Cezanne. (In this respect, see the extended discussion of Modern art from pp. 120 to 174.) Young’s particular strength here is his willingness to develop Heidegger’s insights and negotiate difficulties in them. (The discussion of Cezanne is especially accomplished since Young only has a few sparse lines from a poem by Heidegger, to build on.)

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Heidegger, ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 33–34. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., pp. 44–45. Ibid., p. 49. Gianni Vattimo presents some alternative readings of Heidegger’s world/ earth relation in his essay ‘Ornament/Monument’. His reading of the relation, is, however, rather too geared to the analysis of ornament to be a reliable guide for use in terms of the visual arts, generally. That being said, he does seem to regard it as having such general significance. (The paper can be found in [1997] Rediscovering Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 155–160.) A rather more interesting discussion of the world/earth relation which gives emphasis to the role of spatial factors can be found in Edward Casey’s (1997) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, London and New York, University of California Press, pp. 265–269. Joseph Kockelmans offers a detailed analysis which is especially rich in bringing out the complexity of the world/ earth pairing by reference to its role in other works by Heidegger (see, especially, Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Artworks, pp. 142–155). Another important discussion of the world earth/pairing is in Julian Young’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, pp. 19–50. Young’s analysis and my own are broadly consistent but with very different emphases. In particular, I attend rather more closely to the tensional varieties of the relation; and I link ‘earth’ more closely to the physicality of the art medium than does Young. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 46. Ibid., p. 49. For an example of this, see Susan M. Vogel (1997) Baule: African Art/Western Eyes, New Haven and London, Yale University Press Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 54. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 66. Heidegger makes some tentative links between formalist-type approaches and Hegel’s theory of the end of art. See Heidegger, ibid., pp. 79–81. Ibid., p. 77. Worries arising from Heidegger’s rhetoric concerning history and the destiny of a ‘people’ are well addressed in the chapter on ‘The Greatness of the Work of Art’ in Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question, pp. 99–116. What Bernasconi’s approach does not negotiate is Heidegger’s incomplete development of the ‘createdness’ of the work of art, and the neglect of the role of diachronic comparative history in ascriptions of greatness which is consequent on this. Heidegger, ibid, p. 81. Meyer Schapiro (1994) ‘A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh’, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, New York, George Braziler, p. 138. The discussion is continued (with little significant addition) in ‘Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh’ in the same volume, pp. 143–151. Joseph Kockelmans offers a balanced critique of Schapiro’s approach which emphasizes the fact that Heidegger’s intention is not at all that of simply making a description of the shoes. See Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Artworks, pp. 128–132.

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21 Schapiro, ibid., p. 139. 22 Jacques Derrida sees something of the point at issue here in his remark that ‘Whatever proof you claim to have in hand, the signatory of a picture cannot be identified with the nameable owner of an essentially detachable object represented in the picture’. From (1987) The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, p. 279. Unfortunately, this remark is not developed much further. Derrida spends a great deal of time addressing the Heidegger–Schapiro relation, but very much for his own obscure ends. In particular, he does little justice to the detail of Heidegger’s arguments. For some judicious comments on the Heidegger, Schapiro and Derrida relation, see Chapter 7 in Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question, pp. 117–119. 23 In this respect, see his discussion of the portrait in (1975) Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel, London, Sheed and Ward, pp. 127–132. For an incisive critical discussion of Gadamer’s approach, see Nicholas Davey’s paper (October, 2003) ‘Sitting Uncomfortably: Gadamer’s Approach to Portraiture’ in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 231–246. 24 For an extremely viable account of pictorial representation, see Dominic Lopes (2004) Understanding Pictures, Oxford, The Clarendon Press. 25 Immanuel Kant (1987) The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar, New York, Hackett and Co, p. 182. 26 Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art, p. 140. 27 Hagi Kenaan (Fall 2004) ‘What Philosophy Owes a Work of Art’, Symposium, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 587–606. This reference p. 598. 28 Ibid., p. 599. 29 Ibid., p. 602. 30 Julian Young deals with the problematics of Heidegger’s ‘Greek paradigm’ of great art very effectively. However, he does not address the deeper issue of ‘createdness’ and its relation to the comparative history of styles in art. See Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, pp. 64–68.

Chapter 4 1 This can be found in Man and World, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1973), pp. 3–8, translated by Charles H. Seibert. A more accessible reprint of the translation can be found in Neil Leach, ed. (2002) Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, London, Routledge, pp. 121–124. Conveniently enough, the other Heidegger material in Leach’s collection includes “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (pp. 100–109), which I will have recourse to at various points in this discussion. 2 The Introduction to my book has indicated, already, some reservations concerning Andrew J. Mitchell’s (2010) Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Rather than addressing Heidegger’s sustained and hugely complex argument concerning sculpture in ‘Art and Space’, he prefers to deal with relevant sculptors on the basis of a synthesis of Heideggerian ideas. Some quite interesting points in relation to individual sculptors are made, but Mitchell’s approach does no justice to sculpture as an artifactual phenomenon. And, as noted in my Introduction, he does not consider the intimate link between the progression of Heidegger’s argument and the elaboration of the sculpture’s relation to place. The ‘Art and Space’ essay has not fared well with other commentators either.

