Author's Profile: Baruch Blich has taught in the departments
of Philosophy and Cinema Studies at Tel Aviv University since 1988 as well
as at other universities and academic schools such as Camera Obscura. Blich's
interests and publications are in the fields of art, photography, media
studies, and cinema and he has published articles such as "Pictorial Realism"
in
Empirical Studies of the Arts 9.2 (1991), "Natural Kinds as a
Kind of Family resemblance" in the Proceedings of the 12th International
Wittgenstein Symposium 15 (1988), and "Pictorial Representation and
Its Cognitive Status" in Visual Arts Research 15.1 (1989). In 1989
he was a visiting scholar to the Warburg Institute in London University
and worked together with Roger Scruton and Sir E. Gombrich. At present
Blich is lecturer with the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, a senior
lecturer in The School of Communication annexed to the College of Economics
and Administration and with the Levinski College of Education (all Jerusalem).
In the last five years he has lectured in the Van Leer Institute (Jerusalem),
in the School of Architecture (Haifa), at the Hebrew University School
of Communication (Jerusalem), and has presented papers at various conferences
in Prague, Berlin, New York, Vevey, etc. He was for several years the art
critic for the newspaper Hair (Tel-Aviv). E-mail: <baruch@mofet.macam.ac.il>.
About Art
1. I begin my paper with questions which serve us
as a guideline to my main subject, i.e.: How do we understand the phenomenon
of representation in art? By postulating such a question I venture to say
that art, and I refer especially to what is labeled as "modern art," is
not only an aesthetic medium, but is mostly a cognitive discipline compelling
us to use tools developed by other disciplines in order to understand it.
2. Why, then, is art so difficult to understand? Why
do art objects raise questions as to their status? Why scrutinizing art
involve semiotics, philosophy of language, linguistics, epistemology, ontology
and even metaphysics? Why art is interpreted by psychoanalysis as well
as by other fields of psychology such as behaviorism, perception and experimental
psychology? What do anthropology and sociology have to do with art and
why do we witness art debated in the courtroom concerning copyright issues?
In short -- what makes art a crossroad for many and sometimes conflicting
disciplines? Is there something in art which compels us to tune our commonsense
reactions differently? Is there a secret in art one is requested to decipher
to be able to grasp its essence? Indeed, we can enumerate an endless list
of questions, all of them refer to the unique relations art establishes
with reality. The answer to these queries and many others, can be squeezed
into one word -- "aboutness": art's reference to reality is constituted
on conventions far out from the common accepted rules of thumb. And although
art reflects reality and is about our daily and often dreary business with
life, its denotative aspects are different and sometimes even in contradiction
in many respects to their colloquial use in other domains.
3. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to shed
light on some of these questions and I will do it by explicating the use
of mimesis, representation, depiction, with the intention to show that
their use in the context of art bear special and unique meanings. To do
so, I begin with two examples which to my mind clearly demonstrate the
gap between our ordinary reactions to reality as compared to our reactions
to art. It is generally assumed that the pleasure derived from a play depends
upon the audience's ability to enter the illusion it offers. A good play
presents events whose fidelity to reality is unquestioned. The scene where
Othello strangles Desdemona will be taken as convincing if the actors portray
it so as to create the illusion that a true event is taking place. But
when we come to consider the audience's reaction to the scene on the stage,
we must explain why it is that they do not storm the stage in order to
separate the adversaries and save Desdemona. One straightforward explanation
for inhibiting one's sense of justice might be that people of modern cities
are too alienated from one another to butt into another's business. Another
explanation and more plausible one would be that though the scene is realistic
and calls for active, remedial intervention, the audience is aware that
it is only theater and on the stage of the theater we do not see real scenes
but only as if real scenes. In other words, we the audience in the theater,
in the cinema and in exhibitions of paintings and sculptures (not to mention
ready-made-art), are conditioned to inhibit our sense of realism
we constantly use while interacting with reality for the sake of "as if"
realism and illusion.
