Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame)

Paul Crowther

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804772983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

Why are the visual arts so important and what is it that makes their forms significant? Countering recent interpretations of meaning that understand visual artworks on the model of literary texts, Crowther formulates a theory of the visual arts based on what their creation achieves both cognitively and aesthetically. He develops a phenomenology that emphasizes how visual art gives unique aesthetic expression to factors that are basic to perception. At the same time, he shows how various artistic media embody these factors in distinctive ways. Attentive to both the creation and reception of all major visual art forms (picturing, sculpture, architecture, and photography), Phenomenology of the Visual Arts also addresses complex idioms, including abstract, conceptual, and digital art.

1

Against Reductionism

The Intrinsic Significance of the Image

Introduction

Discussions of visual representation sometimes begin with an indication of the sheer variety of artefacts in question. The clear implication is that this diversity in itself casts doubt on any attempt to define such representation.¹

I argue otherwise. There is much work in aesthetics which converges on a pertinent shared position. The position holds that visual representation per se is based on a convention whereby resemblance between the image and its subject-matter (in terms of salient shared visual characteristics) is the basis of the referential function, without being a sufficient condition of it.²

In the present work I operate with, and to some degree expand, this shared account—most notably in Chapters 2 and 3. A complete phenomenology of visual art, however, needs to be based on additional and rather more challenging material. Specifically, it must negotiate the formative aesthetic power of visual art.

This consists of the artist’s distinctive visual handling of the medium and compositional factors. Through the style in which a work is created, our cognitive relation to what it represents is altered in ways that are distinctive to the visual arts, and, indeed, to the specific medium involved. This is artistic formation in the fullest sense, and to comprehend it is to engage with the intrinsic significance of the image.

As we shall see in due course, this significance converges on issues of phenomenological depth. Such depth is shown through ways in which the creation of visual artworks embodies complex relations between the human subject and its objects of perception, knowledge, and action.

Of course, in an age of global consumerism, it may seem that image-theory should concentrate on photographic or electronically generated imagery, primarily. However, it should be emphasized that the great bulk of western art and visual representation in most non-western cultures is primarily pictorial or sculptural.

Indeed, qua visual representation, photographic and electronic images share many logical and stylistic features with traditional idioms, and in key respects are derivative from them. This being said, the new idioms also have distinctive phenomenological depth of their own, which will be explored at length in Chapters 8 and 9.

A further worry should be noted. It centres on the claim that there are as many theories of the image as there are ‘sites’ and contexts of image-production and reception. To talk of the image’s intrinsic significance, accordingly, might seem an ‘ahistorical’ abstraction. However, (as I shall show in detail further on) objections of this kind are not viable. Indeed, theories of the image’s intrinsic significance, have been of the most decisive importance for art history itself.

In this respect, for example, the development of German art history from Hegel, Robert Vischer, Conrad Fiedler, through Hildebrand, Riegl, Worringer, Wölfflin, early Panofsky, and even Edgar Wind, offers many important (if somewhat scattered) insights concerning the image’s intrinsic significance.³

These are made possible because the tradition in question focuses on art as a formative aesthetic power rather than as a surface presented to the sensitive observer for contemplation (an approach which restricts much Anglo-American formalist art history and criticism).⁴

More recently in the English-speaking world there has been a revival of art historical studies informed—albeit in very different ways—by a sense of the intrinsic significance of the image. Here I am thinking specifically of work by Michael Podro, David Summers, James Elkins, and Yves-Alain Bois.⁵

Podro’s recent writing has a brilliant sensitivity to pictorial detail, and to the perceptual expectations which the reading of such details sets up in the informed viewer. Summers has offered the basis of a reconfiguration of art historical method through his profoundly searching phenomenological analysis of the distinctive structures of pictorial space, and their historical and transhistorical vectors.

Elkins’ contribution is more complex still. For whilst much of his work addresses the diversity of visual imaging and the different ways in which it can be understood, what is ultimately decisive for his approach is a sense that visual images have some meanings which can never be sufficiently analyzed in words.

The distinctiveness of Bois’ work is in its productive interchanges between an enriched, genuinely pluralist notion of theory, and the concreteness of specific artists and art-practices. He is one of the few contemporary art historians I know of who has addressed what I call ‘phenomenological depth’ in a sustained and searching way.

All these thinkers clarify the intrinsic meaning of the image at different levels of its formative aesthetic power. My approach extends this. For it focuses on the ways in which such artistic formation involves factors which are fundamental to our knowledge of self and world. In particular, it is interested in the conceptual basis and implications of structures that are fundamental to the ontologies of visual media—rather than (as with the other thinkers just mentioned) the historically diverse ways in which these structures have been exemplified.

Now this renewed interest in the intrinsic meaning of the image faces a significant problem. It is the challenge of contemporary art history’s widespread and sometimes aggressively reductionist orientation. This orientation is—by intention or, more often, by exclusion—generally antagonistic to the idea of the image’s intrinsic significance. In the remainder of this chapter, therefore, I will attempt to meet the reductionist challenge, and then set the scene for the main arguments of the rest of the book.

Part One of the present chapter critically analyzes the basic structure and limits of reductionist art history and theory. In Part Two, some possible counter-arguments to my critique are dealt with. Part Three presents the outline features of an adequate theory of the image’s intrinsic significance, and the key role played by phenomenological depth is identified. In conclusion, some qualifications to this main direction of argument are made.

