Die Fälschung

Höhle / Cave (c) Samantha Groenestyn

Nelson Goodman (1976: 102) fragt sich, warum es einen ästhetischen Unterschied zwischen einem Gemälde und einer Fälschung gibt, ein Problem das unter den Künste spezifisch für die Malerei zu sein scheint. In der Abwesenheit eines (gegenwärtigen, aber vielleicht erreichbaren) wahrnehmbaren Unterschieds, verlangt er einen Erkenntnisgrund, vom Ursprungs des Kunstwerks, von der Herstellung von der Hand des Künstlers (Goodman, 1976: 104; 106; 116). Diese Erkenntnis soll eine grundlegende sein; sie fällt nicht ins der Augen von allen, die das Werk beobachten. Goodman will den Wert des Bildes retten, wo die Wahrnehmung scheitert und wo die Fälschung einen Anspruch auf Wert zu nehmen bedroht. Dagegen verteidige ich die Wahrnehmung: Der Beweis den wir verlangen liegt doch an der Oberfläche, in der Zugehörigkeit (oder dem Mangel davon) eines Bildes zu einem körperlich ausgedachten Gedankengang. Die Frage von Goodman ist schlecht gestellt; ich lege sie so neu dar: Worin liegt die Fälschung in der Malerei? Eine Untersuchung des umstrittenen Themas der Ähnlichkeit begleitet uns zur Antwort, dass die Fälschung in der Unterbrechung eines Vorgangs liegt, nicht bloß in der falschen Zuschreibung der Identität des Urhebers.

Die Ähnlichkeit, spottet Goodman (1972: 437), ist ein falscher Freund. Sie erklärt weder Identität noch Unterschied. Zwei ähnliche Dinge sind nicht gleich, und deren gemeinsamen Einzelheiten bieten keinen systematischen Grund an, jene Dinge zusammenzufassen. Wenn zwei Gemälde ähnlich scheinen, begegnen wir einem eigenartigen Problem, indem wir wissen, oder wir verlangen, dass sie trotzdem verschiedene Werke sind. Ein Musikstück, im Gegenteil, oder ein literarisches Werk, wird nicht bloß als ähnlich mit weiteren Instanzen von sich selbst beschrieben, sondern als gleich (Goodman, 1976: 112). Solche Werke sind daher duplizierbar: die unzählbaren Instanzen davon werden als echt gerechnet; zwar, als dasselbe Werk. Ein Gemälde erlaubt keine solche Wiederholung; die Begriffe ,Duplikat’ und ,Replikat’ sind in diesem Bereich unzulässig (Goodman, 1978: 49). Das Gemälde gehört dementsprechend zu einer Klasse von Kunstwerken, die einzeln sind: Jedes Bild ist ein selbständiges und einzigartiges Kunstwerk. Eine ,Kopie’ im Bereich der Malerei hat also einen ganz anderen—insbesondere einen negativen—Status. Obwohl unabhängig, ist die Kopie als ein degradiertes Werk betrachtet, deren Ähnlichkeit zu einem Anderen ihren minderwertigen Status sichert.

Nach Palma Vecchio

Die Künste trennen sich deshalb ins zwei Kategorien, die Goodman (1976: 113) ,allographisch’ und ,autographisch’ nennt. Ein Kunstwerk wird als autographisch betrachtet wenn und nur wenn die genaueste Duplizierung davon nicht als genuin zählt. Allographische Kunstwerke lassen sich multiplizieren; Stefan Zweig, zum Beispiel, muss nicht jedes Buch selbst drucken, um zu sichern, dass das Werk ihm gehört. Goodman (1976: 114-115) erprobt eine Erklärung, die von Einphasigkeit oder Mehrphasigkeit abhängig ist: Ob ein Werk, zum Beispiel, eine Phase des Schreibens und eine des Spiels verlangt. Die Trennung ist aber nicht ohne Komplikationen, wie er selbst erkennt (Goodman, 1976: 115). Ein Buch muss nicht notwendig vorgelesen, nicht einmal gelesen werden, wie ein Musikstück gespielt werden muss. Allographische Werke benötigen weitere Phasen hauptsächlich weil die flüchtig und nicht von einer Person hervorbringbar sind. Er trifft auf die Ausnahme der Radierung, welche nicht einzigartig erscheint, und doch mehrphasig ist. Der Unterschied lässt sich also nicht durch Ein- oder Mehrphasigkeit erklären.

Selbst Goodmans Unterschied scheint eher die Körperlichkeit eines Werks zu implizieren. Ein allographisches Werk scheint in etwas Unkörperlichem zu bestehen, das Werk selbst ist unabhängig vom flüchtigen physischen Medium, in welchem es aufgenommen ist. Ein autographisches Werk scheint genau in seiner Ausdehnung zu bestehen, in der Prägung der Hand der Künstlerin. Auch die Musik erfüllt nicht die Bedingung der Körperlichkeit. Die Töne schallen, sie stimulieren die Sinne, sind aber ungreifbar, nicht festhaltbar. Ein physisches Zeichen ist auf die Hand der Künstlerin zurückführbar; ein Wort oder eine Note (außer der Stimme der Künstlerlin selbst) nicht. Eine Radierung ebenso, würde ich behaupten. Eine Radierung ist nicht allein durch den Kupferstich vollkommen. Ein Druck den Rembrandt von seinem eigenen Kupferstich anfertigt, hat besondere Eigenschaften, die einem Druck von der Hand eines Anderen fehlen; viele technische Entscheidungen bleiben beim Auftragen von Tinte, im Aufreiben davon, in der Bewegung der Hand, die die Tinte aufträgt. Ein Druck von der Hand eines Anderen ist keine einfache Duplizierung, auch wenn es keine Fälschung ist. Der Mangel liegt woanders.

Die drei Hütten, Zustand I (von Rembrandt selbst gedruckt)

Die drei Hütten (Von Bretherton gedruckt)

Laut Goodman (1976: 116) ist es genau diese Verbindung zur Hand des Künstlers die wir identifizieren müssen, um den Ursprung und deshalb die Identität des Werks zu bestimmen. Mit allographischen Werken ist der Ursprung über einen anderen Weg identifizierbar: durch die entsprechende Notation. Gemeinsam mit den allographischen Werke ist das Mittel, sie zu notieren; sie zu buchstabieren (Goodman, 1976: 115). Die von der Buchstabierung zugelassene syntaktische Ersetzbarkeit sichert die Unabhängigkeit eines allographischen Werks von seinem Urheber, was für autographische Werke nicht möglich sein soll, welche Hand-abhängig bleiben (1976: 195). Obwohl die Buchstaben eine physische Form nehmen, hängt ihre Duplizierung nicht von dieser Form ab. Verschiedene Manifestierungen, in verschiedenen Schriftenarten und Handschriften, behalten eine formlose syntaktische Identität.

Dagegen erörtert Merleau-Ponty (1966 [1945]: 181), dass auch die physikalische Manifestierung eines Gedichts für das Gedicht wesentlich ist, dass auch ein Gedicht keine freischwebende, unkörperliche Form hat: ,Doch wenn es sich auch von unserer vitalen Gestikulation loslöst, so löst das Gedicht sich doch nicht von jederlei materiellem Grund, es ist unrettbar verloren, wenn sein Text nicht genau bewahrt ist; seine Bedeutung schwebt nicht frei im Himmel der Ideen: sie ist eingeschlossen in die Wörter auf irgendeinem Stück Papier.’ Das Gedicht, behauptet Merleau-Ponty, wie jedes anderen Kunstwerk, existiert als ein Ding, es ist von seinem Ausdruck untrennbar (1966: 181). Die Auffassung Merleau- Pontys zeigt allerdings nicht, dass ein Gedicht nicht duplizierbar wie ein Gemälde ist. Im Gegenteil eröffnet sie einen Weg zu argumentieren, dass ein Gemälde, wie ein Gedicht, kein geschlossenes Ding ist. Was Merleau-Ponty identifiziert und in Frage stellt, ist das platonische Vorurteil, dass alles Sichtbare auf einem perfekten Ideal abhängt, dass alle Ähnlichkeiten zu einem Urbild zusammenlaufen versuchen (Platon, Tim. 28a). Wenn alle Kunstwerke stattdessen ununterscheidbar von der Art des Ausdruck sind, und deshalb untrennbar davon, laufen sie eher zu was anderem als zu einer formlosen Idee zusammen. Laut Merleau-Ponty (1966: 181) sind alle Kunstwerke Individuen, Formen des Seins. Sie sind zugleich lebendig und auf irgendeine Weise körperlich ausgedrückt.

Nach Käthe Kollwitz

Die Identität bleibt für Goodman wesentlich, ob ein Kunstwerk autographisch oder allographisch ist. Wir benötigen zuerst, sagt er, eine Theorie, um die täuschende Ähnlichkeit zwischen Kunstwerken zu navigieren (Goodman, 1972: 439). Es steht daher ein im Kunstwerk tief verborgenes Stück von Erkenntnis hinter der äußerlichen Ähnlichkeit, nämlich die Erkenntnis des Ursprungs eines Werkes, die Bestätigung der Abstammung zwischen einem Werk und dessen Urheber, was demzufolge dessen Wert bestätigt. Die notwendige Theorie ist also für Goodman die der Identität, und eine Notation ist das sicherste Mittel, um die Identität eines Werks zu bestätigen. Diese genealogische Bedingung ist sogar die primäre Funktion einer Notation wie der Partitur (Goodman, 1976: 127-128). Seine Theorie will nur bestätigen, dass dieses in diesem Musiksaal gespielte Stück ursprünglich von Chopin konzipiert war; sie sucht nur dieses Gemälde in der Galerie mit Tizian zu verknüpfen. Nachdem wir die Verknüpfung beweisen, dürfen wir ein Urteil bezüglich des Werts des Werks fällen und die Fälschung demgemäß beiseitelegen.

Diese Betonung auf Urheberschaft wird aber nicht zurecht erfordert. Ein vollkommenes Ergebnis, ein vollständiges und regungsloses Produkt wird mit einem Autor fest verbunden, mit einem stillstehenden Informationsstück mit welchem wir den Wert des Werks gleichsetzen. Dieses Bild sieht wie ein Tizian aus; es ist aber nur wertvoll, wenn es wirklich von Tizian gemalt wurde. Wir lassen die Möglichkeit nicht zu, dass ein ähnliches Bild aufgrund seiner eigenen Vorzüge bestehen kann. Das scheint mir aber nicht ganz richtig: Rubens, zum Beispiel, konnte eine Kopie von Tizian malen, die nicht weniger wertvoll ist (die vertretbarerweise sogar eine Verbesserung ist), und nicht nur weil wir schon den Namen von Rubens und alle dazugehörigen Werke schätzen. Laut Goodman (1976: 195) kann ein Gemälde, als zu einer Notation ungeeignet, nicht von seinem Urheber befreit werden. Obwohl für Goodman jedes Gemälde einzigartig ist, ist es nicht unabhängig; es steht nicht für sich selbst, sondern für einen Maler. Allein ist es nichts; es muss Verweis auf eine Person machen.

Nach Van Dyck

In diesem Sinne ist die Auffassung Goodmans strikt platonisch. Für Platon (Tim. 28a) macht jede Kopie einen Verweis auf etwas Unendliches, auf ein Ideal. Ein Bild umkreist ein Urbild. Weitere Instanzen—wohl alles Sichtbare—können keine Selbständigkeit haben; sie greifen schwach nach dem sie definierenden Modell (Platon, Tim. 28a-c). Ebenso greift jedes Kunstwerk nach seiner Identität, nach seinem Urheber, ob durch eine Notation oder unmittelbar. Das von Goodman verlangte Verhältnis setzt eine innerliche, geistliche Ähnlichkeit voraus—gewiss die stärkste Ähnlichkeit: Identität. Identität ist nicht an der Oberfläche bemerkbar und nicht der Wahrnehmung zugänglich, sie muss gesucht, entdeckt, enthüllt werden. Sie ist die Entsprechung eines Dinges mit einer Idee. Goodman, wie Platon, verlangt das Zusammenlaufen auf einen feststehenden und bewegungslosen Punkt: Auf ein ewig Seiendes (Platon, Tim. 29b; 57e).

