The Iconology of Abstraction

Non-figurative Images and the Modern World

Krešimir Purgar, Krešimir Purgar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429557576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This book uncovers how we make meaning of abstraction, both historically and in present times, and examines abstract images as a visual language.

The contributors demonstrate that abstraction is not primarily an artistic phenomenon, but rather arises from human beings' desire to imagine, understand and communicate complex, ineffable concepts in fields ranging from fine art and philosophy to technologies of data visualization, from cartography and medicine to astronomy.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in image studies, visual studies, art history, philosophy and aesthetics.

1 Prolegomena

Why Pictures Are Signs: The Semiotics of (Non)representational Pictures

Winfried Nöth

1.1 Are Pictures Signs?

In the framework of a semiotics that conceives of itself as a theory of culture, it goes without saying that pictures are signs. Nevertheless, this premise has been doubted, mainly by theoreticians of art, who insist in considering their object of study as one that is essentially different from the domain of signs, symbols and meanings.¹ That pictures are not always signs, and even when they are, their sign function is often secondary, has been the argument of a theory of artworks founded in phenomenology.² Its proponents claim that 20th-century nonrepresentational art provides the ultimate evidence of the fact that pictures can no longer be considered as signs. Such pictures do not represent anything. They “show” or “exhibit” nothing but themselves.³

In contrast to such arguments, this chapter develops the thesis that all pictures, including abstract and other nonrepresentational paintings, are signs. Its aim is to show that the arguments against a general semiotics of pictures suffer from the lack of an adequate sign model and have been developed without due consideration of the results and tendencies of visual semiotics.⁴ They ignore research in the semiotics of painting, which has never been restricted to representational pictures and has done much research in nonrepresentational painting, too.⁵

The question of whether pictures are signs can be answered from a terminological or a theoretical point of view. From a terminological point of view, the history of the concept of sign and its equivalent in other languages must be consulted to answer the question of whether the concept of sign is applicable to pictures. From a theoretical point of view, an adequate sign model must be adopted to answer the question. The focus of this chapter is on the theoretical question, but a brief survey of the meaning of the term “sign”, with respect to pictures in European cultural history, will be given for the sake of historical contextualization.

1.2 Terminological Findings

In ancient European semiotics, pictures were not yet among the phenomena enumerated as signs. The Greek Stoics and the Epicureans used the concept of sign in a narrower sense, which covered only indices, such as landmarks, military signals, weather signs, symptoms of disease or signs predicting future events (Meier-Oeser 1997, XVI). With Saint Augustine, the notion of sign went beyond such restrictions to cover also conventional signs, including words. His definition, which states that “a sign is something that presents itself and furthermore something else to the mind”,⁶ was so broad as to be applicable to pictures too. However, in the list of examples of signs that Augustine gives, pictures are not mentioned.

The explicit inclusion of pictures into the class of signs begins with the Scholastics. In his treatise On Signs of 1267, Roger Bacon proposes a typology, according to which pictures [imagines] and paintings [picturae] belong to one of the five main classes of signs.⁷ From the point of modern semiotics, it is interesting to note that the Scholastics defined pictures as natural in contrast to intentionally “given” signs, such as words. Pictures are natural signs because they function as such by their own nature and due to the “correspondence” between the picture and the depicted, not because of the intention of a sign producer, as in conventional signs (On Signs I.1). (Notice that the criteria “by their own nature” and “due to a correspondence” reappear in Peirce’s definition of the iconic sign.) Of course, pictures may be the result of an intention, says Roger Bacon, but it is not this intentionality that makes them signs: “Whether the artist wants it or not, the picture always represents that to which it is similar” (On Signs I.15).⁸

The definition of pictures as natural signs, which sounds strange today, was elaborated by the Iberian late Scholastic semioticians of the 15th and 16th centuries, who introduced the category of the artificial sign [signum artificiale] as a subcategory of the natural sign. Pictures could be both natural and artificial signs because “artificial” meant “produced with art”,⁹ whereas “natural”, as seen above, meant “iconic”. During these centuries, semioticians began to discuss such questions as to whether the picture of something no longer existing, such as the portrait of a deceased emperor or the image of a merely imaginary creature, should be considered as a sign or not.