Part One

First, the reductionist strategy. Griselda Pollock asserts that

Understanding of what specific art practices are doing, their meanings and social effects, demands . . . a dual approach. First the practice must be located as part of the social struggles between classes, races, and genders, articulating with other sites of representation. But second we must analyse what any specific practice is doing, what meaning is being produced, and how and for whom . . .⁶

Cashed out in more specific terms, this reading of visual ‘production’ emphasizes such things as the immediate material, social, and institutional circumstances in which the image was produced, the stylistic and cultural sources it draws upon, its conscious and ‘unconscious’ modes of displaying them, what audiences it addresses and creates, and its modes of reception and transmission amongst various ‘constituencies’. The overriding tendency, here, is to reduce all questions of meaning to issues of socio-historical contexts of production and reception.

The social history orientation has dominated recent art history. In addition to Pollock, key thinkers such as John Barrell, Carol Duncan, and Albert Boime, among many others, have all—in different ways—emphasized the social conditions of production and reception in the understanding of art.

As one method of art historical analysis amongst others, the social history approach is of great importance and has had the salutary effect of emphasizing the role of broader societal and political factors in explaining how specific bodies of work come to be made and received. The problem is, however, that most social historians of art operate as though their approach provides a sufficient characterization of meaning in the image. This has the effect of reducing the image to its informational content and persuasive effects, and to the social and other circumstantial elements which enable these. Apart from the occasional discussion of technique and artists’ materials—it is consumer and historical context orientated.

Social reductionism of this kind is combined often with a tendency to assimilate art’s visual dimension on the basis of models derived from literary analysis. This semiotic reductionism characterizes, especially, the work of Rosalind Krauss, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Norman Bryson. Bryson even proposes, for example, that pictorial naturalism should be understood in terms of the denotation /connotation relation. In his words, ‘denotation results from those procedures of recognition which are governed by the iconographic codes. . . .’⁷ It is the ‘minimal recognition schema’.⁸ Connotation is primarily bound up with secondary effects of meaning. In relation to this, Bryson notes that

Whereas the viewer can consult an iconological dictionary to determine the precise meaning of the attribute carried by a particular saint, with the crucial codes of connotation—the codes of the face and body in movement (pathognomics), the codes of the face at rest (physiognomics), and the codes of fashion or dress—no equivalent lexicon exists, there is no dictionary of these things that we can consult. Knowledge of these codes is distributed through the social formation in a diffuse, amorphous manner . . .⁹

Hence,

if the naturalism of Western painting is persuasive, it is so not only because of a logic internal to the image and existing solely in the enclosure of the frame, but also because mundane experience so associated the subtle body of signs with the material body of practice that the codes of pathonomics and physiognomics, of dress and address are fleshed out at once . . .¹⁰

On these terms, whilst it might be thought that pictorial idioms achieve ‘naturalistic’ status by virtue of detailed consistency with reality, Bryson’s point is that this effect is actually achieved through the viewer’s perceptual/imaginative filling out of the work’s connotative cues on the basis of social awareness. As he also observes,

the realist image disguises or conceals its status as a site of production; and in the absence of any visible productive work from within, meaning is felt as penetrating the image from outside.¹¹

On these terms, the picture is reduced to a kind of visual text, with its own distinctive made qualities (qua drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, or whatever) marginalized. In particular, the rich consistency between a work’s visual texture and its subject-matter’s appearance is made into a function of social reception skills, rather than the artist’s handling of the medium. Again, reductionism and the role of the consumer displaces the significance of making.

It is important to emphasize that the theoretical standpoints just described are not mere reflections of attitudes current in the late 1970’s or 1980’s, rather they involve analytic structures that have been continued and, in a sense, naturalized as a dominant orthodoxy by the next influential wave of scholars (including, for example, Jonathan Crary, Kevin Moxey, and Mark Cheetham). The only major difference is that this second wave of reductionism tends to legitimize itself by reference to the authority of Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ approach to knowledge (a topic that I will address a little further on).

Reductionism in its individual or combined varieties faces the following central problem. Its dominant notion of ‘production’ is a composite phenomenon emergent from a broader field of meanings. Within this, the process of artistic formation is dealt with as a function of ‘production’s’ component factors rather than as a unifying principle which directs those factors. The upshot is that what is distinctive to the creation and meaning of visual images per se is either repressed or distorted.

Now to think of artistic creation as involving the ‘production’ or ‘construction’ of ‘meaning’ or ‘identity’ is to use analogies or metaphors derived from artifice per se. However, this actually involves a surprising and hitherto unnoticed reversal of significance.

In another work I have described what is at issue here as follows:

Ironically, whilst the ‘production’ metaphor has its origins in artifice, its application to the semantic domain actually distorts our understanding of the artefact. Far from assimilating meaning on the model of artifice, the strategy has the [reverse] effect of re-contextualizing artifice as a variety of signification . . .

[In this respect] it is clear that the metaphorical linking of ‘production’ and meaning is driven by a contemporary western interest. For if meaning is understood as something which is ‘produced’ or ‘constructed’, then it seems close to middle-class fantasies of natives and workers, fields and factories. It appears earthy and real, and far removed from the despised ivory towers of pure knowledge. Meaning, in other words, is here articulated through a metaphor whose political correctness is highly congenial to contemporary western relativism.

Unfortunately this fantasy engenders an even stronger reverse dynamic. For to understand meaning on the metaphor of production or construction, is to reduce it to the means-end model of western instrumental reason. But at the same time, through this reduction, it now appears that artifice and meaning amount to very much the same kind of thing. They can, accordingly, be analyzed on a common methodological basis as modes of signification. Ironically enough, by linking artifice to signification the latter is able to dictate the terms in which the former is understood. Complex forms of making are thus reduced to the status of signifying practices, and adapted, thereby, to the special interests of western academic relativism.¹²

The point is, then, that the strategies of reductionist art history and theory (and related feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist critique) interpret the visual image as a means to an end or, better, as a text meaningful only in terms of its informational or persuasive functions in the site of class, race, and gender stru...