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Joseph Kockelmans’ (1986) Heidegger on Art and Artworks does not discuss the essay. Even Julian Young’s otherwise very thorough book on (2001) Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art only mentions it in passing, in a single undeveloped reference (p. 121). Gianni Vattimo suggests that within the ‘Kehre’ or turn in Heidegger’s philosophy the ‘Art and Space’ essay ‘signals the climactic moment of a process of rediscovery of “spatiality” by Heidegger’. Vattimo explores this in general terms without much clarifying the distinctive role which Heidegger assigns to sculpture. In particular, he does not address the arguments showing that sculpture involves an overcoming of spatiality. See Gianni Vattimo, ‘Ornament/Monument’, in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, p. 155. A more systematic analysis of transformations in Heidegger’s thinking about space can be found in Edward Casey (1997) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, pp. 243–284. Casey shows how a changed conception of the significance of space is decisive for the logical and metaphysical aspects of Heidegger’s thought, as well as for his understanding of art. He discusses the ‘Art and Space’ essay briefly (pp. 282–283), acknowledging its importance, but only offering a few comments concerning Heidegger’s account of place, and none at all concerning the importance of sculpture. Alexandro Vallega’s (2003) Heidegger and the Issue of Space, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, does not analyse ‘Art and Space’ in significant detail, and is restricted in the same broad terms as Casey. See Leach, Rethinking Architecture, p. 106. Ibid., p. 105. This example is developed perceptively in Pauline von Bonsdorff (1998) The Human Habitat: Aesthetic and Axiological Perspectives, Jyvaskyla, International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, pp. 212–213. Leach, Rethinking Architecture, p. 121. Ibid., p. 122. Heidegger gives up rather too easily on the different ways of conceptualizing space. Ernst Cassirer, in contrast, emphasizes that space is capable of being conceptualized in new ways in different places and times, and in different contexts – such as those of physics and art. Hence, a key to space’s special status may be its character as a symbolic form which is amenable to different articulations. For more on this, see Cassirer’s treatment of space throughout Language, vol. 1, of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1966), trans. R. Manheim, New Haven and London, Yale University Press. Leach, Rethinking Architecture, p. 122. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid. Ibid. Though it does not seem to have been noted in the literature before, this linkage of place and individual thing is basically derived from Aristotle’s theory of place as set out in Book IV, Chapter 4, of the Physics. There we are told that place ‘must be the limit of the containing body, by which the container makes contact with what it contains. By “what it contains” I mean a body which is capable of movement’. See Aristotle (1996), Physics, trans. R. Waterfield, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 87–88. If my interpretation is correct, Heidegger holds that place in the Aristotelian sense, of the limit of the spatial thing, as something which sculpture discloses in a distinctive way. However, it is clear that Heidegger is using place also in

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Notes a relational, non-Aristotelian sense, as a site where Being is disclosed. The problem becomes, then, how to link sculpture to both these senses. I will do this in Parts four and five. Leach, Rethinking Architecture, p. 123. Ibid., pp. 123–124. Ibid., p. 124. See, for example, the key essay by Heidegger (discussed in Chapter 1), namely ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1975) included in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, pp. 15–87. As we saw, the burden of Heidegger’s arguments here fall on the relation of ‘world’ and ‘earth’. That he does not make this same relation the direct means of argument in “Art and Space” might be explained by using one of the main examples considered in “The Origin” essay, namely that of the Greek temple (p. 48). The temple is a focus for communal activity and divine presence – its creation opens up a ‘world’ of meaning. However, this dimension is inseparable from our sense of the materiality and quiddity of the temple’s stone and metal. Through seeing these materials worked or arranged into ‘world’-meaning, we sense them, simultaneously, as an expression of primal site – an ‘earth’ that exceeds human artifice and which (in its inexhaustiveness and relative resistance) enables art’s distinctive mode of world-disclosure. Now while Heidegger emphasizes the inseparability of world and earth, he also emphasizes that it is based on continuing strife. In art, the world becomes through physically altering the earth, but, whatever form the earth is given thereby, its own character always ‘juts through’ and, in some respects, resists this formative activity in a positive way. The key problematic in the ‘Art and Space’ essay, however, concerns the relation between space and sculpture. This relation does not involve inseparability and continuing strife, but rather an overcoming of space by sculpture. Hence, no matter how fundamental the world–earth pairing is for art per se, Heidegger might have felt obliged to understate it in ‘Art and Space’ because it would not be the best way of expressing the decisive relation between space and sculpture. (It is worth noting, in passing, that Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place, pp. 265–269, offers an interesting discussion of the world–earth relation which positions it in terms of Heidegger’s broader philosophical tendencies from the late 1920s on.) An influential discussion of the transition from Modern to Postmodern sculpture can be found in Rosalind Krauss (1986) “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modern Myths, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 276–290. Krauss claims that the nature of sculpture has been shifted from certain kinds of object to that of modes of cultural intervention. Significantly, she does not mention the three-dimensional status of sculpture anywhere in the essay. My point, however, is that (despite transformations in the concept of making and the items to which the term sculpture is applied) working with, or upon, three-dimensional forms has a meaning which exceeds their historically specific contexts. Pauline von Bonsdorff, The Human Habitat, pp. 119–120 and 211–214, offers a brilliant theory of place which, in some respects, is more nuanced and incisive than Heidegger’s. In particular, she gives sensitive emphases to the importance of temporality, and the subjective aspects of place – emphases which are also found (in a somewhat blunter form) in my own approach. The best recent discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of the temple is in Babette Babich’s “From Van Gogh’s Museum to the Temple at Bassae: Heidegger’s Truth of Art and Schapiro’s Art History” (2003) in Culture, Theory, and Critique, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 151–169. See also note 17 in the present essay.

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24 My approach in the arguments which follow is inspired by Heidegger’s essay ‘The Thing’ (1971) in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and ed. Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper and Row, pp. 185–182. 25 I also explore this issue at great length in Chapter 6 of Phenomenology of the Visual Arts. 26 As far as I can tell, Heidegger’s use of the term ‘Gods’ constellates around the way in which certain places or activities seem to transcend their particular finite natures by acting as foci for the disclosure of Being and a sense of the recurrent character of such disclosure.

Chapter 5 1 Study of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of painting benefits enormously from a volume entitled The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited and introduced by Galen A. Johnson (1993) Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press. This book brings together upgraded translations of the three most relevant essays by Merleau-Ponty, and offers excellent introductions to them individually, written by Johnson himself. There is also a set of useful general essays by other authors. However, many of these essays exemplify also one of the major problems in Merleau-Ponty scholarship. His key terms – such as ‘flesh’, reversibility and ‘depth’ – are rather cryptic in their formulation. This leads Merleau-Ponty’s interpreters to be content, mainly, with describing his arguments from different viewpoints, and/or talking in terms that sometimes amount to pastiche, or to no more than comparing and contrasting Merleau-Ponty’s ideas with those of other thinkers (notably Sartre and Heidegger). 2 For an account of their development, see Johnson’s extensive individual introductions in the first three chapters of The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ibid., pp. 3–55. 3 Neither Merleau-Ponty nor his interpreters negotiate this. A version of the problem also distorts Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the historicity of painting, leading him to neglect the role of the comparative horizon of historical difference around which individual styles constellate. I shall explore this in later parts of the chapter. 4 Of the essays in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, Linda Singer’s offers the most satisfying critical engagement, and Johnson indicates some promising potential avenues of critique. The only potentially radical challenge to Merleau-Ponty’s approach in that volume, however, consists of two philosophically slight and hugely dogmatic texts by J.-F. Lyotard which deal with Merleau-Ponty mainly in passing. Lyotard tells us, for example, that ‘I have renounced the folly of unity, the folly of supplying the ultimate cause in a unitary discourse, the fantasy of the origin’ (p. 310). We are also told with insistent certainty that ‘No one knows what “language” Being understands, which it speaks or to which it can be referred. No one even knows whether there is only one Being or many, and whether there is only one language of Being or many.’ For Lyotard, artworks illustrate these points – they show that ‘Being or beings do not reveal themselves, they present tiny universes with each work. They essay and make Micrologies, that babble, huff and puff, and are envious of one another’ (p. 333). Lyotard’s own treatment of these points are, however, self-contradictory, in that, in order to be formulated (let alone affirmed with insistent certainty), their deconstructive rhetoric and sceptical dogma logically presuppose unities of the same order as those which they are denying. This is because language and all truth claims