4. The question, therefore, is how do we learn to
react differently in the context of art, and sometimes even in diametric
opposition to our norms of society, and the second problem we are faced
with is who is our teacher; who instructs us the merits of illusion and
where this kind of education is taking place enabling us to grasp the difference
between what is seen on the stage from what we experience out there in
the street. Would we want to say that reality is our teacher, evidence
is our school, or would we say that we learn about fictional scenes from
fiction itself and by conforming to the principles of illusion? To make
a long question short, my intention is to point at the apparent discrepancy
between the means and ends of reality vis-à-vis the means and ends
of art, and maintain that interpreting artistic illusion is much more complicated
as well as sophisticated than our intuitive interpretation of reality.
But before trying to give you an answer allow me to sharpen the idea I
intend to present with another case. My second example is still in the
theater but instead of a fictional occurrence taking place on the stage
let us examine a case when the outside world, reality, intervenes with
the "as if" reality represented in the theater. I refer to Donald Davidson’s
following example: “An actor is acting a scene in which there is supposed
to be a fire. It is his role to imitate as persuasively as he can a man
who is trying to warn others of a fire. "Fire!" he screams. And perhaps
he adds, "I mean it! Look at the smoke!," etc. And now a real fire breaks
out, and the actor tries vainly to warn the real audience. "Fire!" he screams,
"I mean it! Look at the smoke!," etc. (Davidson, 270). To be able to warn
truly his audience the actor is supposedly required to use another language,
language of reality; a language whose rules of referring are constituted
by a different language game.
5. In other words, our actor standing on the stage
and facing a real fire behind the audience's seats is expected to switch
his/her language game and use a language appropriate for a true warning
as compared to the language he uses while reciting the text of the play.
Obviously, our actor is helpless as there is no special language to denote
reality other than the given language he uses while denoting the fictional
fire in the play. And yet, it is clear that our reactions towards what
is represented on the stage should be of a different kind than our reactions
towards reality even though the stimuli we are faced with are of the same
appearance.
6. Would we say that what makes the scenes on the
stage different than the same scenes in reality is the context of the scenes?
That a fictional scene is due only to various environmental factors such
as the building in which the theater is located, the fairly strict rules
of dress in the theater, the presence of a staff of ushers waiting to show
us our seats, the customs of dimming the lights and raising a curtain?
etc., etc.
7. Are all these elements responsible for switching
from one language game to another, for interpreting an action as an "as
if" action and not as a real action? Or should we search for an answer
somewhere else? Now, I do not deny that we frequently interpret signs (art
objects as well as realistic phenomena) in relation to their context, but
I believe that identifying a context and being able to adhere to its rules,
is not a simple matter and it requires the operation of a special
cognitive faculty, a certain state of mind, an ability to screen the context
we experience in relation to other contexts we conform to. In other words,
a necessary condition for interpreting a sign is by identifying its context;
Marcel Duchamp's fountain is interpreted as a work of art because it is
placed in a museum which defines its status as such. However, the context
(i.e., the museum, the theater, the cinema, etc.), although it is necessary
for interpreting the signs it exhibits and its existence is crucial for
the tuning of our reactions accordingly, the context as such is not a sufficient
condition for identifying the aboutness of art and for grasping its denotative
content.
8. To make myself clear let me concentrate a bit further
on the logic of pictorial representations. A portrait showing a bearded
man conveys to a normal observer on the customary interpretation the property
of being bearded, but the painting certainly does not itself possess the
property of being bearded. Conversely, it possesses the property of being
covered with paint, but does not convey this property in its symbolic function
– does not tell the viewer that the man depicted is covered with paint.