Die Anklage Goodmans gegen die Ähnlichkeit spiegelt die uralte Klage Platons (Soph. 259d-e) wider, dass die Trennung überhaupt eine Grausamkeit ist, dass sie nicht dem philosophischen Geist würdig ist. Die Ähnlichkeit breitet sich stark aus, unendlich, ohne System und ohne Regel. Gemeinsame Einzelheiten bestimmen eine Klasse nicht: Ähnlichkeit zwischen zwei Einzelheiten sichert keine gemeinsame Eigenschaft durch die ganze Gruppe. Jedes Mitglied in der Gruppe [rb by yr] teilt etwas mit den anderen, ohne dass alle drei einen Eigenschaft teilen (Goodman, 1972: 442-3). Überdies, schreibt Goodman (1972: 443), haben irgendwelche zwei Dinge genau so viele Eigenschaften als irgendwelche andere zwei gemeinsam, also entscheidet die Summe von gemeinsamen Eigenschaften nichts. Die Ähnlichkeit suggeriert kein System, ein Faden kann immer unterschiedlich durchgewebt werden, und die Ähnlichkeiten die wir merken, hängen vom Kontext ab, der immer wechselnd und eigentlich von uns hervorgebracht ist (Goodman, 1972: 444-6). In einem Fall verknüpfen wir nach Geschlecht; in einem anderen verknüpfen wir nach Klasse. Vergeblich suchen wir nach einem definierenden Muster in diesem ständig sich erweiternden Chaos. Vernunft fordert Ordnung, und Ordnung ist (laut Platon, Soph. 259e) nur durch die Vereinigung von klaren Begriffen möglich. Und weil diese Vereinigung nicht Ähnlichkeit sein kann, muss sie im Voraus bestimmt werden, auf einem immobilen Kern.

Nach Rubens

Was, wenn wir auf so einen Kern verzichten? Wenn wir die Behauptung von Merleau-Ponty aufgreifen, dass ein Kunstwerk—ob Gedicht, Gemälde, Musikstück, oder was anders—kein statisches Produkt ist, sondern ein lebendiges Dasein? Anstatt des finalen Resultats der Tätigkeit einer bestimmten Hand gestehen wir zu, dass der Sinn dieses Werks aus einem breiteren Sinn entnommen ist (Merleau-Ponty, 1966: 181). Das Werk nimmt an einer Seinsweise teil, es schenkt einem kleinen Stück von der Begegnung der Künstlerin mit der Welt Form, es verewigt eine kleine Ecke von Erfahrung (Merleau-Ponty, 1966: 181). Als solch ein belebendes und multiplizierendes Lebewesen weigert es sich, sich dem platonischen Seienden zu beugen. Es bestätigt seine unbestimmte Natur, seinen unvollkommenen Zustand, die Grobheit seiner Kanten, welche zur Möglichkeiten offen erbleiben, es bestätigt die unaufhörliche Bewegung, die das Verhältnis zwischen irgendwelchen zwei Punkten ist—kurz gesagt: ein Kunstwerk gehört zum Werdenden (Platon, Tim. 29b; 52a; Pol. 597a-c; 605a). Platons (Soph. 234b-c; 235d-e; 236a-c; Tim. 27c; 28b-c; 57d; 70d;) Kategorie von Verlagerung und Veränderung, von allem, das uns und unsere Seele bewegt, was unsere Gefühle rührt und unsere innige Stille zerstört, ist seit langem für die Künste und für Bilder, wohl, für alles Sichtbares reserviert, sogar für die schöne Welt selbst, die bleibt, bei der Auffassung Platons, ein unvollkommenes Bild von einer vollständig abstrakten Welt des Absoluten.

Solch ein unbestimmtes Dasein verneint eine gleichbleibende Identität; es strebt nach keiner Erkenntnis, sondern nach der Offenheit der Welt selbst. Die Verhältnisse die wir suchen, sind keine Verweise vom Bild zum Urbild, sondern wechselnde Beziehungen zwischen Dingen an der Oberfläche der Welt. Diese Einstellung ist jene von Deleuze (1993 [1969]: 311) verlangte, wann er uns ermahnt, ,den Platonismus umzukehren.’ Indem wir das Werdende als etwas Positives bestätigen, stellen wir die platonische Welt auf den Kopf und fliehen vor der Tyrannei der abstrakten Idee. Wir verschmähen die geistige Tiefe und ergreifen die Oberfläche. Der Künstler, seit langem als Heuchler wegen ihrer degradierten Kopien—dreifach vom Urbild entfernt—dargestellt, und deshalb mit dem Sophisten als ein Hersteller von Falschheit beurteilt, muss das Simulakrum verteidigen (Platon, Soph. 234b- c; Pol. 597e; Deleuze, 1993: 317).

Nach Veronese

Und das kann sie tun, indem sie erkennt, dass Platon das Simulakrum fehlgedeutet hat. Auch Platon (Pol. 597b; 601d) unterscheidet zwischen Ebenbilder und Trugbilder: ein Ebenbild, auch wenn es eine verarmte Kopie von der Idee bleibt, sieht er trotzdem als einen ,wohlbegründete Bewerber,’ der die ,konstitutiven Beziehungen und Proportionen des inneren Wesens’ zu bewahren versucht, nämlich die innerliche und geistliche Ähnlichkeit (Deleuze, 1993: 314). Platon will den Sieg vom Ebenbild über Trugbild sichern (Deleuze, 1993: 314). Aber genau in diesem falsch charakterisierten Unterschied findet die Malerin ihren Spalt. Behauptet Deleuze (1993: 314): Platon selbst zeigt uns die Richtung, Platonismus umzukehren, weil das Simulakrum kein Trugbild ist. Es stellt in Frage eher das Model-Kopie Verhältnis überhaupt.

Das Simulakrum ist keine immer vom Model entferntere Kopie, wie Platon (Pol. 597a-c) versucht durch das Beispiel des Tisches aufzuzeigen (Deleuze, 1993: 315). Ein gemalter Tisch, laut Platon, ist höchst täuschend, und deshalb notwendig fragwürdig motiviert; er ist eine bloße Erscheinung, die nichts dient. In der Tätigkeit der Herstellung eines gemalten Tisches, stellt sich die Malerin als Sophist—Hersteller von falschen Erkenntnis—hin, der ebenso alles abbilden kann, der nur die Erscheinung alles zu wissen kultiviert (Pol. 511d-e; 598a; 602a). Laut Platon bezeichnet die Malerin Objekte, von deren Mechanik sie überhaupt nichts versteht, genau wie der Sophist Argumente zusammenkettet, um überzeugend zu scheinen, ohne echtes Verständnis zu besitzen. In beiden Fällen ist die Wahrheit nebensächlich; die tiefliegende Erkenntnis bleibt noch verborgen. Die Ähnlichkeit von Bildern und von Argumenten mit ihren ursprünglichen Ideen ist trügerisch, weil sie bloß äußerlich ist. In der Abwesenheit von innerlicher Ähnlichkeit nimmt das Bild naturgemäß einen Mantel von äußerlicher Ähnlichkeit an, um seine Lüge zu verbergen.

Nach Sowjetischen Bildhauerei

Das mag wohl für eine Kopie stimmen, die einen Verweis auf etwas zu machen versucht, so Deleuze (1993: 315). Ein Ebenbild versucht diese innere Identität, dieses unsichtbares Stück Erkenntnis, körperlich darzustellen. Die Versuche der Kubisten, Dinge zu malen, ,wie sie sind, das heißt: anders als wir sie sehen,’ eine tiefliegende und gedankliche Wirklichkeit vom Sichtbaren zu abstrahieren, könnten dementsprechend als Ebenbilder verstanden werden (Rivière, 1966 [1912]: 82; Gleizes und Metzinger, 1988 [1912]: 37-38; Platon, Pol. 598a). Die Kubisten kleben an der reinen Idee von einem Ding, und erproben, diese Idee unvollkommen durch ein inadäquates Mittel nachzubilden. Sie bleiben daher von Platon bezaubert. Ein Trugbild erweckt den Anschein, dass es ebenso dieses Verhältnis bewahrt. Deleuze aber greift die Verfeinerung Platons vom Bild auf und hebt eher das Simulakrum an: Für das Simulakrum ist das Ziel etwas völlig anderes. Das Simulakrum ahmt ungeniert nur an der Oberfläche nach, und zwar ganz zufällig: Es ist eigentlich auf einer Disparität gebaut (Deleuze, 1993: 319). Kein Verhältnis bindet das Simulakrum an das Modell, es macht keinen Verweis darauf; es existiert nur in der Verhältnissen, die sich auf der Oberfläche der Welt ausbreiten. Das Werdende wächst unendlich und Reihenweise, und stellt Modell und Kopie zugleich infrage (Deleuze, 1993: 2; 314). ,Alles kehrt jetzt zur Oberfläche zurück’ (Deleuze, 1993: 7).

Das heißt, wir berufen uns absichtlich auf Ähnlichkeit, wir betonen keinen Versuch nach Gleichheit, keine tiefe Identität die äußerlich misslungen ist, sondern eine ausdrückliche Variation, ein Abrücken. Jede Ähnlichkeit spricht für sich selbst und verkündet seine eigene Stellung. Ähnlichkeit sucht nicht nach Gleichheit und Ruhe, sondern nach Verschiedenheit und Bewegung. Foucault schreibt (1974 [1973]: 25): ,Mittels der Gleichheit wird sichtbar gemacht, durch den Unterschied hindurch wird gesprochen.’ Darunter steht nichts: Goodman hat recht, dass die Suche nach reihenweiser Synthese künstlich und vergeblich ist. Er findet in der Ähnlichkeit einen falschen Freund weil er nicht erkennt, dass die Freundschaft sich in einer offenen Ankündigung von Disparität zeigt. ,Nur was sich ähnelt, differiert,’ erklärt Deleuze (1993: 320)—sonst stellen wir uns der Identität. Ohne irgendeine tiefliegende Verbindung zwischen zwei ähnlichen Dingen sind wir gezwungen, an der Oberfläche zu verweilen, und genau diese Abwesenheit zu beobachten. ,Diese Abwesenheit steigt sogar an ihrer Oberfläche empor und kommt im Gemälde ans Tageslicht’ (Foucault, 1974: 36).

Laut Foucault (1974: 40) zeigt Magritte genau diese Unterschied zwischen similitude und Ähnlichkeit mit seiner Pfeife. Sein kalligraphisches Spiel zwischen Bild und widersprüchlichen Wörtern—,dies ist keine Pfeife,’ wo das Bild sicherlich eine Pfeife darstellt, auch wenn es keine rauchbare Pfeife ist—zieht unsere Aufmerksamkeit auf das ,Ist’. ,Ist’ bezeichnet eine Verhältnis, und Magritte spielt mit der Zweideutigkeit dieses Verhältnisses, und auf zwei Ebenen. Erst ist es nicht klar, ob ,dies’ auf den Text oder das Bild hinweist (Foucault, 1974: 19-20). Text und Bild scheinen austauschbar, beide scheinen in einer eigenen Weise eine Pfeife darzustellen; sie scheinen nämlich entweder wörtliche oder visuelle Äquivalenzen von Pfeifen zu sein, bis wir den beiden zusammen begegnen und deren unlösbaren Konflikt betrachten. ,Das Bild und der Text fallen je auf ihre Seite, gemäß der ihnen eigenen Schwerkraft,’ beobachtet Foucault (1974: 20). Sie teilen keinen gemeinsamen Ort, überlappen sich nicht, weder auf dem Blatt mit seinem unüberbrückbaren weißen Raum noch in ihrer Funktion.