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Notes rely on the following of rules. In order to follow rules, there has to be a broader unity in terms of how the subject engages with the world. These centre on the achieved coordination of the body’s sensori-motor capacities. Lyotard, however, does not consider these, and is content to dismiss Merleau-Ponty’s theory of painting as mere yearning for a return to the Mother. Even if that were correct, it would of course be entirely irrelevant to the truth-value of Merleau-Ponty’s arguments. Indeed, as well as generally contradicting himself, Lyotard reduces the human subject to the status of a kind of disembodied magazine reader driven mainly by the desire for new stimuli. The role of the body in cognition is left entirely unexplained, and also that of the achieved continuity of culture. However, what Lyotard ignores, Merleau-Ponty engages with, and explains in the most stimulating ways. Merleau-Ponty (1973) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith with revisions by Forrest Williams, London, Routledge Kegan-Paul, p. 6. See, for example, the opening section of ‘Eye and Mind’, especially pp. 121–123 (in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Heidegger has similar reservations about scientific knowledge in his essay ‘The Age of the World-Picture’ included in (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York, Harper and Row. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 170. Ibid., pp. 333–334. ‘Eye and Mind’ in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 124–125. Merleau-Ponty (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, p. 137. Ibid., p. 142. For a different interpretation of flesh, see Galen Johnson’s introduction to ‘Eye and Mind’ in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 47–49. He says that ‘reversibility is an aesthetic rather than a logical phenomenon and does not imply the symmetry of subject and object, their substitutability in meaning’ (p. 48). Now Johnson is right that there is an aesthetic aspect, but reversibility is mainly an ontological reality – where two factors are part of one another’s definition. I try to develop this approach in the subsequent. The real difference between Johnson’s reading and mine is, I think, that he makes too much of Merleau-Ponty’s rather strained analogy with mirrors. As I understand it, the deconstructionist ploy holds that since language must be analysed as an unending play of difference and deferral, this calls into question the reality of meaning, presence and the like. But we must recall that for Merleau-Ponty, analysis breaks up primary lived-unity, and tries to reconstitute it through an artificial re-assemblage of the analysed elements. The absurdity of deconstruction is to hold that because this re-assemblage cannot be done, the original unity itself must be called into question. I have criticized this error at great length in Chapter 1 of my (1993) Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, and Chapter 9 of (2002) Philosophy after Postmodernism: Civilized Values and the Scope of Knowledge. ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 118. Ibid., pp. 106–107. One assumes that if perception were based on habitualized secondary expression, the embodied subject would be unable to deal with the demands of unexpected stimuli – and there is surely an element of the unexpected in every perceptual situation. ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 97. ‘Eye and Mind’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 125. Ibid., pp. 125–126.

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20 ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 91. 21 Ibid., p. 93. 22 ‘Eye and Mind’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 128. 23 Ibid., p. 127. 24 A similar relation to Merleau-Ponty’s visible/invisible, pairing can be found in Adolf Hildebrand’s account of the relation between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘external’ forms. See his The Problem of Form in Fine Art included in (1993) Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–93, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherious Ikonomou, Santa Monica, CA, Getty Research Institute. 25 ‘Eye and Mind’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 145. 26 Ibid., p. 145. 27 Ibid., p. 141. 28 Ibid., p. 143. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 144. 31 Ibid., p. 148. 32 Ibid., p. 147. 33 Ibid. 34 Included in J.-P. Sartre (2004) Essays on Aesthetics, London, Peter Owen. 35 For example, in part I of ‘Eye and Mind’, Merleau-Ponty underlines approvingly the irrelevance of Cezanne’s involvement with contemporary events. See The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 123. 36 ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 61–62. 37 Ibid., p. 62. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., pp. 63–64. 40 Ibid., p. 65. 41 Ibid. 42 ‘Eye and Mind’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 141. 43 The World of Perception, p. 66. 44 Ibid., p. 53. 45 Ibid., p. 54. 46 Ibid., p. 56. 47 Ibid., p. 95. 48 The criterion of the aesthetic – under most definitions of it – concerns idioms of structure in how things appear to the senses. If this structure is enjoyable for its own sake, rather than for its practical or theoretical significance, then it has an aesthetic character. 49 ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 64. 50 I have outlined the significance of abstract art in great detail in Phenomenology of the Visual Arts, Chapter 5. In that discussion, I follow Merleau-Ponty’s basic approach, albeit considerably refined and extended. In the present work, I have abandoned the term ‘contextual space’ in favour of ‘transperceptual space’, and have revised my description of its main levels. 51 ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 64. 52 I explore this in great detail in Chapter 2 of Phenomenology of the Visual Arts. 53 Again, see Phenomenology of the Visual Arts, Chapter 2.

