From Visual Culture to Visual Art: the Normative Shift (original) (raw)
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This essay attempts to refute the conventionalist aspect of Nelson Goodman's theory of representation that is still one of the most influential theories of aesthetics in our time. However, the primary aim of this essay is not to summarize the long ongoing debate between the conventionalist and the opposed views of art, but rather to re-examine in its wider context the conventionalist view and its implications for twentieth century art. This re-examination will be carried out from vantage points such as paleoanthropology, prehistoric art, hierarchy theory, empirical findings of psychology, relations theory (logic) and other fields, thus bridging between empirical and philosophical contributions to the elucidation of this problem. A central argument of this essay is that the conventionalist view is not only mistaken but that it has destructive implications for art as a symbolic activity. This follows from the fact that this view reduces the artistic to the perceptual and to the habitual, and thereby abets the complete blurring of the lines of demarcation between art and non-art, which is perhaps the main problem of art in the present century and in the foreseeable future.
Is figurative representation arbitrary? A re-examination of the conventionalist view of art
2000
This essay attempts to refute the conventionalist aspect ofNelson Goodman's theory of representation that is still one of the most influential theories of aesthetics in our time. However, the primary aim of this essay is not to summarize the long ongoing debate between the conventionalist and the opposed views of art, but rather to re-examine in its wider context the conventionalistic view and its implications for twentieth-century art. This re-examination will be carried out 'from vantage points such as paleoanthropology, prehistoric art, hierarchy theory, empirical findings ofpsychology, relations theory (logic) and other fields, thus bridging between empirical and philosophical contributions to the elucidation of this problem. A central argument of this essay is that the conventionalist view is not only mistaken but that it has destructive implications for art as a symbolic activity. This follows from the fact that this view reduces the artistic to the perceptual and to t...
The Appropriation of the Work of Art as a Semiotic Act
Contributions To Phenomenology, 2015
A work of art can be defined as a section of space (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) that has been assigned a particular status. It is not our intention to define this status-philosophical aesthetics has been addressing this issue for centuries. Rather, we aim to pinpoint the mechanisms in virtue of which this section of space is isolated and bestowed with the status in question. Such a move requires the action of a certain instance-hence the emphasis we put on the interactive character of the process. We shall pay particular attention to the type of sign called 'index,' which plays a pivotal role in this affair.
Can Art Provide Knowledge? On the Cognitive Value of Images
New Theories, 2022
The question of the relationship between art and knowledge and whether and in what sense art can be regarded as a form of knowledge has been addressed from different perspectives but it still does not have secure grounds in contemporary aesthetics. The argument involves rather skeptical attitudes – from Plato to Kant and throughout the dominance of positivist tradition in Western philosophy in the first half of the 20th century – as well as cognitivist approaches, such as James O. Young’s view of art as a source of knowledge, which has the capacity to provide both propositional and practical knowledge. The “linguistic turn” in contemporary thought and the ensued iconization of language in western culture led to the identification of cognitive potential with discourse, resulting in inequitable disregard of sensory awareness and turning the human experiences and cognition into the product of language. The submission of iconicity to semantics and reducing the pictorial to interpretable text without sensory significance led to the questioning of the cognitive aspect of visuality. The hermeneutical perspective, drawing upon Michael Polanyi’s view of all knowledge as established in relation to tacit thought, considers art as embodying tacit knowledge and emphasizes the importance of the inherent inexhaustibility of meaning in art that can contribute to the inquiry. Recognizing that knowledge is not always reducible to language, such perspective liberates knowledge from the dominance of the propositional and provides further insights for the phenomenology of art as a creative practice. No doubt that the ways of representation in arts are fundamentally different from those in the sciences and both realms contribute to knowledge in radically different ways. However, while the ways to explicate how art can enhance the faculty of judgment and practical knowledge might be relatively obvious in literary works, the question of how visual works can provide the same kinds of knowledge is more ambiguous. Consequently, the question of epistemic potential of visual representation is even more challenging. Image as a system constructed according to the immanent laws with its own iconic sense - which determines its difference from reality as well as from discourse – challenges perception, because a conceptual, abstract tendency of perception is incompatible with a sensual particularity of the image (Boehm). At the same time, it allows a multiplicity of experience made possible by simultaneity inherent in the image provided that we understand the act of seeing as comprising simultaneity and consecutiveness as well as the unconscious, pre-conceptual processes. It is the expressive potential of the pictorial and the specificity of art as an experiential and perceptual modality embodying representational meanings that distinguishes it as a distinctive form of knowledge. In an endeavor to defy the approach of semiotics and the epistemology of science that insist on amodality of knowledge and its dependence on discursive context, this paper rejects the reducibility of knowledge to language and embraces the approach that advocates „disestablishing the view of cognition as dominantly and aggressively linguistic“ (Stafford). Keywords: Visual art; pictorial representation; art and knowledge; aesthetic cognitivism.