Und dies ist die zweite Ebene: Das Wort macht einen Verweis, es übernimmt den Platz des Dings selbst, es reicht als eine Substitution dafür. Das Wort nimmt eine funktionierende Äquivalenz oder Identität an. Dieses Verhältnis, diese buchstäbliche ,ist’, benennt Foucault (1974: 42) ,Ähnlichkeit’, welche verkündigt: ,Dies und das und das auch noch—das ist jene Sache.’ Das Bild, im Gegenteil, steht in einem völlig andere Verhältnis zur Pfeife. Es muss auf keine echte Pfeife verweisen, auch nicht auf die Idee einer Pfeife überhaupt. Es hängt sich von keiner unkörperlichen Modell von Pfeifen überhaupt. Wenn wir nichts von Pfeifen wüssten, würde das Bild unabhängig davon bestehen. Das Bild ist keine Pfeife, sondern es ist eine weitere Bestätigung von Pfeifen, körperlich anders als alle ähnlichen Pfeifen und Pfeifenbilder, die reihenweise und horizontal und wildwachsend sich ausbreiten, jede eine neue und selbständige und körperliche Bejahung in der Welt. Diese similitude bestätigt sich und jubelt in der von Deleuze beschriebene Disparität; sie ,entfaltet sich in Serien, die weder Anfang noch Ende haben,’ sie besteht in einem unbestimmten und umkehrbaren Verhältnis (Foucault, 1974: 40). Alice, schreibt Deleuze (1993: 1-2), wächst und schrumpft zugleich: Das Werdende, seiner Natur nach, ist ständig bewegt und erreicht nie das Ziel. Es tanzt horizontal über die Oberfläche der Welt, in alle Richtungen gleichzeitig (Foucault, 1974: 42). Was Foucault ,die Ähnlichkeit’ nennt, entspricht eher dem platonischen Impuls, nach einer festen Identität zu suchen: Sie ,ordnet sich dem Vorbild unter, das sie vergegenwärtigen und wiedererkennen lassen soll’ (Foucault, 1974: 40). Ein Bild macht keinen solchen wörtlichen—propositionalen—Verweis auf irgendeinem Modell. Deshalb ist ein Bild nicht in demselben Sinn wie ein Wort ,abbildlich.’ Es lehnt das ,Ist’—die Äquivalenz—ab.

Die Ähnlichkeit zeigt dennoch eine Verbindung an, oder, besser gesagt, die Variationen der Ähnlichkeit sind die Resultate einer Form von Kontinuität. Die von Goodman vorgeschlagene Stammlinie zwischen Kunstwerk und Urheber ist aber zu einfach für diese Verbindung. Gewiss bleibt der Urheber wichtig, nicht aber als statischer Identifikationspunkt, nicht als ein bloßer Name oder vertrautes Etikett. Der Urheber ist viel mehr: Im Hervorbringen eines Kunstwerks ist der Locus eines Vorgangs. Die Verbindung, die wir suchen ist genau den Denkprozess eines Künstlers, der ein Kunstwerk ausdrücklich zu ,ein[em] Knotenpunkt lebendiger Bedeutungen’ macht (Merleau-Ponty, 1966: 182).

Und noch weiter: obwohl jedes Bild seine Verschiedenheit und in diesem Sinn seine Eigenständigkeit versichert, als Teile eines zusammenhängenden Denkprozesses können wir behaupten, dass mehrere Bilder zu einem Kunstwerk gehören. Gemälde sind nicht in demselben Sinn wie Musikstücke duplizierbar; die sind aber nicht so einzigartig wie üblicherweise angenommen. Die Malerin macht keine so starke Trennung zwischen jeden Skizze, während sie durch einen einzigen Cluster von Ideen arbeitet. Mit ihrer Hand untersucht sie mehrmals dieselbe Idee, erst von dieser Seite und dann von einer anderen Seite; sie erforscht diese Idee in einer kontinuierlichen Gedankenlinie, auf der Suche nach einer adäquateren körperlichen Instanziierung davon.

So einen Gedankenprozess können wir in einer Reihe von Skizzen von, zum Beispiel, Édouard Vallet beobachten. Im Katalog ist jede Skizze individuell nummeriert und benannt: ,80. Paysannes se reposant’, ,81. Jeune Valaisannes se reposant’, ,82. Jeunes femmes se reposant’, ‘88. Femmes couchées’, bis zum endgültigen Gemälde, ‘92. Femmes endormies’ (De Wyder, 1976: 66-75). Für den Kataloghersteller steht jedes Bild ewig in seiner Vollkommenheit als ein Werk; für Vallet dagegen ist jedes Bild ein Schritt, eine Bewegung, eine flüchtige Begegnung mit der Welt. Er reist, wie Alice, hin und her, er überdenkt diese Skizzen in keiner festen Folge (Deleuze, 1993: 1). Seine Gedanken sind weder fest noch linear; die umkreisen einander und verweben sich miteinander, wirken aufeinander. Einer isoliert beobachteten Gestalt begegnet man anders, wenn sie mit einer zweiten Form zusammenhängt. Die Farbtöne betonen einige Linien mehr als andere; anatomische Einzelheiten gehen verloren und werden wieder miteinander verflochten. Am Ende haben wir ein einzelnes Gemälde, die Kulmination aller Untersuchungen. Und für die Künstlerin ist sogar dieses Bild vielleicht unvollkommen, bleibt noch eine offene Frage, und zumindest auch nur ein Schritt zur nächsten Frage. Jedes Bild ist eigenartig und doch nicht: Jedes Bild entwickelt sich aus und inmitten anderer Bilder. Es ist der Kunsthistoriker, der nachträglich, in seinem Kategorisierungseifer, eine Trennung aufdrängt. Unsere Kategorien wählen willkürlich Gemälde als autographisch aus, wenn es nicht zu befremdlich ist, sie als veränderliche und lebendige Vorgänge zu konzipieren.

Édouard Vallet, Femmes endormies

Eine Kopie eines Gemäldes strebt nach einer äußerlichen Ähnlichkeit und mag sogar erfolgreich sein. Wir sind aber nicht damit zufrieden: Wir spüren ein Trennen, das die Oberfläche nicht verriet. Wir kehren zu unserer neu geformten Frage wieder zurück— worin liegt die Fälschung? Es liegt in keiner tief verborgenen Erkenntnis, sondern in der abrupten Unterbrechung des Gedankenprozesses der Künstlerin. Wir schätzen eine Fälschung nicht, weil sie ungestützt vom Gedanken steht. Und zwar würde ich behaupten, dass dies an der Oberfläche doch sichtbar ist, wenn man mit den Bewegungen einer Künstlerin vertraut ist. Die Künstlerin zieht ihre Hand über die Oberfläche in einer eigenartigen Linie; jede Erforschung weicht von den anderen sanft ab, ohne diesen Charakter abzuschaffen. Jede neuentdeckte Harmonie ist eine Ausbreitung oder vielleicht eine Verfeinerung von einer Konstellation von Farben, die langfristig vor den Augen der Künstlerin geschwebt hat. Der Fälscher nimmt nicht an diesem lebenslangen Ineinandergreifen von Künstlerin und Welt teil. Der Fälscher offenbart eher seinen eigenen Denkprozess (vergl. Slaby, 2014, über Empathie und Handlungsfähigkeit). Er zeigt seine Ungeschicktheit indem er das Gelb des Firnisses oder die Schäden sklavisch und gedankenlos reproduziert. Er betrachtet das Gemälde als ein vollkommenes Erzeugnis, was seine einfältigen Entscheidungen höchst klar machen. Die Fälschung ist von einer echten Begegnung mit der Welt getrennt. Der Fälscher übte seine eigene Handlungsfähigkeit nicht aus.

Der Nachahmer hingegen produziert keine Fälschung, genau weil er erstens die Gedanken der Künstlerin einzutreten versucht, und zweitens diese Gedanken in seinen eigenen Gedankenprozess integriert. Er erweitert seine Gedanken, indem er mit der Künstlerin zu denken versucht. Rubens kopiert Tizian, nicht um ein Tizianerzeugnis zu besitzen, sondern um die Gedanken von Tizian in Besitz zu nehmen. Rubens bleibt aber zuversichtlich in seinen eigenen Gedanken. Seine Kopien zeigen die Verschmelzung von Gedanken—die unverwechselbaren Lippen und Augen seiner flämischen Frauen vermischen sich nahtlos mit der leuchtenden Haut in ihrer schönen Tizian’schen linearen Vereinfachung.

Tizian, Mädchen im Pelz, Wien

Rubens, Mädchen im Pelz, Brisbane

Eine Fälschung, wie Goodman sie versteht, stützt sich auf das platonische Verhältnis zwischen Urbild und umkreisenden Bild. Eine Fälschung ahmt dementsprechend ein Original nach, und dazu unvollkommen. Wenn die Gedankenreihe anstatt der Person betont wird, der lebendige Vorgang zwischen Künstlerin und Kunstwerk und Welt (das Werdende) anstatt des Erzeugnisses (das Seiende), verlagert sich der Sinn von Fälschung. Sie ist nicht mehr eine bloß misslungene oder täuschende Kopie, die nicht mit dem angeblichen Ursprung verbunden werden kann. Eine Fälschung ist vielmehr eine Kopie die den entscheidenden Vorgang umfährt, um ein bloßes Ende zu reproduzieren. Der Fälscher nimmt nicht am Vorgang teil und er gliedert die Gedanken des Anderen nicht ein. Er unterbricht die Serie und löst einen Teil davon ab. Als Gemälde mag das Resultat noch technisch und ästhetisch schön sein, aber es fehlt die suchende Qualität der Striche, die eingeübte Zuversicht, der unverkennbare Schwung einer Linie, der es nicht nur zu dieser Hand aber auch zu dieser lebenslangen Untersuchung verbindet. Genau der Mangel dieser Erfahrungen schwillt zur Oberfläche. Die Fälschung zeigt sich als minderwertig, weil sie sich auf keine fortlaufende Untersuchung baut, weil sie kein ,Knotenpunkt lebendiger Bedeutungen’ ist (Merleau-Ponty, 1966: 182). Sie ergreift keine lebendige Idee, sie greift die Welt nicht an. Sie ist eine totgeborene Idee, die nach dem Unmöglichen sucht: Identität.

Nach Veronese

Deleuze, Gilles. (1993 [1969]). Logik des Sinns. Übersetzung von Bernhard Dieckmann. Frankfurt (Main): Suhrkamp.

Foucault, Michel. (1974 [1973]). Dies ist keine Pfeife: Mit zwei Briefen und vier Zeichnungen von René Magritte. Übersetzung von Walter Seitter. München: Carl Hanser.

Gleizes, Albert, und Jean Metzinger. (1988 [1912]). Über den ,Kubismus.’ Übersetzung von Fritz Metzinger. Frankfurt (Main): Fischer.

Goodman, Nelson. 1972. Problems and Projects. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An approach to a theory of symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1966 [1945]. Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung. Übersetzung von Rudolf Boehm. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Plato. (1988). The Republic, 2nd edition. Translated by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin.

Plato. (1984). The being of the beautiful : Plato’s Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Plato. (1976). Timaeus and Critias. Translated by Desmond Lee. Hammondsworth, England: Penguin.

Slaby, J. (2014). Empathy’s Blind Spot. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 17, 249-258.

Rivière, Jacques. (1966 [1912]). ,Gegenwärtige Strömungen in der Malerei,’ in Der Kubismus, Ed. Edward Fry. Köln: DuMont Schauberg.

De Wyder, Bernard. 1976. Vallet, Édouard: Exposition et catalogue, sous les auspices du Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève. Genève: Musée Rath.

Common ground

Ode to the rooftops (c) Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

Pursuing a link between moods and art, Schmetkamp (2017: 1683) claims that ‘moods are the expressive equivalent of perspectives, of how we perceive and are in the world.’ Schmetkamp (2017: 1683; 1693) argues that films, in invoking particular moods, invite a shift in perspective. This is an initially attractive suggestion, because it seems to lead us away from the impulse to understand a work of art, a cognitive act, and to permit us to encounter the work of art in a pre-reflective way. In the case of painting, we might correspondingly argue that rather than confronting symbols in need of interpretation, we confront the perspective of another person–the painter–and are invited to try on that perspective, inhabit it, and perhaps adjust our own perspective accordingly.

But the idea of perspective-shifting is still chained to the impulse to understand another, as if the head of another is a ‘container of objects’ to which we somehow seek to gain access (Slaby 2014: 253; 255). Perspective-shifting is one way of describing empathy: as an ability to inhabit another’s perspective and thereby predict and share in their emotions (Goldie, 2011: 303; Slaby, 2014: 249). Slaby’s (2014: 252) compelling critique of empathy will thus help us grasp why perspective-shifting is equally unsatisfying in the realm of aesthetics, because of the parallel importance of agency. Beyond mere perspective-shifting, I propose that a painting, as an affective encounter between painter and viewer, offers a fertile, physical ‘we-space’ in which, rather than attempting to understand a painter, we may to some extent co-author our positions in the world: a shared and ongoing project (Krueger, 2011: 644).