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54 ‘Expression and the Child’s Drawing’ in Merleau-Ponty (1974) The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, London, Heineman p. 149. Merleau-Ponty’s use of the locution ‘two-dimensional perspective’ is odd, but the context of its use indicates, clearly, that he is thinking of ‘classical’ perspective. 55 Ibid., p. 149. 56 Ibid., pp. 149–150. 57 Given this, it is slightly of curiosity that Galen Johnson devotes so much space to it in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 27–31. 58 See, for example, ‘Eye and Mind’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 126. 59 I discuss these in detail in Chapter 2 of Phenomenology of the Visual Arts. 60 ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 99. 61 Ibid., p. 97. 62 Merleau-Ponty may have Malraux’s notion of the ‘imaginary museum’ in mind here, but the significance of the museum’s presentation of art has broader significance also. 63 A strong and influential representative of this tendency is Griselda Pollock. 64 ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 100. 65 ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 96. 66 Ibid., p. 117. 67 Merleau-Ponty (1970) Themes from the Lectures at the College du France, trans. John O’Neill, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, p. 42. 68 ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 101. 69 The notion is explored in most of my books on aesthetics. See especially Chapter 4 of (2002) The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 6 1 See, for example, Rudolf Arnheim (1974) The Psychology of Visual Perception: Psychology of the Creative Eye, San Diego, CA, University of California Press. The approach taken in the present chapter attempts a critical reconfiguration of Lacan’s thought in the direction of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology – but, at the same time, identifies vital emphases not found in Merleau-Ponty. An interesting strategy with some similarities to this can be found in Stephen Melville’s ‘Division of the Gaze, or, Remarks on the Color and Tenor of contemporary “Theory” ’, included in Vision in Context; Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight (1996), ed. T. Brennan, and M. Jay, New York and London, Routledge, pp. 101–116. 2 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (1977), trans. A. Sheridan, London, Tavistock Publications, p. 2. 3 Ibid., p. 196. 4 Ibid., p. 103. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 126. 7 Ibid., p. 154. 8 Ibid., p. 285.

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9 Ibid., p. 65. 10 Ibid., p. 17. 11 Jacques Lacan (1978) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Norton and Co, p. 85. 12 Ibid., p. 92. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 96. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 106. 17 Ibid., p. 108. 18 Ibid., p. 101. 19 Ibid., p. 112. 20 Ibid., p. 116. 21 Ibid., pp. 117–118. 22 Ibid., p. 116. 23 Ibid., p. 115. 24 Ibid., p. 114. 25 Ibid., p. 115. 26 It must be admitted that the idea of developing Lacan without the Freudian dimension would be found problematic by many commentators. For well-argued alternatives which are much more sympathetic to the Freudian Lacan, see, for example, Malcolm Bowie’s (1991) Lacan, London, Fontana Press, and Slavoi Žižek’s (1991) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA, and London, MIT Press. Žižek’s book is rather more advanced in conceptual terms than the term Introduction would suggest. His treatment of the relation between artistic form and the Real is especially original. 27 For a general account of perspective which negotiates all the key literature in a lucid but critical way, see James Elkins’ (1985) The Poetics of Perspective, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press. Hubert Damisch’s (1994) The Origins of Perspective, trans. J. Goodman, Cambridge, MA, and London, MIT Press, is somewhat more opaque in terms of exposition but explores the broader significance of perspective in a decisive way through analogy with the third-person use of language. The classic discussion remains Erwin Panofsky’s (1991) Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Woods, New York, Zone Books. Panofsky links mathematical perspective to a correspondence with the ‘optical impression’ but the problematics of this are noted rightly by both Elkins and Damisch. I have explored the topic is great detail in Chapter 3 of my book (2002) The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press. See also Chapter 2 of Phenomenology of the Visual Arts. 28 This theme is explored throughout The Transhistorical Image. 29 For a useful discussion along these lines, see T. J. Clark’s (1984) The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Age of Manet and His Followers, London, Thames and Hudson, p. 17.

Chapter 7 1 Mikel Dufrenne (1973) The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward Casey, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press. The only significant general

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Notes extended discussion of Dufrenne that I know of in English is Eugene F. Kaelin’s rambling and very negative appendix to (1962) An Existentialist Aesthetic, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 359–385. Ibid., p. 346. Ibid., p. 247. In this, Dufrenne is extending Kant’s doctrine of the schematism, so that it does justice to the equi-primordiality of space in human experience. For Kant’s doctrine, see (1998) The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 271–277. See Dufrenne, ibid., p. 275. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s rather torturous discussion in part III of ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson, pp. 130–139. Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, p. 276. Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., pp. 276–277. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., pp. 278–279. Ibid., pp. 277–278. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 279. Dufrenne, Ibid., p.280 Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 289. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 289. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 286–287. Ibid., p. 287. Ibid., p. 288. Throughout Dufrenne’s discussions – especially of colour theory – he employs analogies with music and musicians very persistently. These are of limited help, insofar as to establish them would be just as problematic as proving his main arguments concerning colour in painting. Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, p. 291. Ibid., p. 292. Ibid., pp. 292–293. Ibid., p. 293. For Wolfflin, linear and painterly are terms that pick out emphases on contour, or on the assembling of mass from more patchwork elements, in a comparative context. He is also committed to the more contentious view that they are ‘categories of beholding’. For details of the linear–painterly pairing, and categories of beholding, see his (1932) The Principles of Art History, trans. M. Hottinger, New York, Dover Publications, pp. 18–32 and 226–237, respectively. Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, p. 295.

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Ibid., pp. 295–296. Ibid., p. 296. Ibid. Ibid., p. 298. Ibid., pp. 298–299. Ibid., p. 299. Eugene F. Kaelin is very wary of Dufrenne’s notion of the ‘quasi-subject’ in his book Existentialist Aesthetic: Theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1962. He suggests that through this notion, ‘Dufrenne is expressing in quasi-metaphysical terms what every good critic has known for a long time: that the object expresses whatever is expressed in a work of art, and that the author’s intention and a perceiver’s reaction may be falsified, as criteria of judgment, by reconsideration of the object’s internal structures, in a word, that aesthetic perception is at its best always object-centered’ (Kaelin, Existentialist Aesthetic, p. 385). It is difficult to know what to make of this remark, since, as far as I can see, the whole point of Dufrenne’s concept is to emphasize the artwork’s link to subjectivity’s foundational role in the constitution of time as a horizon. The basis of Benedetto Croce’s theory is set out best for a modern audience in (1992) The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and the Linguistic in General, trans. Colin Lyas, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. R. G. Collingwood’s (1939) The Principles of Art, Oxford, Clarendon Press, remains the definitive statement of his position. See also Chapter 6 of my (2009) Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame). The position taken there has, however, been modified on the basis of ideas presented in Chapter 2 of the present work. Bergson’s best account of duration is spread throughout his (1978) Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul, and W. Scott Palmer, New York and London, Humanities Press, George Allen & Unwin. See, for example, p. 276. In this respect, see also the conclusion to Chapter 5 of Phenomenology of the Visual Arts. The best account of the Ideal is in Joshua Reynolds’ (1969) Discourses on Art, London, Collier-Macmillan. See especially pp. 58–59 for an account which clearly subordinates colour to the demands of Ideal beauty. At the very least, it is difficult to contest the importance of art theory per se as a mediating factor in the emancipation of colour and painting, and most especially, in the enabling of modernist work.