Presentation and representation in art—ontic and gestaltic constraints on aesthetic experience
Visio, 2002
The present paper proposes to investigate certain basic characteristics of aesthetic objects and aesthetic experience. It has a descriptive and a genetic purpose. From a descriptive point of view it aims to establish the existence of a fundamental and relatively autonomous layer in aesthetic objects and aesthetic experience: the presentational layer (in contradistinction to the layer of represented figures or the "motif"). It comments briefly on some previous, mainly phenomenological, analyses that have been developed along lines akin to those followed here (E. Husserl and R. Ingarden). It argues on the one hand that the presentational layer is a correlate to a specific and pervasive mode of apprehension that grasps the aesthetic object independently or regardless of what it represents, i.e., appreciating only its style of qualitative presence. On the other hand, it tries to demonstrate that such a mode of apprehension presupposes the existence of an objective correlate endowed with specific 1 This article owes a lot to discussions with my colleagues Per Aage Brandt and Svend Østergaard from the Center for Semiotic Research, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Brandt proposed long ago an autonomous semiotic theory of "presentation" and "representation" in art, the phenomelogical tenets of which I will try to trace and develop. structural and qualitative properties that allow it to be perceived and appreciated in its mere mode of organized manifestation.
Conceptualization in the Visual Arts: Another Epistemological Domain
The international journal of critical cultural studies, 2015
Abstract: The visual arts, marginalized from other areas of knowledge through the epistemological fragmentation fostered by positivism and the desire to respond to the rapid and complex development of new technologies, have lost touch with their most important task: reflection. Speculation about artistic action and delivery of critical judgments on its manifestations requires introspection and thinking about the processes and parameters of development involved. Imagi-nation and creation in the visual arts have become spontaneous reactions that arise from the intuition of the instant, neglecting important stages of concentration, abstraction, speculation, and transformation of esthetic experience. Today the arts provoke a chain of physical reactions—disgust, surprise, rejection, etc.—at transgressions of form, not of sub-stance: there is a chasm between thought and reason. The content for which Klee, Kandinsky, Arnheim, and Gombrich fought and which the work of Cézanne, Duchamp, and Beuys made comprehensible has been forgotten. It is a matter of reflecting on the importance of the epistemological domain in the visual arts, calling for a return to its conceptualization and rebuilding the philosophy and theory of the visual art of our time. These disciplines have a theoretical dimension related to the concepts that underpin them, a technical dimension concerned with the means by which the work or artistic action is produced, and a poetic dimension that establishes a link between the person who creates the artwork and those who perceive and view it, as well as among the latter themselves and between them and the artwork. An indispensable requirement for this task is the knowledge to recognize and understand both the surplus of meaning in the visual arts and the socialization of cultural values. Theoretical structures and concepts are essential, because the same object or action can give rise to different interpretations that are equally valid, as long as they are cognitively supported. The visual arts are an area of learning, a body of knowledge unified by certain principles, but not a set of closed truths; on the contrary, these truths are in a constant dynamic relationship with other cognitive areas, influencing some and being influenced by others. Conceptualization of the visual arts is valuable because it has a direct impact on the way of thinking, the behav-ior, the actions and the decisions of human beings, by virtue of being seen as generators of values and cultural assets.
Semiotics at the Crossroads of Art
Semiotica, 195 (Jun 2013), 69 - 96.
This article first examines and compares three partly overlapping terms - visual semiotics, pictorial semiotics, and the semiotics of art - and aims at the specification of their interrelations. Then, the focus shifts to the problems of the semiotics of art, and the changing mutual relations between the semiotics of art and art history are analyzed. It is important to note that, during the last halfcentury, the notions of visual art, its ontology, and functions have thoroughly changed and, during recent decades, changes have also appeared on the metalevel of art history. The question is whether and how the semiotics of art should react to these changes.