II Three broad categories: Perception, knowledge and agency

Empathy can be very broadly conceived in two ways. The first captures the directness with which we sometimes relate to others. Sometimes our emotional response to another person is automatic, involuntary and passive (Slaby, 2014: 255). Their emotions are not buried or locked away, but visible at the surface, directly available to perception (Slaby, 2014: 255; Zahavi, 2001: 153). Such direct responses are sometimes classed as ‘lower level’ empathy, for not being cognitively demanding (Slaby, 2014: 251). They encompass the kind of matching that goes on when a group spreads its contagious solemnity or rage or excitement, or the simulation explained by mirror neurons (Goldman, 2011: 33-36). Parallels with art may be traced in Tolstoy’s (1896) memorable but largely rejected contagion theory (Wollheim, 1980: 119), in which an artwork directly infects us with its emotional content. Any such superficial matching is problematic because it can be completely detached from the context of the original emotions–Coplan (2011: 7; 8) expresses this concern in terms of insufficient accuracy, and argues that empathy demands, in addition to some kind of matching, a more active and imaginative engagement with the emotions of others. Simply feeling along with someone without appreciating why they feel as they do seems too primitive a response to be considered empathy.

The second broad way is to prioritise the cognitive or reflective aspect of our encounter with others, and it treats emotions as a kind of knowledge to be obtained. This is where the urge to understand becomes particularly prominent. Another person’s emotions become pieces of information to be accessed and interpreted, they demand some active consideration, not unthinking mimicry, and once we have organised this information we are in a better position to say that we understand the other person as a whole. These responses are grouped as ‘higher level processes’, emphasising ‘the information-processing sense of that term’ (Coplan, 2011: 5; Goldman, 2006: 39; Goldie, 2011: 304). Goldman (2011: 36-38) calls it the ‘reconstructive route’ to empathy. The idea of a privileged first-person position, in which I have special access to my own emotions, fuels this attitude. While we might simply distinguish between our own experience of an emotion and another person’s experience of us having that emotion, emphasising a phenomenological difference, there is often rather the implication that we hold ‘an epistemically privileged position’ towards our own emotions–that we can know them more accurately than another (Slaby, 2014: 254). It becomes questionable here how far one can call such understanding of another person ‘empathy,’ since a psychopath could ably perform such intellectual puzzle-solving but would seem to lack a necessary element of feeling. Analogously, intellectually decoding a painting seems to miss the affective richness of a painting, which we would rather hope would move us.

Both of these broad categories, though they prioritise very different things, are united by a common underlying assumption. Whether perceptually accessed and mirrored, or reflectively computed and understood, emotions are on both accounts reified (Slaby, 2014: 257). From either position, emotions are treated as fixed objects, whether reproducible, observable, discoverable or knowable (Slaby, 2014: 253), whether by oneself or by another. It is this unsatisfying ‘common pattern’ of treating our experiences as bytes of information locked away in storage or transmitted as complete units that leads Slaby (2014: 253; 255) to defend a third broad conception of relatedness, one rooted in the phenomenological tradition, that shatters the very concept of empathy.

This third broad category, to which interaction theory belongs, moves away from these pre-packaged inner states and towards an active, embodied agency that is bound up with the world itself (Krueger, 2010: 644). It stresses the ongoing, future-oriented authorship of our perspectives. And, as beings wrapped up in the world, it emphasises the shared aspects of that agency (Slaby, 2014: 255). Abandoning the attitude that a painter embeds little packets of emotional information into a painting, which either directly arrest us or which we systematically interpret, we might instead approach the painting as a physical setting for the active construction of perspectives. The painter wrestles with her perspective in laying down paint; the viewer wrestles with his in mingling the two perspectives–not, as Schmetkamp (2017: 1683) claims, merely trying the painter’s perspective on. Agency changes the interaction between these perspectives, opening up a more sophisticated exchange than perspective-shifting. First we must consider what a perspective is.

III Perspective

Drawing heavily on Merleau-Ponty, I frame perspective in terms of an ongoing project of positioning oneself in an ever-shifting world. Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]: 77-80) challenges the scientifically-driven assumption that the world is static and objectively knowable, that is, able to be described as if ‘from nowhere,’ stressing two crucial points. The world, in which we are inextricably immersed, can only be described in terms of relations. This is a familiar enough concept for a painter, who does not (usually) attempt to transcribe blue or yellow, as though these hues possessed fixed frequencies, but who rather sees that a mixture of grey next to a vivid yellow can appear blue: it is the relation between these hues that gives a certain effect. Likewise, the hills that shimmer a soft blue in the distance do so precisely because of the yawning gulf between us and them. The painted blue describes no objective feature of the hills, but rather the relation between us and the hills. (It is no accident that Leonardo da Vinci (2008: 113) adds this hue-shift to his list of types of perspective, calling it ‘perspective of colour.’) A perspective must be made sense of in terms of our relations with other constituents of the world.

Secondly, and drawing on Husserl (1973 [1948]: 87), Merleau-Ponty (2012: 196) emphasises the indeterminacy of the the world. It ‘shimmers’ at its edges, open-ended, unresolved and brimming with unactualised possibility. Part of our being in the world involves acting on our possibilities, realising some and abandoning others, a process that reconfigures the world such that it offers a fresh spread of possibilities with every act. Our actions influence and alter how the world unfolds–we are participatory agents, and, what is more, we are directed towards an unfixed future. Our actions seize some possibilities and concretise our position in the world: I stand here in relation to the bluish haze of Kahlenberg; I stand here in relation to the restless rumblings of nationalism. And our perspective is never complete, we are continually authoring it as we move through the world.

Our perspective, then, may be considered quite literally as a view from where we stand in relation to others and the world, as a worldview, but importantly as an actively constructed and future-looking worldview that constantly incorporates new input even as it influences that world. Agency emerges as an integral part of perspective thus considered. Perspective proves to be not a passive apprehension of a predictable and rigid world, but a ‘practical point of view’ (Slaby, 2014: 252). In taking up our positions, we ‘enact a world’ (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007: 488). As agents, argues Slaby (2014: 253), we are precisely not a hold for discrete entities and replicable states; rather, each of us has ‘a say in specifying, in ultimately deciding and committing to what one will have on one’s mind,’ and we partake in an ‘active, prospective engagement with the world: a future-directed positioning towards what goes on.’

This positioning is far more than descriptive; it suffuses the world with significance. Heidegger (1993 [1927]: 185-187) argues for a practical significance, or ‘mattering,’ generated by our immersion in our projects and our seamless fusion with our tools; Sartre (1998 [1943]: 36-38) argues that acts as small as lighting cigarettes, or even failures to act, are the very things that affirm who we are and both indicate and bestow significance. The failure to quit one’s comfortable job and become a painter demonstrates that one wants a life of security and stability more than one wants to paint, however much one apparently regrets this inaction.

These embodied ways of conceiving of significance contrast starkly with the search for meaning and its linguistic overtones. Meaning or sense prompts us to make a propositional substitution, to uncover an objectified packet of knowledge which the thing directly encountered stands for. In replacing something with its ‘meaning,’ we claim we finally understand it and its import. This attitude puts us in a troubling position when relating to others: we presume we ‘have to work out each other’s minds much like [we] do with scientific problems’ (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007: 486). De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007: 486; 487) thus begin to flesh out an embodied, active and shared approach to introducing (rather than uncovering ready-made) significance into the world: ‘the enactive notion of sense-making.’

De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s (2007: 497) account of participatory sense-making gives another slant to perspective, emphasising that agents may cooperatively and expressively position themselves. This begins to look a lot like Slaby’s (2014: 255) alternative to empathy, a ‘co-presence’ that echoes Heidegger’s (1962 [1927]: 118) Mitwelt. Far from trying to get inside one another’s heads, or to bridge some unfathomable abyss, agents accept what they perceive at the surface–the cheerful smile of their cycling companion as they surge up Kahlenberg–and construct a shared perspective (Slaby, 2014: 255-6). Two happy parties navigate vineyards and Heuriger vitrines and jointly author a golden afternoon in the Viennese hills, an experience different from that which each would author alone, and without needing to imagine themselves inside the head of the other to forge an honest and valid connection. ‘We thus drop the assumption,’ declares Slaby (2014: 256) ‘that the goal of interpersonal relatedness would inevitably have to be an encompassing understanding of the other person.’

IV Painting

Painting could arguably occupy a special place in such embodied discussions of affective relatedness. A painter goes a step further when positioning herself in the world: she gives her perspective physical form. Painting is another kind of act; the painter not only takes up a position in the world, considering and selecting and rejecting certain possibilities as she applies paint, but she also openly lays out that position in that same act. The painting is like a smile. But instead of saying that a painting opens up the painter’s mind to us (as though it were some closed-off realm), we ought to say that a painting lets us see through the painter’s eyes. ‘The view from here,’ she declares, laying it out before us, actualising those fleeting moments in a carefully arranged and subtly related way, ‘looks like this.’

But how can we say, ‘The view from here looks like this’ when paintings invariably lie? The soul of painting seems to be precisely the way it deviates from our ordinary perceptual experience, whether very subtly, as in very naturalistic paintings, which nevertheless involve choices about contrast and atmosphere and how fine-grained the modelling should be, or whether quite dramatically, as when edges dissolve into one another, or crude chunks of colour merely suggest masses, or when the world is fragmented into flat and interlocking geometric forms. Rather than saying abstractly that the painter gives her perspective physical form, we ought to investigate what this actually consists in.

In the paintings of Ruprecht von Kaufmann, for example, people fly through the air, or grow fish heads, often have no head at all, or their toes melt together into a single sturdy foot mass. This is certainly not how the world literally looks; we are not dealing with mere perception. If we are to cast these paintings as von Kaufmann’s perspective, we need to admit other modes of intentionality into perspective. Imagination is very relevant here: von Kaufmann invents things that could not exist. But there is also a sense of anticipation, of imagining how things might unfold: a leaping person or a diving person on a certain trajectory, headed towards a partly visible and partly foggy future. Remembering is equally important. Von Kaufmann’s deeply emotional experiences with family, loss and doubt haunt the paintings.

Remembering even plays a much more pedestrian, technical role in his work (von Kaufmann, 2014). Von Kaufmann actively observes the world about him and commits things to memory before reprising them in his paintings. The construction of a chair, the bone structure of a particular face, the character of a foot, the pattern of a fabric all resurface in his paintings after long gestation periods. Here I want to be careful not to say that he stores them up, fully-formed images catalogued in Augustinian caverns of memory, ready to be summoned (St Augustine, 2009: 152; 172). I want to emphasise that our memories are permeated and transformed by other emotions, other encounters and other expectations. When von Kaufmann paints a remembered sofa, it is a sofa embedded in a fabric of experiences, and it emerges from his brush stained by those experiences–it sags mournfully, it fades with resignation. How the world ‘looks’ is shorthand for: ‘this is a visual approximation of many interrelated and nuanced modes of intentionality towards the world.’ Von Kaufmann’s mellow and faded purples, the dampness that permeates his world through sludgy textures and glistening highlights and trickles of paint all combine to work up an uneasy mood.

V Moods and emotions

Moods are not emotions, except perhaps for Heidegger (1962 [1927]: 136), who uses the terms more freely and interchangeably. There are very precise ways of teasing the two apart (see for example Gallegos, 2017: 1500), but a simple distinction on the grounds of intentionality will do here (Schmetkamp, 2017: 1684-5). Emotions are usually considered to be directed at some particular object: I am sad about the cancelled Kahlenberg outing. But von Kaufmann’s paintings, though they might leak a sort of sadness, cannot really be said to express sadness about any particular thing. Rather, they build up a diffuse kind of tone or atmosphere, which might be better described as a feeling directed toward the whole world or even toward existence itself: a mood. Heidegger (1962: 179; 228-235; 1978: 99) goes so far as to say that such undirected moods are the precondition for finding ourselves in a world at all, that our every encounter with the world happens through some pervading sense of menace or serenity or boredom or some other mood. Ratcliffe (2005: 49; 52) describes a similar affective background of bodily ‘existential feelings,’ which are similarly non-intentional but set the scene for the way we open up onto the world. Although there are fearful objects in von Kaufmann’s paintings, such as fish-headed men, we are not really invited to fear them or direct some emotion at them. Still, they draw some affective response from us, especially situated as they are in a murky and oppressive old room with their damp skin, casually violating one another. Thus, it would be more philosophically precise to say that von Kaufmann’s paintings are mooded.