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Bibliography Aristotle (1996) Physics, trans. R. Waterfield, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Arnheim, Rudolf (1974) The Psychology of Visual Perception: Psychology of the Creative Eye, San Diego, CA, University of California Press. Babich, Babette (2003) ‘From Van Gogh’s Museum to the Temple at Bassae: Heidegger’s Truth of Art and Schapiro’s Art History’, Culture, Theory, and Critique, 44(2): 151–169. Benjamin, Walter (1998) Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, London, Verso, pp. 185–204. Bergson, Henri (1978) Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, New York and London, Humanities Press, George Allen & Unwin. Bernasconi, Robert (1993) Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press. von Bonsdorff, Pauline (1998) The Human Habitat: Aesthetic and Axiological Perspectives, Jyvaskyla, International Institute of Applied Aesthetics. Borsch-Supan, Helmut (1974) Caspar David Friedrich, London and New York, Thames and Hudson. Bowie, Malcolm (1991) Lacan, London, Fontana Press. Brennan, T. and M. Jay, eds (1996) Vision in Context; Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, New York and London, Routledge. Casey, Edward S. (1997) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press. Cassirer, Ernst (1966) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Language, vol. 1, trans. R. Manheim, New Haven and London, Yale University Press. Clark, T. J. (1984) The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Age of Manet and His Followers, London, Thames and Hudson. Collingwood, R. G. (1939) The Principles of Art, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Croce, Benedetto (1992) The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and the Linguistic in General, trans. Colin Lyas, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Crowther, Paul (1993) Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Oxford, Clarendon Press. — (2002) Philosophy after Postmodernism: Civilized Values and the Scope of Knowledge, London and New York, Routledge. — (2003) The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. — (2007) Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt, Oxford, Oxford University Press. — (2009) Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame), Stanford, Stanford University Press. — (2012) The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style, London and New York, Continuum.

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Damisch, Hubert (1994) The Origins of Perspective, trans. J. Goodman, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Danto, Arthur (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Davey, Nicholas (2003) ‘Sitting Uncomfortably: Gadamer’s Approach to Portraiture’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 34(3): 231–246. Dillon, Martin (1998) Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press. Elkins, James (1985) The Poetics of Perspective, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1975) Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel, London, Sheed and Ward. van Gerwen, Rob, ed. (2001) Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1971) ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper and Row. — (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York, Harper and Row. Hopkins, Robert (1998) Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ikonomou, Eleftherious and Mallgrave, Harry Francis, eds (1993) The Problem of Form in Fine Art in Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–93, Getty Research Institute. Johnson, Galen A. (2010) The Retrieval of the Beautiful; Thinking through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press. Johnson, Galen A., ed. and introduced by (1993) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press. Kaelin, Eugene F. (1962) An Existentialist Aesthetic, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press. Kant, Immanuel (1987) The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar, New York, Hackett and Co. — (1998) The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kenaan, Hagi (2004) ‘What Philosophy Owes a Work of Art’, Symposium, 8(3): 587–606. Kockelmans, Joseph J. (1986) Heidegger on Art and Artworks, Boston, MA, Martinus Nijhoff, and Dordrecht, Lancaster. Krauss, Rosalind (1986) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modern Myths, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Lacan, Jacques (1977) Ecrits, trans. A. Sheridan, London, Tavistock Publications. — (1978) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Norton and Co. Leach, Neil, ed. (2002) Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, London, Routledge. Lopes, Dominic (1996) Understanding Pictures, Oxford, Clarendon Press. — (2005) Sight and Sensibility, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphons Lingis, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press. — (1970) Themes from the Lectures at the College du France, trans. John O’Neill, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press.

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— (1973) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith with revisions by Forrest Williams, London, Routledge Kegan-Paul. — (1974) The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, London, Heineman. — (2008) The World of Perception, trans. T. Baldwin, London and New York, Routledge. Mitchell, Andrew J. (2010) Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2005) The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort, New York, Fordham University Press. Panofsky, Erwin (1991) Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Woods, New York, Zone Books. Pollock, Griselda (2003) Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art, London and New York, Routledge. Ranciere, Jacques (2007) The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York, Verso. Reynolds, Joshua (1969) Discourses on Art, London, Collier-Macmillan. Schapiro, Meyer (1994) Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, New York, George Braziler. Schier, Flint (1987) Deeper into Pictures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Toadvine, Ted (2009) Merleau-Ponty and the Philosophy of Nature, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press. Vallega, Alexandro (2003) Heidegger and the Issue of Space, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press. Vogel, Susan M. (1997) Baule: African Art/Western Eyes, New Haven and London, Yale University Press. Walton, Kendal (1993) Mimesis and Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Wentworth, Nigel (2001) Phenomenology of Painting, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wolfflin, Heinrich (1932) The Principles of Art History, trans. M. Hottinger, New York, Dover Publications. Wollheim, Richard (1973) On Art and the Mind, London, Allen Lane. — (1980) Art and Its Objects (Second Edition), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. — (1987) Painting as an Art, London and New York, Thames and Hudson. Yohe, James (2002) Hans Hofmann, New York, Rizzoli. Young, Julian (2001) Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Žižek, Slavoi (1991) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