A picture is no doubt an enigma. It is considered the most common and most
readily perceived means of communication, but as soon as we try to explain
the reality it stands for, it becomes clear that unusual perceptual processes
are involved. This polarity between the immediate automatic apprehension
of the content represented by pictures, and the difficulty in explicating
it, stems from the fact that pictorial representation is an extremely strange
creature. On the one hand, its relations with reality are denotative, as
is generally accepted for all representational systems. Being denotative,
it reflects and frequently also preserves reality and serves as a convenient
channel for the acquisition of knowledge, the shaping of public opinion,
advertising, education, etc. On the other hand, pictorial representation
raises the complex issue of understanding the visual perception of objects
appearing in a picture; an issue that puts the normal channels of perception
vis-à-vis problems that oblige us to classify pictures as a unique
mediator. This equivocal understanding of pictures stems mainly from our
dilemmas on how we are to treat the ‘aboutness’ of pictures.
9. While pictures are made of paper, canvas, covered
with paints, dots and lines, all to be perceived on their own merit, they
are also, after all, vehicles of representation, in which we are presumed
to identify other objects, and whose value we determine according to established
similarities between the said smears and the reality they bring to life.
The same goes with an action taking place on the theater's stage. The strangling
of Desdemona is related to what we know or believe is a true strangling
of a helpless woman in reality, and yet the difference is that a real strangling
possesses the properties of this very action, whereas the "as if" strangling
represents the real action by exhibiting different properties which we
as an audience should be able to identify.
10. To take another medium -- language, we can put
it, as John Searle has nicely phrased it, "in the form of a paradox: how
can it be both the case that words and other elements in a fictional story
have their ordinary meanings and yet the rules that attach to those words
and other elements to determine their meanings are not complied with: how
can it be the case in 'Little Red Riding Hood' both that 'red' means red
and yet that the rules correlating 'red' with red are not in force?" (319).
It is, therefore, crucial for us -- consumers of art -- to be able to identify
art's aboutness, that is, the means with which art represents reality and
the inner intricate artistic manipulations by which the artist transfers
the real and the true into fictive string of signs.
11. How, then, we come to terms with what Searle eloquently
described as a paradox, and is there away to comply with the paradox. As
you can expect, there is no a straightforward answer to the problem, and
yet it seems that my question bothered a number of art historians like
Gombrich (1972), psychologists like Gregory (1970), and Asch (1969), anthropologists
like Segall, Campbell and Herskovits (1966), as well as philosophers since
ancient times. All of them share one basic assumption, which was put forward
by Kant. In his The Critique of Pure Reason (1787), in the beginning
of the preface to the second "Introduction," Kant distinguished between
knowledge and belief: "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge,
in order to make room for faith" (29). At a first glance one cannot believe
one's eyes: Kant who is renowned as the philosopher of knowledge, advocates
for the merits of faith and belief; however, reading the whole chapter
written by Kant back in 1781, we would find he advocated for belief only
in those cases where what is debated transcends our knowledge, such as
das
Ding an sich (the thing in itself, that is, the rules of nature, the
order of the cosmos, etc.), free will of moral judgment, and those aspects
of mental behavior which are not subject to experience.
12. It would not be incorrect to say that since Kant
there were no major changes in these concepts -- between "I know that"
and "I believe that"; between the knowledge that tomorrow it will rain
-- an action supported by evidence and facts, and the belief that tomorrow
it will rain -- an action based on intuition or luck. And yet, when we
come to consider a problem close to the issue we discuss here, a problem
raised by the British philosopher G.E. Moore (1959), it is interesting
to note that knowing something and believing in something are two interwoven
actions one can not without each other. I will not raise Moore's question
in detail here, I will only suggest that he was concerned with the conditions
of reality and in order to test it he asked how do we know we do not dream.
To answer this question, Moore had distinguished between the arguments
given to support the evidence of reality, from the arguments we supply
when asked how do we come to know that the evidence we support our knowledge
is true. As to the first problem, which has to do with the evidence of
reality, Moore simply stretches his arms and kicks his table, saying that
he is positive about these actions. When asked to justify his conclusion
as to the evidence of reality, here he said that he can rely only on his
belief that the rival interpretation, that is, we dream reality and what
we see around us is untrue -- that assumption would face us with a much
more complicated understanding of reality than the straightforward interpretation
that what we experience is true. In other words, Moore has shown that we
do not rely only on our knowledge, but we need to utilize our belief that
the frame of reference in which we operate our knowledge is evidently true.