Schmetkamp (2017: 1682-3) suggests that this more careful affective distinction dramatically changes the aesthetic terrain. While emotions and art have an enduring philosophical relationship (reaching right back to Plato’s (Rep. 595a-b) admonitions against the arts for their propensity to move and thus destabilise us), moods open up fundamentally different questions about how we relate to art, while holding fast to their affective core. Having elaborated what we mean by perspective, particularly in terms of painting, we are in a better position to look at Schmetkamp’s (2017: 1683) main claim that ‘moods are the expressive equivalent of perspectives.’ Moods, by her account, add an affective layer to perspective, a layer quite distinct from directed emotions. This has a very Heideggerian flavour, especially insofar as she invokes their pre-reflective, ‘world-disclosing capacity’ (Schmetkamp, 2017: 1684-5). The moods of others, expressed in artworks, she asserts, ‘assail human beings holistically,’ enabling them to ‘comprehend a perspective in an encompassing manner’ (Schmetkamp, 2017: 1683). Moods are not perspectives, she clarifies; rather they give us access to perspectives: they are the precondition for having a perspective at all, and the gateway to trespassing into another’s perspective (Schmetkamp, 2017: 1690).

VI The problem with perspective-shifting

Moods really come into play in art, according to Schmetkamp (2017: 1692), in two respects. The first, interestingly, is that they ought to help us to understand a work of art. Concentrating on film, Schmetkamp (2017: 1692) argues that since a film thematises a mood, correctly apprehending that mood is central to understanding the film. This strikes me as immediately problematic, for the same reason Slaby (2014: 256) is uneasy about trying to understand other people empathetically. Schmetkamp has snuck in the idea that moods are objects, pre-packaged and ready to be delivered up to our cognitive faculties.

Secondly, Schmetkamp (2017: 1685; 1692) argues that moods are important in art because they acquaint us with the perspective of another. Specifically, they enclose us in that perspective, inviting a confrontation between that perspective and our own. A film allows us to temporarily shift our perspective–‘without being totally absorbed’–and to potentially change our own perspective accordingly (Schmetkamp, 2017: 1691; 1693-4). It would not be much of a stretch to say this sounds like another form of empathy in which we try to inhabit the mood rather than the emotions of another person.

A non-trivial problem with this proposed shift in perspectives is that, as Goldie (2011: 302) makes clear, there are two ways we might try to do it. We might imagine ourselves in the other’s position–Goldie (2011: 302) calls this ‘in-his-shoes perspective-shifting,’ in which we draw a firm boundary between the self and the other (Coplan, 2011: 5)–or we might imagine ourselves as the other. The former would seem to miss the point of empathy, of Einfühlung or ‘feeling-into’ another, ignoring the situation as it applies to them (Slaby, 2014: 250). If you hate cycling up cobbled hills in the height of summer, imagining yourself in my position will not result in the same jubilant glee at the prospect of doing so. But imagining that you are me and all my confounding perplexities is no mean feat, and not only because you lack my background experiences, quirks of character, inexplicable love for the hills and other irrationalities (Goldie, 2011: 309; Slaby, 2014: 252-3). And not only because you would have to artificially objectify these background influences and bring them into the foreground to perform such a feat of empathy (Slaby, 2014: 252). Worse: you would deny my moment-by-moment authorship of my perspective–you would usurp my agency (Goldie, 2011: 315; Slaby, 2014: 252). My perspective is not a thing to be entered into, because as soon as you trespass upon it, you begin to author it.

VII Co-authorship

When we confront a painting by von Kaufmann, then, taking it to be an extension of his perspective, there is always an element of authorship from our side. Granted, it is not the same kind of authorship as he performs when he physically wrestles with the surface of the picture. Von Kaufmann posits himself in the world as he lays down paint, and the moods that swell up in his paintings originate in his own mooded opening onto the world itself. He repeatedly encounters the world as ominous, treacherous, doubt-riddled, dizzying, but also irresistibly beautiful in its relentless and indifferent onward surge. The curve of a shark’s nose slices onwards with the same elegant and ruthless force of life itself. As a well-dressed headless man leaps from a building, von Kaufmann’s undirected mood materialises in a precarious viewpoint, in the contrast between the clean angle of the building and the trembling texture of the fragile figure, in the unresolved edges and muted purples.

But von Kaufmann is not claiming authorship from our side, nor trying to persuade us to adopt his doubt, nor to revise our own perspective in the wake of a perspectival showdown. Rather sagaciously, von Kaufmann (via personal communication, December 2017) explicitly explains that he wants to give us just enough narrative substance that we feel we have a stake in each painting, that we are compelled to pick up and continue the story, for those stories are another way of making sense of the world (a sentiment echoed by Krueger (2011: 645), and a topic for another time). The magic happens when we find that something in this plainly laid out perspective already aligns with something of our own. It resonates with us precisely because of its familiarity, as though it were an expression of our own doubts. That is to say: we are not confronting some alternative view, but meeting with von Kaufmann on some common ground.

The painting reflects a shared space: the plane of the picture opens into an active field. As viewers, we are invited to author something else. We are prompted, at a common affective juncture, to continue to build our own perspective around this powerful embodied expression bestowed upon us Iike a gift. Our own background and idiosyncrasies and variable moods latch onto the ponderous mood, the anxiety, the bewilderment, but the stories that we weave are our own.

The shared space of a painting evidently lacks the reciprocation of a face-to-face encounter, and only loosely takes inspiration from Krueger’s (2011: 643-4) ‘we-space.’ The interaction cannot possibly happen in the same dynamic way that he argues for, for indeed there is no interaction between agents (Krueger, 2011: 646). Instead, each agent interacts with the painting. But what is crucial is that both painter and viewer remain agents; each understands that the other affectively engages with the painting and finds compelling common ground in that thin layer of paint because of the background-driven, future-oriented authorship of each party, however differently their actions might manifest.

VIII

A painting invites not a shift in perspective, but active authorship in an affective space that is live for both painter and viewer. The perspectives of the two necessarily differ, but sometimes there is enough overlap to forge a strong connection between the two, allowing each agent to author a different perspective from this common ground. Rather than trying to inhabit the painter’s perspective or to cognitively understand a painting as if its affective power lay merely in the uncovering of discrete packets of affective information, stressing the future-oriented agency of active parties physically immersed in an ever-unfolding world gives us a richer way forward in binding moods and art.

St Augustine. (2009). The Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University.

Coplan, A. (2011). Empathy: Features and effects. In A. Coplan, & P. Goldie, (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University.

Gallegos, F. (2017). Moods Are Not Coloured Lenses: Perceptualism and the Phenomenology of Moods. Philosophia, 45, 1497-1513.

Goldie, P. (2011). Anti-Empathy. In A. Coplan, & P. Goldie, (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University.

Goldman, A. I. (2006). Simulating minds : the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University.

Goldman, A. I. (2011) Two Routes to Empathy. In A. Coplan, & P. Goldie, (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University.

Heidegger, M. (1962 [1927]). Being and Time. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, (Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Heidegger, M. (1978 [1929]). ‘What is Metaphysics?’ in his Basic Writings. D. F. Krell (Ed. and trans.). London: Routledge.

Heidegger, M. (1993 [1927]). Sein und Zeit. 19. Edition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.

Husserl, E. (1973 [1948]). Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

De Jaegher, H., & E. Di Paolo. (2007). Participatory Sense-Making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 485-507.

Von Kaufmann, R. (2014). Slideshow Lecture. Presented at the Laguna College of Art and Design. Laguna Beach, California. [Online] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odb_j855EUY [Accessed 12 January 2015].

Krueger, J. (2011). Extended Cognition and the Space of Social Interaction. Consciousness and Cognition, 20, 643-657.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012 [1945]). Phenomenology of Perception. Hoboken: Routledge.

Plato. (1988). The Republic, 2nd edition. Desmond Lee (Trans.). London: Penguin.

Ratcliffe, M. (2005). The Feeling of Being. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12(8-10), 43-60.

Sartre, J. P. (1998 [1943]). Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Hazel E. Barnes (Trans.). London: Routledge.

Slaby, J. (2014). Empathy’s Blind Spot. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 17, 249-258.

Tolstoy, L. (1996 [1896]). What is Art? Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Da Vinci, L. (2008). Notebooks. Selected by Irma A. Richter. Thereza Wells (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University.

Wollheim, R. (1980). Art and Its Objects: With Six Supplementary Essays. Reprinted 2. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Zahavi, D. (2001). Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5-7), 151-67.

Indifference and the look

If you like painting, Sartre, ocular globes, jungles, death, decay and all things existential, you should have a look at the paintings of José Luis Carranza and read my recently-published piece on him in Arte al Limite. Get it in print or have a look online–page 90.

Organisms of paint

State of the Art (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

‘It is impossible,’ says Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]: 221), ‘to paint about painting.’ He contrasts painting with the self-reflexivity of speech which can turn in on itself infinitely. And yet Ruprecht von Kaufmann, in his impressive retrospective exhibition in Erfurt, Germany, boldly offers us a kind of modern altarpiece, ‘State of the Art,’ which seems to be precisely a painterly contemplation on what painting is and where it is going. The panels seem to unfold like an altarpiece in an old German church, but in fact they are flat against the wall: the perspective is built into their skewed frames and continues in the lines of the pictures. From the outset the painting toys with our perception and toys with our smug art historical expectations. It raises a physical challenge to our interminable discussions about painting; for language proves, after all, ‘equally uncommunicative of anything other than itself’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 219).

The left wing houses a blazing piano whose narrow side is painted in rough, grainy, horizontal slashes that are cut sharply into a perfect vertical line–a painterly impossibility, unless one makes use of some non-traditional tool, like a stencil. Where the paint meets this stencil it rises to a proud precipice, defiantly thick. The piano seems wedged behind a smoky bar, but the long, thin counter proves to be a hovering canoe, whose subtle modulations of colour would also be impossible to paint save for the long and carefully prepared hooked curve of a stencil that determines its border. Its edges are licked pink, flaming between the sedate purple and indifferent white, giving them a diffuse glow even while they wrap around sharp edges.

State of the art (detail) (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

In the boat is a sorry looking figure. His painting-arms–for they end in brushes–hang limp and useless. Beyond him, in the final panel, flat and hasty modernist scribbles recede impatiently around a corner. Von Kaufmann seems to be in a devastating limbo. His works lack the shrewd indifference or even scorn towards narrative expected of the contemporary painter. But perhaps his painting is, in a sense, ‘accidentally narrative,’ in the way Merleau-Ponty (2012: 174) argues that a poem is. Beneath the images conjured up by the words of a poem lies the poem’s real power: its pulsing, rhythmic incantation loosely caresses its story but it leads, he insists, ‘in the reader’s mind, a further existence which makes it a poem’ (2012: 174). The force of its delivery lingers in our minds, not the synopsis, and our memory of that electrifying encounter stays with us long after the plot is lost to us. ‘A novel, poem, picture or musical work,’ ventures Merleau-Ponty (2012: 175) ‘are individuals, that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed.’

Etude (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Floating in this uncertainty, von Kaufmann puts on his painting-arms anyway. He brandishes them with the fury of the piano player in the small gouache study ‘Etude,’ who plays on relentlessly with quivering, bendy arms while the whole thing goes up in smoke. Behind the hovering, inert painter (who is about to be hit with a bucket of paint) hangs other equipment ready to be assumed: his ordinary hands, more brushes, and a cluster of gracefully hooked shapes. It takes me a minute, but then I recognise them: some stencils hang from the wall with a languid drape, curling with the glamour of Nouvelle Vague cigarettes, seductive as a Jugendstil arc across any reputable Viennese Kaffeehaus door. The painter might wearily pull on his brushes, but he might also adapt–

Flucht (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Suddenly the stencils are everywhere. What would be discarded is offered triumphantly to our view, laid at the altar of painting. I see their crisp, cool results in the slick noses of sharks and I see their untiring reiteration of geometric patterns. But I also see them painfully and meticulously describing complex floor tiles in exaggerated perspectives, and I see them as sensually abstracted flat shapes. Von Kaufmann knows their rhythms intimately, he sees them scattered about the landscape of his studio, he eyes them as he dutifully attends to emails and escapes, momentarily, into their undulating forms, flattening them, in his mind, into lusciously rolling shapes, before abandoning his emails to paint them so: abstractions of abstractions, main protagonists formed of discarded remnants, paintings devised out of the very tools of painting, and out of unconventional and disposable tools at that. Von Kaufmann slips into his painting-arms and paints–defiantly, belligerently, compellingly–about painting.