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Index aesthetic appreciation 56 attention 159 attitude 53 character 32, 74, 98 concepts 54 criteria 99, 163 effect(s) 58, 105, 140 empathy 134 engagement 24, 156 enjoyment 1 experience 2, 58, 67, 98, 112, 154 forms 28 idea 56 idealization 77, 135, 162 image 113 judgement(s) 163–5 meaning 27 mode of empathy 133–4 object(s) 138–9, 142, 146–7, 158 perception 74, 148 response(s) 27, 35 significance 59, 106, 148, 164 the 1, 4, 7, 27, 80, 112, 164, 168n. 8, 171n. 31, 179n. 48 value 108 aesthetics analytic 2, 4, 9, 28 Impressionist 94 Marxist 1 of painting 23 philosophical 166 post-analytic phenomenological 7 allusive character 75 images 75 representation 100, 155 anamorphic image 122 projection of a skull 122 appearance(s)

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of distance 101 distorted 122 immediate 35, 39 in immediate vision 162 individual 163 ‘inhuman’ 99 of movement 102, 150 objective 113 phenomenal 24 of pictorial media 111 possible 33, 37, 50, 55 spatial 136, 154 standard 35 subject matter’s 102 three-dimensional 31 of truth 54 see also Heidegger, Martin virtual 89, 101, 160 visible 88, 106 visual 2, 38–9, 87, 89–90, 103, 155, 164 the work’s 21–2, 25–6, 74 Aristotle 157, 175n. 16 Arnheim, Rudolf 115, 180n. 1 art abstract 6, 28, 30–44, 161, 179n. 50 assemblage 5, 72–3 minimal 5, 30, 32–4, 38, 40, 44 minimalist 75 assemblage (art) 5, 72–3 autographic character of traditional visual art 58 avant-garde 176n. 21 Babich, Babette 176n. 23 Being 2–4, 6–7, 43, 46, 48–9, 51–4, 58–67, 70, 73, 75, 77–8, 79–83, 87, 92–3, 97, 106, 108, 113, 119, 130, 135–6, 155, 161–3, 165–6, 176n. 16, 177n. 26, 177n. 4 Bergson, Henri 141, 155–6, 183n. 45 Bergsonism 165

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Bernasconi, Robert 172n. 1, 173n. 18, 174n. 22 body the 17, 19, 178 Bonsdorff, Pauline von 175n. 4, 176n. 22 Bowie, Malcolm 181n. 26 Brett, John Ynys Mon 149–50 brushstroke(s) 19, 40, 109–10, 123–5, 141, 144, 149, 156. canon 168n. 7, 171n. 32 canonic significance 59 values 108 Casey, Edward 173n. 7, 175n. 2, 176n. 20, 181n. 1 Cassirer, Ernst 175n. 7 Cezanne, Paul 13–14, 19–20, 80, 90, 93–103, 105–7, 113, 135, 144, 157, 172n. 1, 179n. 35 Auvers, Panoramic View (c. 1874) 13, 19 The Black Clock (1870) 19 ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’ 93–7 see also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Le Chateau de Medan (c. 1880) 13–14, 19 Mont. St. Victoire 19 Portrait of Geffroy 99–101 Portrait of Vallier 95 The Railway Cutting (1870) 19 Clark, T. J. 181n. 29 cognitive stock 9–10, 18 Collingwood, R. G. 149, 183n. 43 comparative critical context 159 diachronic history of a medium 59, 173n. 18 dimension of style 59, 163 historical criteria/ factors 4, 78, 116, 160, 163 historical dimension 58 historical mediation 7 history 59 horizon (of stylistic originality) 7, 22, 24–5, 112, 164–6, 177n. 3 composition 22, 36–7, 39, 143, 148–9, 154 compositional

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activity 148–9, 152 aspects 11 balance 40 coming-to-be 153 correctness 37 creation 141–2, 147 emergence 150, 154 factors 25, 142 features 37 means 44, 152 movement 140 order 43 origins 156 processes 156 sense 145–6 strategy 31, 37, 58, 150 structures and proportions 152, 156 unity 145 concealment (Heidegger) 51–2 see also unconcealment (Heidegger) Constable, John Hadleigh Castle (1829) 17 consumerism 5 consumerization 134 contextualism 46, 54 contextualist approaches 133 art historians 56 criticisms 7 see also Schapiro, Meyer createdness 45, 52–4, 58, 173n. 18 see also Heidegger, Martin Croce, Benedetto 149, 183n. 43 Cubism 38, 88, 102–3, 112 Cubists, the 96 Damisch, Hubert 181n. 27 Danto, Arthur 1 Davey, Nicholas 174n. 23 depth (perceptual, pictorial) 177n. 1, 29–31, 33, 80, 85–7, 89–92, 94–5, 97, 101, 103, 105, 108, 113, 147, 149 Derrida, Jacques 84, 118, 120, 128, 168n. 4, 174n. 22 Desire (Lacan) 7, 117–19, 122–6, 129–34, 162 Dillon, Martin 169n. 11 disclosure 7, 34, 48, 50–1, 53–4, 59, 62, 74, 78, 86, 125, 158, 162, 176n. 20, 177n. 26

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Index drawing 11, 26, 34, 36, 50–1, 68, 85, 111, 118, 124, 137–8, 141, 143–7, 149, 158–9, 180n. 54 Dufrenne, Mikel 2, 3, 6, 137–50, 152–60, 162–4 duration 88, 119, 138–42, 145, 147–9, 153–6, 183n. 45 earth (Heidegger) 4, 45, 47–53, 57–9, 67–70, 162, 173n. 7, 176n. 20 edge (of the picture or canvas) 10, 34, 50, 101, 104, 112 effective historical difference 59, 112, 136 electronically generated (virtual realities) 76 Elkins, James 182n. 7 embodiment 7, 56, 64, 66–7, 75, 78, 80–2, 110, 116, 125–6, 128, 132–5, 147, 156, 162–3 empathy 24, 133–4, 179n. 24 equipment (Heidegger) 46–9, 53, 57, 76 evil eye 124, 132 ex-centric self/ structure of the subject (Lacan) 119, 127 ex-centricity 130, 136 expression primary (Merleau-Ponty) 84–5, 111–12 secondary (Merleau-Ponty) 84, 112, 178n. 16 expressive achievement 58 character (of painting and sculpture) 4, 22, 26 dimension (of pictorial representation) 24, 115 features 24 form 36 gestures 156 meaning 27, 82 perception 9, 16–17, 21–2, 86–7, 90, 93, 113 power 84 properties of painting 2 qualities 26, 50 significance (of pictures) 2, 18, 45, 111, 168n. 8 states 149