13. Another and no less persuasive demonstration of
the knowledge-belief duality was put forward in S.E. Asch's series of experiments
on the "Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion
of judgements" (1969). It is an experiment which was later replicated in
many other experiments and that has become a classic demonstration in social
psychology for creating an environment detached from reality, within which
a naive subject is required simply to evaluate the lengths of a line in
comparison to three given lines. The other eight subjects in the experiment
who secretly collaborate with the experimenter precede the naive subject
in their evaluation of the length of the line, and they intentionally evaluate
it wrongly, far from the normal approximation of its length. As a result
of the group pressure, our naive subject joins the group's evaluation,
although the line he/she is supposed to evaluate is demonstratively different
than the other three. If we apply this experiment to our case in art, we
can understand why I claim that learning to respond to a context cannot
be apprehended from reality, but only from the context we are involved
in. The same goes with the perception of visual illusions, such as the
convergence of railways etc. We, the consumers of art, being exposed to
an "as if" reality by the arts, react similar to the above naive subject.
We do not compare what we see with real phenomena, or with what we know
from reality. Instead we, as experienced consumers of art, having knowledge
as to the history of art, evaluate a particular piece of art with established
conventions we have knowledge of.
14. It was Saul Kripke (1980), who has convincingly
demonstrated that Frege's theory of meaning which relies on reality is
unworkable. His proposal takes another route and he prefers to use reference
as a kind of a "chain of communication," or as a genetic connection between
singular terms and their respective referents, even the deeds and the properties
that are related to them turn out to be false. As a result of turning our
attention to the history of the referent or to its genetic ties with its
name, the naming relation does not depend any more on any essential properties
of the referent expressed by the name. In other words, we can go on using
a name given to a referent, even if we are told that the properties related
to it are false. For example, would it occur to us to use a different name
to Moses the moment the deeds related to him in the Biblical stories turn
out to be false, or to have been carried out by someone else; would he
no more be Moses for us?
15. Denying denotation its reference to reality was
advocated also by Wittgenstein who coined the term "family resemblance"
as an answer to the question what is a language. His intention was to demonstrate
that in spite of the great variety of language games, there nevertheless
exists a criss-cross of mutual properties by which those totally dissimilar
language games are all rightly considered as language. What is attractive
in Wittgenstein's terms is that he attaches to the dissimilarities of language
games a role no less important than their similarities. With this he turns
language into an open system, to which one can annex an endless number
of language games. In view of Wittgenstein's theory of language we can
easily explain, each of us in his own natural language, the phenomenon
of metaphors and other figurative speech including slang. Metaphors and
slang do not necessarily demand a straightforward comparison with their
literal meaning, or with any reference to the world. We use metaphors,
and acquire their meanings, in the frame of the language we use, and by
doing it we extend its game. If we agree or at least accept part of what
I propose, namely that we can not learn about signs but from the system
of signs itself, that language acquisition take place within the game of
the language we learn, it should be clear why I am convinced that conforming
to the aboutness of art does not necessarily rely on a natural connection
between what we experience while interacting with art objects, and what
we are exposed to in reality.
16. The questions I raise at the beginning of the
paper as to the involvement of so many disciplines in the understanding
of art, are evidence to the fact that art's reference to reality, is and
will be in question. It is not easy to put on the operating table smears,
dots, and patches of color and debate their resemblance to reality, unless
we know to decode their inner and intricate structures. The same goes with
theater -- the play is about a murder, but is it indeed about a murder
or should we say that the play is about the performance of a murder. One
cannot settle down these problems in one short paper, yet I hope I raised
questions we all thought of but did not dare to ask.
Works Cited
Asch, S.E. "Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgements." Basic Studies in Social Psychology. Ed. H. Proshansky and B. Seidenberg. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. 393-401.