Perfektion (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

The inevitable final step is that the stencils break away from the pictures, wearing the residue of the paintings on their smooth skins as they stalk the gallery, looming as embodied thought. I stand, at last, face to face with the unearthly human forms of strangely graceful sculptures that von Kaufmann has fashioned from these remnants, breathing the same air that flows between their fanned rib cages. I cast a quick look about the gallery, shocked at being entrusted with this vivifying secret. But no one else seems to notice. They approach the sculptures–thoughtfully pieced together with astounding anatomical care, with graceful kinks offsetting ribs and pelvis, and swollen calves, with a sturdy turn of the knee and the sure fastening of hamstrings to fibula–with predictable detachment, accustomed to greeting clusters of garbage in galleries. They fail to grasp that all are one: that, intoxicated with the act of creation, possessed by the same sick obsession with galvanism as Mary Shelley, von Kaufmann has animated the very tools of expression, granting them their existence as beings, as individuals.

Tumble (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

But the studio remains haunted with doubts and other tiny evils. ‘The Atelier’ towers as a false diptych. It is light and grand and littered with deceptions: benign decapitations, casual self-cannibalism, banal skulls that make up the satin ripple of the wallpaper. But most arresting is the break between the panels. It is not at the dramatic pictorial division, where the studio is propped up like a film-set. This rift between red and white trails off into a wash of strokes that reveal the painterly artifice that it is, while the real division shatters the glass of the mirror. Von Kaufmann, with the head of a rabbit, sits stiff and paralysed. His wife is sturdy and solid and human, uncovered and unshakable, sensible in her house shoes, a woman really seen, something sure among the sham. Her earthiness is grounding. She is a delicate balance between flesh and drapery, like the melting woman of ‘Take off your skin,’ whose legs, painted with ribbon-like delicacy, seem to curl endlessly in on themselves like Möbius strips.

The studio, 8 years of my life as Mr Lampe (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Sometimes this firm but fluid drawing softens into something more loose and flat, like the legs in ‘In the house,’ a five-panel painting that traverses some intensely emotional territory across its breadth. These legs revert to gentle outlines with the loving wobble of a Klimt leg, rounded out by two or three subtle tones laid crudely next to one another. A slumped figure is composed entirely of looping outlines filled in banana-yellow, garish against the subdued purples, as if a caricature of himself, of his own maddening powerlessness, shut off from the turmoil behind the door. These softened human imprints constantly vie with the sharpness of stencils and with the exacting slopes of edges of rooms and stairways, whose disconcerting perspective refracts across breaks in the panels. The low-slung moon, thick and pocked with holes through horizontal waves, gleams artificially against a scraped violet-blue sky, cut out by a perfectly circular stencil. The bed escapes this technical tension; its soft ripples wrap expertly around a solid form with a pleasing virtuosity, its pearlescent tones are hushed and close and its strokes are swift and free.

In the House (detail) (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Perhaps the clash between human and tool is most violent in the long series of remembered heads, the ‘Zuschauer’ (‘spectators’). Von Kaufmann seems intent on finding an elegant summary of each person, an understated string of loving lines to cup a face and distill its delightful individuality. But the painting bites back. Von Kaufmann goads it out of submission, gouging its lino surface instead of gently smoothing paint across it, slicing it and swapping its parts around, or overloading it with chunks of paint. Each eruption of paint latches onto something of the painted spectator, who willingly parades themself as they desire to be seen. But each presentation is met with a judgement, and the paint betrays that judgement. Full and dewy lips are rendered in bleeding, streaky paint. Large glasses alluding to intellect perch upon an aloof face, and von Kaufmann carves them in deep, hollow circles. A proud girl with a lovely tilt of chin and charming cheekbones is all but erased by a flat slab of gold paint, and von Kaufmann seems to sneer at her bland anonymity behind her polish, before piling a rough blob of the glitzy substance in the middle of her vacant face. Whether they seem to gaze dreamily at a starry sky, or stew knowingly in their sagging skin, or wear their bright lapels proudly, or leer from gaudy Hawaiian shirts, von Kaufmann teases them with the cruel painterly pleasure he takes in their lopsided ears, their bulbous noses, the undersides of their copious chins as they raise their heads and prattle on endlessly. And he never lets them stare him down: their evasive eyes softly dissolve like sugar sunken into coffee, nothing more than smoky circles in their sockets.

Zuschauer (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

The spectators seem to suffer a painterly fate akin to Deleuze’s (2003: 98; 99) ‘diagram’–the controlled chaos that he attributes to the smeared faces painted by Francis Bacon, the part of the painting freed from intention and left to the harsh irreverence of the hand. Indeed, the stencils permit exactly that–they define a limit within which von Kaufmann can enact a mindless physical fury at odds with the rest of the painting process, that would otherwise spill destructively into other regions and swallow up the picture. But von Kaufmann has found more than a clever tool in his stencils, for his rough patches, rather than wreaking disaster on a painting, seem rough in a directly human response to innovations and developments in painting. A stencil could, in the hands of another, be a crutch, an assistant to a lazy painter. Von Kaufmann defies the stencil and pushes its possibilities, he uses it not for ease and perfection but rather to reveal what paint is, its viscosity and willfulness, and to show us how inescapably human painting is. Every frenzied texture that wrestles through a stencil is a declaration about painting. Von Kaufmann does not carelessly disrupt his paintings. Rather, he thrashes painting to life, extracting every last drop of expression from every last part of it–even from the tools and the substrate–awakening it into a being, into an organism of paint.

Whatever von Kaufmann’s private doubts about painting may be, he keeps probing perception, probing existence itself, until the paintings assume their own existence, silently stewing and imposing their alternatives on us. His work always clings to a story, certainly, and prods us to discover one. But in so many ways they are paintings about painting, thought through the act of painting itself; the presence they give to these thoughts is far more deep and honest than this inadequate tribute of words. Every time von Kaufmann puts on his painting arms, he inhabits painting even as it inhabits him, he fuses seamlessly with his tools like bike and rider and surges on relentlessly, and we can no longer say where the brush ends and he begins.

Prometheus (c) Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Deleuze, Gilles. 2003 [1981]. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. 1 edition. London: Continuum.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Hoboken: Routledge.

‘Die Evakuierung des Himmels‘ runs until 02 April 2018 at Kunsthalle Erfurt, Germany. Do it!

Knowledge or experience

Coffee house muses (c) Samantha Groenestyn

Malcolm Budd (2012: 205) is not restrained in his admiration for Richard Wollheim’s (1987) influential book Painting as an Art, but he finds Wollheim’s appeal to a distinctive phenomenology by which we encounter paintings to be rather extravagant. Wollheim’s (1987: 22; 181) account of pictorial representation notoriously avoids language-driven accounts of representation, and turns squarely toward our experience of what it is like to look at a painting. Crucially, finds Wollheim, we exercise a remarkable ability (not exclusive to looking at paintings) to be aware of both the painted surface and of something depicted in it–at the same time. He calls this phenomenologically distinct feat ‘seeing-in.’ Budd (2012: 194) finds seeing-in to be inadequately described and unsupportable. What Wollheim cannot escape, he argues, is that our ability to grasp what a picture represents is inevitably grounded in knowledge. Proposing added visual experiences is a superfluous move when we inevitably need to secure representation by means of knowledge.

Wollheim introduces seeing-in between the perceptual experiences of ordinary seeing and illusion. Seeing, on its own, is a wonderfully complex process, but what has been traditionally difficult to account for is that a painting presents us with two very different objects of attention in the one object. The same marks may be seen as marks on a surface or as the scene or person they represent. This adds a layer of complexity to seeing that has proved difficult to reconcile. Ernst Gombrich (1959: 5) champions illusion as the solution, arguing that we do not see both surface and image at the same time, but that we are able to flick between the two visual experiences. When we attend to the image we submit to the illusion. Budd (2012: 187) clarifies that this by no means demands that we hold a false belief; rather, we are able to hover between two different perceptual experiences that have the same representational content. But what he finds unsatisfying about Gombrich’s solution is that it excludes the possibility that we can experience both at the same time.

Wohnzimmer (c) Carl Moll (1903)

If we reflect on the experience of looking at paintings (the kind of thing a phenomenologist would do), it would indeed seem that we can attend to both surface and image at once. Gombrich’s insistence that one cannot seems stubbornly at odds with the experience of looking at a painting. Certainly, sometimes we are so caught up in the picture that we concentrate more on its content, but (aside from plausibly-located trompe l’oeils) we are not prone to mistake paintings for the thing that they depict, nor to really forget that they are paintings. Sometimes we are so enamoured of the paint that we neglect the content, but it is difficult to block out the content entirely. Perhaps the best counterargument to Gombrich is the kind of painting that proudly brandishes its physicality, of which countless fine examples abound. Let’s limit our examples to the Viennese painter Carl Moll. His naturalistic portrayals of Viennese interiors and parks and hills are recognisable scenes of breakfast settings and villages among forests. But their dappled marks of all manner of inflection, their tight design and their honest but somehow augmented colours are inescapable reminders that the object of our vision is a painting. The distortion is always just enough that the paint must always be present in our experience, even when contemplating a Wiener Frühstück.

Mutter und Kind am Tisch. (c) Carl Moll (1903)

Wollheim (1987: 46) begins to describe such experiences, echoing Leonardo da Vinci’s (2008: 173) example of the battles and landscapes to be found in textured walls by the daydreaming eye, but his appeal to phenomenology goes little further, argues Budd (2012: 194). By Budd’s estimation, the phenomenon remains under-described, and in any case, it is not clear that the step is at all necessary. At least one feature of the experience must be established: Budd (2012: 193) argues that seeing-in must involve distributed attention, a specifically non-focused attention that roams the picture as we take in the picture as a whole, or an attention rather meditatively shared among the many properties of a picture (a theme Bence Nanay (2016: 13; 21, 22) takes up with great enthusiasm). Without distributed attention, the perceptual experience simply lapses back into seeing (in which we see only paint) or gives way to illusion (in which we see only the image).

Rather than pursue the necessity of distributed attention, Budd recasts Wollheim’s earlier and later accounts of representation in terms of his own favoured emphasis on depiction. The choice is significant: depiction frames representation explicitly in terms of a referential relationship. It says that a picture refers to something else in the world which it depicts, for which it is in some way a substitute, without being equivalent, for the thing in the world does not ever depict the picture. This explanation insists that pictures are dependent on the world. Moreover, it operates in a very linguistic way, treating pictures (or their parts) rather like propositions that refer to objects or ideas. I am not too sympathetic to this attitude and neither is Wollheim. His explicit rejection of language-driven explanations makes his unconventional appeal to phenomenology unsurprising. It is clear that Budd persists in the propositional tradition of representation, but we shall examine his criticism nonetheless.

Depiction, he begins, demands an awareness of two things: both the marked surface and what is depicted (Budd, 2012: 186). When we are aware of both, we can correctly determine what a painting depicts. Were we not aware of the surface, we would think we were looking at the real thing. Were we not aware of what is depicted, representation would break down and we would be left with an incomprehensible arrangement of paint. Traditionally, work on representation tries to relate these two kinds of awareness, but the real problem, explains Budd (2012: 186), was always a knowledge-based one. The awareness of what is depicted is comprised of two parts: that we can see that x is depicted, and that we know what an x is in order to recognise it. Representation, when it succeeds, hangs on this knowing what before any concern about perceptual experiences. For a spectator to see a representation of snow, he must first know what snow is, then see that there is snow in the picture, and finally see that the picture is on a surface and is hence a picture and not actually snow.