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191 structure of the visible (MerleauPonty) 97

figurative art 38–9 component 36 and non-figurative concepts 30–1 objects 40 paintings 151 works 44 figure 30, 34, 50, 52–3, 102, 111, 131, 135, 144 flesh (Merleau-Ponty) 4, 7, 81, 83, 86, 88–90, 92, 95, 108, 113, 162, 169n. 12, 177n. 1, 178n. 12 foreshortening 103, 105, 159 formalism 108, 155 formalist approaches to art 45, 173n. 17 notion of the aesthetic attitude 53 Francesco, Piero Della Flagellation 131 free-standing format 50 sculpture 61, 74 works 74 fresco 51, 103, 144, 158–9 Freud, Sigmund 117, 126 Freudian connections 116 dimension 181n. 6 Friedrich, C. D. 22, 25 Large Enclosure Near Dresden (1832) 17 futurist ‘lines of force’ 91 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 56, 174n. 23 Gaze, the (Lacan) 115–16, 120, 122–6, 129–36 Gericault, Theodore Epsom Derby 88 Gerwen, Rob van 170n. 1 gestural and composed character 159 (and compositional) activity 5, 68, 148–9, 152 compositional emergence 142, 154 and compositional movement 140 and compositional origins 148, 156

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and compositional process 156 creation 141 factor 141 and linguistic exchanges 134 painting 85 gesture 7, 40, 84–6, 89, 100, 108–11, 115, 124–5, 132–6, 140–1, 148–50, 152, 154, 156, 162 God 105–6 Guercino 13 harmony 37, 50–2, 59, 137, 143, 145, 147–8, 159 Hegel, G. W. F. 173n. 17 Heidegger, Martin 2–4, 6–7, 45–78, 80, 111, 115, 120, 135, 138, 144, 147, 162–4 Hildebrand, Adolf 179n. 24 historical difference 59, 111–12, 135–6, 160, 177n. 3 historicity 80, 107–8, 111–12, 162, 177n. 3 Hofmann, Hans 34 Pompeii 30–1 Hogarth, William 14 Holbein, Hans 55, 121–2 The Ambassadors 121 Ann of Cleves 55 Hopkins, Robert 168n. 5 image(s) 1, 4–6, 10–11, 18, 21–3, 26, 28, 30, 50–1, 54–6, 58, 75–6, 89, 99, 102–6, 110, 113, 116, 120, 122, 127, 130, 132, 154, 163 imaginary, the (Lacan) 119–20, 132 imagination 4, 56, 105–6, 141 imaginative 24, 33, 36, 38, 47–8, 56, 58, 75, 132–3, 137–8, 141–2, 147–50, 152, 154, 156–7, 159 immobile 87 arts 142 figures 102 finished object 147 thing 156 work 148 immobility 102, 140–1, 156 installation (art) 72–3 intentions 10–11, 15–16, 19–25, 28, 33–4, 36–7, 55, 84

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interpretation 17–18, 21, 31, 41, 47, 50, 56–8, 65, 67, 76, 84, 87–9, 93, 99, 103–4, 111, 130, 144, 149, 165 intrinsic fascination (of painting) 27, 134, 157, 167n. 1 invisible, the (Merleau-Ponty) 88, 162 Johnson, Galen 169n. 12, 177n. 1, 178n. 12, 180n. 57 Kaelin, Eugene F. 182n. 1, 183n. 42 Kant, Immanuel 3–4, 56, 138, 182n. 4 Kelly, Ellsworth 44 Kenaan, Hagi 45, 57 Klee, Paul 91. 96, 172n. 1 Kline, Franz Meryon 40–1 Kockelmans, Josepth J. 172n. 1, 173n. 20, 175n. 2 Krauss, Rosalind 176n. 21 Lacan, Jacques 113, 115–36, 147, 162–4 Leach, Neil 173n. 7 light 19–22, 24, 37, 41–3, 49–50, 54, 66, 73, 85, 87, 89, 92–4, 122, 137, 143, 145–7, 150–1, 157–9 logocentrism 120 Lopes, Dominic 168n. 5 Lyotard, J.-F. 177–8n. 4 Les Immateriaux 73 magnitude 23, 62 making-room (Heidegger) 65–6 Malevich, Kasimir 38 Supremus 43 Malraux, Andre 92, 180n. 62 Masaccio 112 Tribute Money 131 Matisse, Henri 91, 96, 141 melodic 143, 146 melody 137, 146–7, 150, 152 Melville, Stephen 180n. 1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 2–4, 6–7, 34–5, 79–116, 120, 129–30, 135, 138–9, 144, 147, 157–8, 162–4 Michelangelo David 70–1, 74 mirror-stage (Lacan) 127

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Index Mitchell, Andrew 169n. 11, 174n. 2 mobility 74, 104 virtual 140 modal plasticity 106 modernist painting 103, 157–8 works 131, 139 Mondrian, Piet 38, 41–3 Monet, Claude 19–20 Morris, Robert Slab 75 music 58, 137, 141, 147 Nancy, Jean-Luc 167n. 2 Newman Barnett Vir Heroicus Sublimis 32, 43–4 non-figurative concepts 30–1 painting 92 non-stylistic (Wollheim) 12–14 Oblak, Mojca Frames 151–2 oil painting 138, 144, 158–60 Olitski, Jules 44 ontological basis of the picture 56 bonding 82, 84–5 complex 27 concept 105 difference 6 dynamics 162 emancipation 157–8 exchange 49 factors 4, 58, 78–9, 112, 163, 166 features 89 grounding 44, 99 implications 81 level of emergence to perception 89 order 83 possibility 159 potential 157 realization 137–8 reciprocity 130, 161 self-sufficiency 5 significance 86–7, 106, 111, 162–3 status 7, 64