In the subsequent history of the concept of sign, pictures mostly remained included in the category of sign, although in the Age of Rationalism, they were often neglected. Nevertheless, in a treatise entitled Semiotik by Johann Heinrich Lambert of 1764, “depictions and imitations” appear again as one of three major sign classes besides the arbitrary and the natural signs.¹⁰ About 1800, there is the theory of painting as a sign system in the semiotics of the French ideologue Destutt de Tracy.¹¹ Since the new beginnings of semiotics in the second half of the 20th century, the study of pictures as signs has become an exemplary field of research in Applied Semiotics.

It is true that the concept of sign, still in the 20th century, has also been defined in a narrower way that excludes pictures and, sometimes, even words. Susanne K. Langer, for example, under the influence of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, defines both words and pictures as symbols, and in her terminology, which restricts the concept of sign to indexical signs or signals, symbols are not signs.¹² However, this terminology has not become generally accepted in modern semiotics.

1.3 The Crisis of Representation as a Crisis of the Pictorial Sign?

The assertion that works of nonrepresentational works of art are no longer signs is closely related to the debate of those who have deplored the so-called crisis of representation.¹³ Evidence of this crisis is allegedly abundant in modern art, which confronts us with abstract pictures that seem to have lost their referents. Supposedly, the loss of the referent in pictorial representation had reached its climax in the images of virtual reality, in which reality was no longer depicted but actually created. Some scholars in the field of image studies came to the conclusion that digital images are the prototypes of pictures that represent nothing and hence cannot be signs.¹⁴

However, if representing something without a referent in the visible world of “reality” is a symptom of a crisis of representation, this crisis is certainly as old as the world of pictures in general. Indeed, pictures that represent something nonexistent in “real” space and time are as old as the history of art. Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and his Final Judgment are clearly pictures that do not denote any real human beings, since no painter can have witnessed the first or the last day of humankind. It may even be the case that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is no real but a merely imaginary portrait of a lady.¹⁵ Nevertheless, the imaginary or fictitious beings represented in these paintings, even if they are no faithful portraits of historical figures, are certainly iconic signs of possible human beings and iconic depictions of the painters’ knowledge of men and women in their biological nature and cultural setting.

The assumption that only those pictures are signs that depict something real, just as a photograph does, suffers from the reductionist view that every sign must have a material object as its referent. It is an assumption that only testifies to a crisis of an inadequate sign theory.¹⁶ Consider the logical consequence of such a theory for the semiotics of language.¹⁷ Words could only count as language signs if they depicted objects such as “apple”, “house” or “fish”, whereas words such as “love”, “dragon” or “good” that depict no “concrete” objects would have to be excluded from the class of verbal signs.¹⁸ However, if one accepts the widely held view that all words are verbal signs, one would have to come to the counterintuitive conclusion that the word “dragon” is a sign, whereas the picture that represents the same dragon is not a sign.

It is true that the referent of the sign, sometimes also called “denotatum” or “designatum”, has indeed been reduced to “things” in the sense of material objects in the history of semiotics, for example, by the logical positivists.¹⁹ However, as early as in the writings of the Scholastic semiotician William of Ockham, the sign clearly does not stand for a “thing”, but for something that “evokes something in a cognition”.²⁰ If those who defend the thesis of the nonsemiotic nature of pictures argue still today on the basis of an outdated sign model, their conclusion that pictures are not signs only testify to the inadequacy of their semiotic premises.

Böhme, for example, in accord with his plea against the alleged hypertrophy of semiotics,²¹ goes on to distort the semiotic approach to pictures as follows:

The simplest reply to the question concerning the essence of the picture is: a picture is a sign. However, what is more trivial than the statement that a picture depicts something that is not the object, but refers to it. A picture makes something present that is not there itself. It refers to something else and has its essence in such reference.²²

After his discussion of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa as an example of a picture without a referent, and hence of a picture that is not a sign,²³ Böhme comes to the following conclusion, clearly based on a sign model reduced to the sign-referent dyad: “What is then a picture? The fact that a picture can be a picture without having a referent obliges us to assume a being of pictures that is independent of the being of the things”.²⁴ While Boehm restricts his critique of the interpretation of pictures as depictions to those who have an inadequate concept of picture, Lambert Wiesing extends this critique to the concept of sign in general. However, his own view of the sign as a depiction of an object is clearly inadequate and it is inappropriate to substantiate his thesis that pictures are not signs. Wiesing argues:

From a phenomenological point of view one can say: pictures are the things whose visibility becomes autonomous. Pictures show something that differs from whatever they are themselves—in contrast to an imitation, which imitates and also wants to be that which it imitates. However, something on which you can see somet...