Winter in Preibach (c) Carl Moll (1904)

Wollheim describes his special perceptual capacity, on which seeing-in is based, in two different ways as his theory develops. The early version describes it as two simultaneous experiences; the later version describes it as a single experience with two aspects. Budd treats each version in turn. The early stance states that seeing-in is based on a special perceptual capacity that involves simultaneously seeing two things: one that is present before the eyes and one that is not. The paint (or the rough texture of the wall) is what is directly visually perceived; the snow is also visually perceived but it is not there. Seeing what is not there, by Wollheim’s account, is a ‘cultivated experience,’ and here, argues Budd (2012: 196) lies the gap that Wollheim cannot fill perceptually. Wollheim can see that there is snow, but must bring his knowledge of what snow is to the picture. The what is hidden beneath the that.

Wollheim’s later account simply buries the problem even deeper, Budd (2012: 199) continues. In merging the two experiences into a single perceptual experience, twofoldness, with two aspects, a configurational and a recognitional aspect, Wollheim neglects to explain from whence this recognition arises, if not from some prior knowledge. The gap, the epistemic blank, reemerges in this subordinate part of the unified perceptual experience.

Let us examine this knowledge gap. For Wollheim (1987: 44; 89), it is crucial that all the resources that a spectator needs to engage with a painting are contained within that painting. This is because he wants to locate the meaning of a painting within itself, rather than use the painting as a tool for getting at the meaning of the world. The latter kind of position, held by proponents of symbol-driven theories like Nelson Goodman (1977: 241; 260; 265), see the painting and its elements as substitutions for concepts or objects in the world, as something that must always be interpreted in relation to the world. To ascribe a painting this kind of placeholder-status is to treat it propositionally: like language. Wollheim knows that we bring our own preconceptions to a painting, and he does not utterly discredit this type of meaning. But, he argues, it is not the most illuminating nor the primary type of meaning that paintings can have (Wollheim, 1987: 22). Indeed, we can engage meaningfully with a painting in spite of a lack in our knowledge.

At the sideboard (c) Carl Moll 1903

Consider a painter, perhaps from Australia, who has never seen snow. She has, however, seen paintings of snow, and has heard a few things about it. Everything she knows about snow has been gained from second-hand sources. Nevertheless, she may go on to convincingly paint a snowy picture that conveys the unmistakable airy softness of thick, freshly-fallen snow, its icy sparkle in the sun, its mellow blueness in the shade. This knowledge of what snow is seems very mysterious for it was gained through knowledge that certain pictures represent snow. Budd’s knowledge requirement is not as primary as he claims. The same might be argued for mythical creatures, of which we become acquainted through fabricated pictures. Importantly, it seems that this knowledge stems from perception in one way or another: sometimes perception of the world, of snow itself; sometimes perception of other pictures.

Nanay (2016: 51) directs us back to perception for an explanation of this knowledge gap. He adds some nuance to Wollheim’s twofoldness by extending it into ‘threefoldness’ (Nanay, 2016: 48). Not unlike Budd, he distinguishes between three aspects, with the crucial difference that he considers each of them to be accessed by a perceptual experience. He lists them thus:

A: the two-dimensional picture surface
B: the three-dimensional object the picture surface visually encodes
C: the three-dimensional depicted object

Like Budd, Nanay distinguishes between the that and the what: B is the painted snow, and C is snow in the world, or the village of Nußdorf itself, to return to Carl Moll. For representation to succeed, by Nanay’s (2016: 58) account, we only need to perceive A and B, not A and C. The unfortunate Australian painter who has never seen snow, and those unfamiliar with Vienna’s delightful circle of wine-producing hills, can still successfully identify these in pictures. But more than this: without any idea where Nußdorf is or what it looks like, a spectator can still see a well-defined if anonymous village replete with church spire in the picture. The picture is not wholly without meaning simply because the spectator cannot put a name to it or connect it to a referent in the world. Similarly, a picture of a person can be recognised as such and even quite arresting even if that person remains anonymous to us.

Blick über Nußdorf und Heiligenstadt (c) Carl Moll

Nanay (2016: 55) describes this knowledge-deficiency in terms of perception. To the spectator uninitiated in the wine- and wandering-oriented recreation offered by the Viennese hills, C (Nußdorf itself) remains both unperceived and unrepresented. For the Viennese who does recognise those particular hills, Nußdorf is represented, though not immediately before his eyes. The final step, explains Nanay (2016: 55) is this: while gazing upon the hushed horizon of the painting, Nußdorf itself is ‘quasi-perceptually represented.’ The two experiences of seeing (one of what is there: the paint; one of what is not there: Nußdorf) comprise two simultaneous perceptual states and their overlap, says Nanay (2016: 57), is what the distinct phenomenology of recognising what a picture represents amounts to. Recognition is not necessary for representation to succeed, but when it does occur Nanay argues that it is possible to account for it perceptually.

Not so for Budd (2012: 204), who insists that ‘whatever a picture depicts, you would not see it as a depiction of that thing if you were unaware of what that thing looks like from the point of view from which it has been depicted.’ Representation completely falls apart for him when the unlucky spectator has a particular gap in his knowledge. And yet, the hazy scene through Nußdorf and Heiligenstadt and on to the hills retains its representational charm, not dissolving entirely into a completely impenetrable textured abstraction. Representation proves more robust than this.

View on the Nussberg toward Heiligenstadt (c) Carl Moll (1905)

Indeed, should the uninitiated spectator succumb to the lure of the hills that Moll irresistibly conveys and travel to Vienna, he might gaze out at the real thing and note with some amazement that the hills do in fact possess certain qualities that he gathered from the paintings. That sometimes they are a deep, violet-blue with crisp edges, and other times they dissolve, pale and silvery, into a husky purple sky. Something of the sleepy wine-drenched atmosphere soaks the pictures in a way that is more honest than the real thing, and not entirely absent from the real thing.

Budd considers it an unjustifiable extravagance to turn to phenomenology and posit a new species of seeing. As we have considered, his account of representation remains rooted in language, and reexamining the experience of looking at a painting is an attractive alternative if one finds this kind of substitution-based interpretive meaning inadequate when it comes to painting. I would suggest that Wollheim’s move is far from extravagant, and could be extended further. Looking at a painting, at its variegated surface and its carefully conceived relationships, is very different from looking at whatever it ‘depicts,’ and not only because of the mysteriousness of seeing the three-dimensional in the two-dimensional. It is as though one is granted access to the perceptual experience of another, the artist. The artist is able to show far more about her perceptual experience by her deliberate selection, construction, augmentation and handling of the what. She is able to show something of how she experiences the hills, tinged with memory and longing, spiked with intense heat or blistering cold, as a solitary thinker or basking in delightful company. Painting, by its very nature, offers us perceptual experiences far beyond our ordinary visual encounters, specifically by merging it with the horizonal structures encountered by others: painters.

Obersdorf

Budd, Malcolm. 2012. Aesthetic Essays. Oxford University: Oxford.

Gombrich, Ernst. 1959. Art and Illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation. Phaidon: London.

Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An approach to a theory of symbols. Hackett: Indianapolis.

Nanay, Bence. 2016. Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception. Oxford University: Oxford.

Wollheim, Richard. 1987. Painting as an art. Thames and Hudson: London.

Da Vinci, Leonardo. 2008 [1952]. Notebooks. Oxford: Oxford.

Blueish yellow

The connection between colour and geometry demands some attention. Richard Heinrich (2014: 41) argues that ‘there is always a tension between … colour space and the geometry of colour,’ that conceptualising colour in terms of space is not as simple as unearthing the underlying geometric principles that will take care of everything. He is, of course, correct in this. There are many rich and nuanced ways of conceiving of colour spatially, from Aristotle’s delightfully plain string of colours, which Newton (1672) eventually closed into a circle, which has been expanded both theoretically and experimentally into various three-dimensional schema that are as idealised or roughly-hewn as their methods dictate (Briggs, 2017). A geometric conception of colour space, like that of Philipp Otto Runge (1810), approaches colour from a purely theoretical side, permitting us the sharp analytical divisions of conceptual midpoints and the elegant polish of a sphere as the theoretical limit. The reality of colour, both for the physicist and the painter, is much rougher at the edges, much more irregular, much grittier. But this does not mean that some abstracted principles, deliberately divorced from the messy realities of light and pigment, cannot be united with the practice in an instructive way. Indeed, such conceptual clarity can help the practicing colourist organise her approach to colour, while still allowing the flexibility to adapt those principles to experience.

But this is not really the disjunction that Heinrich is getting at. Rather, he is concerned that a geometric model for colour tries to explain both our perceptual experience and our concept of colour, and that this uneasy compromise tends to destroy our concept of colour (Heinrich, 2014: 41-42). We establish a working web of relations, but relations between possibly infinite coordinates of hue-value-chroma, none of which bear any greater significance over any other such that they attract the familiar and seemingly meaningful titles of ‘red’ or ‘yellow.’ This is true, but it points to the greater underlying problem that our concept of colour is desperately flawed. That we conceive of colour so misguidedly despite our firmer scientific grasp on it has only negative implications for painters. Most pressingly, there is a pervasive and false belief that colour cannot really be taught, which lends it a certain mysticism both in philosophy and in art schools. This mysticism is only compounded by the fact that colour is persistently mistaught on the basis of our flawed conception of it. We need to reconfigure our concept of colour or, if that is too extreme, to at least separate out a working theory of colour that practitioners–painters–can rely on from a more experiential understanding of it. This, I think, is not so outlandish: physicists operate with a different set of primary colours without threatening our habitual perceptual ideas about colour. What needs to be teased out is the psychological conception of colour, dearly-held but quite unrelated to the models most useful to artists and physicists.

From Runge, 1810: Farbenkugel

The primary colours are a good place to start, especially given Heinrich’s justified criticism of Runge’s development of the colour sphere (Farbenkugel). Runge moves deftly from a triangle (picking out red, yellow and blue) to a star which incorporates orange, green and purple, smooths them into a familiar colour-wheel and fleshes the whole thing out into a ball. The dubious move (which Heinrich (2014: 38) does not let him get away with) is that he begins with certain geometric parameters but quietly dissolves them along the way. The triangle is made of points, marking out the primary colours, which are connected by lines, which signify the gradations between them. The triangle says that conceptually, we grasp the idea of a ‘pure’ red–it tends neither towards yellow nor blue, it is not in the least orange or purple, it holds a privileged status as a colour (hue) that every orangish red and purplish red does not. It says that while there are many oranges, there is only one pure red.

We can, however, conceive of a middle-orange, one that appears equally red and yellow, and a green that is no more yellow than it is blue, and likewise a perfectly balanced purple. Runge (1810) thus bisects each line and places each of these so-called secondary colours at the midpoints, forming a small inverted triangle. Perhaps what starts to go awry here is that the lines from green to orange, from orange to purple, from purple to green, do not really signify anything–just a gradation of muddy browns. Runge expands this second triangle without explanation, presenting us with two triangles which we could not, on geometric terms, distinguish, though they represent vastly different ideas: the hierarchy is dissolved. To gloss over this fact, Runge removes the points altogether, and it is this that Heinrich (2014: 40) particularly objects to. The model abandons its initial claims about the significance of some colours above others and drops into a fluid mass of relations.

Runge’s Farbenkugel development

Runge’s move is questionable, but the result is perhaps not so catastrophic. This is not only because in practice, one can navigate colour more nimbly and efficiently when one thinks only in terms of relations rather than absolutes (for example, recognising that this mix should be bluer than that mix, rather than trying to match a particular fixed shade on a colour chip). But also because our attachment to the primary colours might be unjustified. Runge’s initial choice of red, yellow and blue–even as conceptual ideals–could be as arbitrary as his model ultimately suggests.

As David Briggs (2017) describes, the concept of a primary colour is itself somewhat muddy. We generally bring to it the idea of an ‘unmixed,’ ‘pure,’ or ‘primitive’ colour. But these intuitions bring various assumptions, mostly derived from paint, which are simply nonsensical when we describe colour in terms of light. In light, common colours compound the reflectance: green does not ‘defile’ red, but their shared components yield yellow and their differing components cleanly cancel out. Another enduring sense of ‘primary colour’ is a colour from which all others can be derived. This would already force us to branch colour into two separate realms, one of paint and one of light, which revolve around different base colours: subtractive and additive primaries, respectively. Briggs (2017) assiduously notes that this formulation brings conceptual dangers of its own, particularly that ‘it is a small and slippery step from the observation that all hues can be made from three primary colours, to the assumption that all hues are made of those three colours,’ which would be another paint-oriented bias.