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193

structure 98, 108, 113 switch 103 truth 4, 163 unity 153 ontology 2, 6, 27–8, 46, 68, 82, 96, 100–1, 107–8, 111, 115, 120, 147, 162 optical illusion 31, 33–4, 36–7, 39–41, 44, 100, 151, 161, 171n. 6 originality 7, 59, 171n. 31 Other, the (Lacan) 117, 119, 122, 124–6, 130, 132–3 Panofsky, Erwin 181n. 27 paradigmatic historical difference 112 Parker, Cornelia Cold Dark Matter 73 perspective 80–2, 84–6, 93–4, 96–9, 101, 103–8, 113, 130–1, 139, 142, 158–9, 162 phallus 117, 128 phenomenological 2–7, 11, 16, 28, 30, 44, 50, 52, 60, 93, 113, 149, 161, 164–6 phenomenology 3–4, 6, 9, 29, 80, 82–3, 90, 108, 120, 129, 137, 161, 165 existential 2, 129 post-analytic 5, 166 philosophy 6, 46, 58, 60–2, 80, 126, 157 analytic 1, 4–5 of art/ painting 4, 7, 9, 54, 57 continental 4 Kant’s 3 photograph(s) 88, 94, 102, 162 photography 88, 102, 154 physicality (of the medium) 5, 50, 154, 156, 173n. 7 pictorial object (Dufrenne) 137, 139–43, 145–9, 152–3, 155 picture-plane 19–20, 135, 139 place 7, 61–78 elemental 67–70, 74–5, 162 relational 65–6, 69, 74, 77 planar 20, 30, 99, 101–5, 139, 162 planarity 101, 106 plane 19–21, 27, 30, 34, 48, 99, 101–3, 111, 123, 135, 139, 146–7, 154 Pollock, Griselda 168n. 3, 180n. 62

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Pollock, Jackson 38 Yellow Islands 40 post-analytic 4–7, 161, 166 Postmodern 69, 72–3, 76 Postmodernism 168n. 4, 178n. 13 presentness 102, 104, 106, 162 presumption of virtuality 33–4, 44, 161 projection 33, 50–1, 56, 119–20, 122, 125, 127, 131–2, 153–4 quasi-subject (Dufrenne) 137, 147–9, 154 Rae, Fiona 41–3 Night Vision 41–2 Ranciere, Jacques 167n. 2 Real, the (Lacan) 119–20, 128 reciprocal 49, 68–9, 76, 82, 92, 126, 131, 136, 138, 142 reciprocity 20, 23, 87, 99, 102, 106, 109–10, 112, 122–4, 127, 130, 133, 138, 147, 161–2, 165–6 reification 116, 127–30 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 14 The Bathers 86 reversibility (Merleau-Ponty) 7, 80, 82–3, 86, 89, 92, 95, 108, 162 see also flesh (Merleau-Ponty) Reynolds, Joshua 183n. 47 rhythm(s) 49, 137, 145–7, 159 rift (Heidegger) 52 Sartre, J.-P. 93, 105 scanning (perceptual) 102, 137, 139–40, 149, 152 Schapiro, Meyer 7, 45, 54–7 schema 127, 146–7 schemata 138, 142–3, 146–7, 158–9 schematism (Kant) 182n. 4 Schier, Flint 168n. 5 scopic 120, 122, 125, 129 sculpture 50–1, 60, 61–78, 154, 156–7, 161–3, 166 seeing-as 6, 29, 32–3, 41, 44 seeing-in 10, 16–17, 21, 29–33, 170n. 1, 6 see also twofoldness

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shape(s) 22, 38–9, 43–5, 50, 52–3, 75–9, 87, 89, 92, 94–5, 101–2, 109, 151, 155 Shaw, John Byam Liston Study for Love (1898) 150–1 signature(s) 15, 18, 20 signified 118–19, 128 signifier 118, 128 Singer, Linda 177n. 4 site-specific (art) 61, 70, 72–3 Smithson, Robert Spiral Jetty 71 space pictorial 31, 46, 50, 96, 123, 132, 135, 140–1, 151, 158 in sculpture 61–78 space-occupancy 5, 156 spatiality 74, 91, 162, 175n. 2 spectator 2, 9, 11, 15–16, 18, 21–2, 23, 30, 56, 140–2, 147–8, 149, 153–4, 157 spectatorial 15, 154 specular ego (Lacan) 116–19, 127, 129–31 style(s) 2, 6, 9, 12–15, 18–22, 24–5, 46, 51, 58–9, 78, 80, 86, 89, 97, 100, 107–8, 110–12, 125, 146, 160–1, 163–6 stylized 14 bonding 86 nature of perception 113 subjective connections of time 148 experience 113 level 161 organization 155 states 149 subjectivity 7, 63, 79–82, 105, 113, 115–36, 157, 183n. 42 embodied 82, 90, 108 technomorphic abstraction/ abstract art 29, 40–1 temporality 7, 61, 70, 124, 137–40, 142, 153, 157, 162 Titian 14 Toadvine, Ted 169n. 11, 14 tradition 12, 108–12, 135

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Index transperceptual space 29–44, 75, 161 the 6 truth 45–60, 62, 64, 66–8, 70, 75, 78–80, 82, 97–9, 103–4, 108–9, 131, 138, 142, 159, 163 Turner, J. M. W. 24–5 Turrell, James Roden Crater 71 twofoldness 6, 10, 21, 27–33, 40, 44, 76, 161, 170n. 1 unconcealment (Heidegger) 53, 58–9, 64, 67 unconscious 118–19, 126–7 Ur-painting 6, 9–12, 16, 18, 22–4, 27–8, 37, 50, 161 Vallega, Alessandro 175n. 2 Van Gogh, Vincent 45, 48, 51, 53–7 A Pair of Shoes 47 Vattimo, Gianni 173n. 7, 175n. 2 Velazquez, Diego 55 video 5, 102

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195

visibility 5, 85–8, 90, 99, 108, 112, 158 visible, the (Merleau-Ponty) 6, 35–6, 80, 83, 87–92, 95–8, 100, 103, 105, 108, 111–12, 162 vision 5–7, 10, 13, 16, 29, 35, 40, 52, 58, 74, 77, 79–113, 115, 120–4, 131–4, 154, 156, 162 Vogel, Susan M. 173n. 10 volume 38–9, 50, 63–4, 67, 77 Walton, Kendall 171n. 6 Wentworth, Nigel 170n. 8 Whiteread, Rachel House 71–2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 21, 32 Wolfflin, Heinrich 146, 182n. 34 Wollheim, Richard 1–3, 5–6, 9–44 world (Heidegger) 4, 45, 47–53, 57–9, 63, 68, 77 Young, Julian 169n. 11, 172n. 1, 173n. 7, 174n. 30, 175n. 2 Zizek, Slavoj 181n. 26

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