To further complicate the idea of a primary colour, Briggs (2017) rightly points out that in fact we cannot derive all colours from just three. For the painter, purple is notoriously elusive because red pigment is still too yellow, thus the mixture of red and blue tends to result in an unsavoury brown. Painters resort to other pigments such as a rose (suspiciously magenta-like) or to outright purple pigments. Perhaps even more shatteringly, the additive primaries are no more certain, they do not correspond to any specific red or green or blue wavelengths; rather, Briggs describes them as optimal ranges of wavelengths. Defining primary colours at all turns out to be a hazardous and imprecise enterprise; at the very least this should cause us to question what reason we have to insist on points in our geometric model of colour.

Copy after Mestrovic

That reason might have something to do with our perception. Ewald Hering (1878) describes another set of primaries: the four psychological primary colours of red, yellow, green and blue. These four colours are privileged for having a ‘mentally unmixed’ status, while all other colours seem, to our minds, to be gradations between adjacent colours. This is why an orange can satisfactorily be described as a yellowish red, but we feel uncomfortable to describe a green as a yellowish blue. This seems to be the unrelinquishable ‘grammar of colour’ that Heinrich (2014: 41) particularly wants to hold onto: the sense, based in our experience of colour, that these colours are distinct and in this way primitive. This stance seems as arbitrary and as defensible as any: green is rigid and present in our experience in a way that orange is not. Or as Heinrich (2014: 41) puts it, ‘we will have to admit that green lies between blue and yellow in a fundamentally different sense as orange between yellow and red.’ But for the painter, green remains a mixture of yellow and blue, just as red may be a mixture of rose and yellow, depending on her pigments. And for the physicist, green is the absence of blue and red, while orange is a more complex array of light. Our mental divisions–what we project onto the world and how we break it down–do not correspond to the ‘input into our visual system’ and the stimulation of our rods and cones (Briggs, 2017); nor do they correspond to the pigments that happen to be available to painters. And that might be just fine.

What I propose is to keep these three types of colour systems distinct, while acknowledging their intersections. Runge’s colour sphere perfectly captures the fluid conceptual relations between hues and their values and chroma for the painter. Since it is advantageous to think relationally rather than in absolutes when trying to establish a harmonious colour context in a painting, an idealised, geometric model of three-dimensional colour space proves a useful tool for the painter. Such a tool, being relatively simple, yet rich and adaptable to any situation, empowers the painter both to organise her observations and translate them into paint, and to teach a coherent and systematic approach to colour to her students.

Copy after Belvedere Apollo cast

Physicists, meanwhile, may continue to measure wavelengths, discuss energy, and optimise their additive primaries of red, green and blue. Since the physicist is concerned with describing what light information enters the eye, his measurements do not undermine or contradict the relational model of the painter’s pigments. Rather, the two conceptions intersect unexpectedly beautifully: the complementaries of the additive primaries (red, green and blue) are cyan, magenta and yellow. These last three are used in printing to achieve the maximum range of mixed colours, and can be shown to yield a broader gamut of colours in paint than red, yellow and blue. This elegant inversion, identified by Helmholtz (1852a), perhaps gives us a firmer reason to fix cyan, magenta and yellow as the optimal subtractive primaries, if indeed we would rather retain points in our geometric model of colour space. At the very least, we might revise our pedagogical practices and stop teaching painters colour theory based on the psychological primaries rather than on the actual properties of light and pigments.

A painter does not need to understand the physics of light in order to manipulate paint. The systems remain conceptually distinct. But I think it would be correct to say that not only is the painter’s system inversely related to the physicist’s; it is also subordinate to it in the sense that after the pigments are applied, a painting, too, is simply an object reflecting wavelengths of various frequencies into the rods and cones in our eyes. In this sense, as Briggs (2017) argues, the painter works with light. He offers a particularly nice example that bridges the two systems in the practice of painting. A painter can drag paint roughly over dry paint of another colour such that the colour underneath sparkles through the gaps, or lay small strokes of different colours next to each other as the Impressionists did. The eye mixes these physically unmixed colours in an additive manner. Scientifically, it would be called ‘additive averaging mixing;’ painters call it ‘optical mixing’ and use it knowledgeably to great effect. Briggs (2017) further argues that the painter works with perception, and that what the spectator perceives remains largely geared around the four psychological colours, by which he makes sense of the painting.

And so we return to the ‘concept of colour’ that Heinrich is reluctant to dissolve into the more sophisticated systems. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein, he relates it to a ‘grammar of colour,’ which modestly and openly captures something but not all of our experience of colour (Heinrich, 2014: 41). This is the key: none of the systems of colour we have discussed capture everything of our experience of colour; each operates in its realm without excluding or invalidating the others. An artist might comfortably talk of a ‘blueish yellow’: her vivid cadmium yellow paint is redder than the mental ideal of yellow; she can physically add blue to it to make it more yellow. But for the spectator, who now sees an ideal yellow in the painting, no feat of mental dexterity seems to allow him to imagine a blueish yellow. The slightest introduction of blue slides the colour irrevocably into the lush spectrum of greens. That is simply the mental category of green. And since, mentally, green is opposed to red, our brains cannot grasp a red that leans towards green, or a green that leans towards red. The curious thing is that yellow and blue, though they complement as strikingly as red and green, merge effortlessly into a pleasing colour. This says very little about how light or pigments operate, but it says a great deal about what we project onto what we see. Perhaps a phenomenology of colour would treat of questions like these.

Copy after Mihanovic

In any case, as spectators with firm mental categories for colour, the are things we can say about colour, and things that we cannot. Wittgenstein (LWL, 8) is not so facetious to suggest that certain models of colour–such as his favoured colour octahedron–are ‘really a part of grammar… It tells us what we can do: we can speak of a greenish blue but not of a greenish red etc. … Grammar is not entirely a matter of arbitrary choice.’ Grammar has its role, and need not be threatened by geometrical schema designed to help the painter navigate colour space, any more than it should be threatened by physics. A grammar of colour seems to attempt to describe our intuitions about colour based on how we perceive it, just as the grammar of a natural language attempts to explain how we structure our expressions, even though it may consist more in explaining exceptions than syntactic regularities (Chomsky, 1965: 5). Perhaps the intersection between a geometric colour space and a grammar grounded in a phenomenology of colour would reveal yet more rewarding insights, perhaps as beautifully connected as light and paint have proved to be.

Briggs, David. 2017. The Dimensions of Colour: Modern Colour Theory for Traditional and Digital Painting Media. Accessed November 2017, <www.huevaluechroma.com>.

Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.

Heinrich, Richard. 2014. ‘Green and Orange – Colour and Space in Wittgenstein.’ In: Frederik Gierlinger, Stefan Riegelnik (Eds), Wittgenstein on Colour. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

Helmholtz, H. 1852a. ‘On the Theory of Compound Colours’. Philosophical Magazine, Fourth Series, 4(4): 519-34.

Hering, Ewald. 1878. Zur Lehre Vom Lichtsinne. Wien: Gerolds Sohn.

Newton, Isaac. 1672. A Letter of Mr Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light and Colours: Sent by the Author to the Publisher from Cambridge, Febr. 6. 1671/72; In Order to Be Communicated to the R. Society. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 6, 3075,8.

Runge, Philipp Otto. 1810. Farbenkugel: Konstruktion Des Verhältnisses Aller Mischungen Der Farben Zueinander Und Ihrer Vollständigen Affinität. Köln: Tropen.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. (LWL) Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1930-32, from the Notes of John King and Desmond Lee. Lee, Desmond (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Just trying to say it right

The struggle (c) Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

There are few people who can both write about art and produce it. I have been cautioned against attempting the superhuman feat of doing both. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of impassioned but mutilated thought that has been scribbled down, and a lot of cleverly strung together ruminations that entirely miss the point of the artwork in question. Regrettably, frenzied vehemence and smooth yet detached theorising tend to be accepted as legitimate encounters between art and writing, as though art ought to infect words with its garbled passions, and as though crystalline categorisations really said the whole of what is to be said about art. An honest, steady, thoughtful middle ground is difficult to attain, but it is this gravity and lucidity that Susan Sontag manages to achieve in her essays on film, theatre and literature. Against Interpretation and Other Essays thrusts us deep into the works in question, considering them, as it were, from the inside. Sontag is both artist and thinker: author and critic; able to love and to measure, to experience and to judge.

The essay. Perhaps, itself, a dying artform. It is easy to dash off an article, a commentary, a review, some quick thoughts, or a summary. But to engage with ideas–whether they emerge from books or paintings or elsewhere–involves something more. It involves a cohesive train of thought, an argument, an insight, a real willingness to enter a zone of intellectual conflict. In the case of writing about art, the essay is a knife, sharpened for the express purpose of permeating the flesh of the artwork to get at what is inside, to taste it, to judge it, to display its qualities for what they are. Perhaps things were ever as dire as they seem to be now: but writing about art, if at all penetrable, is so often vapid promotional cotton candy; sugary teasers that are little more than loosely-clad advertising, slick and professional, treading lightly so as not to crush any toes.

As for myself: Perhaps you have traced my artistic education, observing my first tentative steps into the world of painting, as I respectfully recounted it online. I kept my eyes open, I exposed myself to many things. I thought fiercely and critically about all of it–all of it–I agonised over the disappointments, the ineptitude, the obtuseness, the deception, the sheer ignorance. I think one does not improve unless one learns to discover faults, and can explain why they are faults, and propose ways of addressing them. As an artist, I kept these considerations to myself and applied them in practice. But in writing about art, I maintained a certain reverence. I made a conscious choice to be just, but positive: to focus on the best things.

Copy after Klinger

A curious but probably predictable thing came from this: I was plagiarised. My thoughts found themselves rehashed, sloppily restitched and dimly cited in monstrous word-spaghetti that no longer conveyed the original idea, if any at all. I went to exhibitions where my own words were read back to me, translated into German. It made me consider who has these jobs, and why they don’t know what to say about art. Certainly, artists don’t always know how to write about their work, and that’s why they paint it. But if people who are otherwise proficient writers can’t produce a faithful and insightful piece on a work of art, the problem seems to be deeper. They cannot think about art. They stand before a painting in a distracted panic.

But not all of us do. Some of us approach an artwork attentively, quietly, patiently. We take our time with it, revisit it, think on it. Sontag (1966: 12) is not at all incorrect to say that ‘attention to form in art’ is urgently needed. The formal properties–how colour is used, how strokes are applied, linear rhythms and the balance of shapes–might not be the entirety of a painting, but taking them in is surely the place to start. The little ripples of paint will soon chase away the anxiety, drawing us into a silent and timeless realm, inviting us to reflect. Our thoughts will scurry around with the worries and agitations that we hug to ourselves every waking minute, but these, too, will slow down. A painting is a shy creature, but approached through its form, it might let us near it.

Copy after Claudel

Sontag’s essays, as a collection, make me consider the art I encounter and what is being said about it. I have known highly trained painters, self-taught painters, casual painters, designers, illustrators and conceptual artists across the world. Sontag looked fiercely at the world around her, she wrote about the time in which she lived, about America, about Europe. Her essays are not lighthearted, not necessarily short, not lazy Sunday supplements. They are the product of an active and alert mind wrestling with works that stimulate it or disappoint it and unleash a response. Goodwill is no vice, but the critic, the thinker, has work to do, and goodwill must not cloud the public discussion about art. We came to be impressed, to be stirred, to greet grand ideas–when art fails us, it is not we who should be ashamed, apologetically carrying home our embarrassment at the artist’s deficiency like a tail between our legs. Our critical faculties have not failed us. The art is rubbish.

Sontag (1966: 12) demands a kind of criticism that genuinely responds to art, rather than one that ‘usurp[s] its place.’ Words continue to threaten to replace the artwork, but the situation has grown considerably worse: the words are disposable, interchangeable, unilluminating and cheap. Barely able to capture a coherent thought, they could hardly hope to upstage an artwork. The real threat is whether such vacuous feel-good writing blinds us to art entirely, dulling our sensibilities, subduing our objections. The remedy has been around for some fifty years. We need:

‘Acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. This seems even harder to do than formal analysis.’

(Sontag, 1966: 13)

The conjunction of sharp and loving is surprising but utterly natural. For how can one love a painting without discernment? How can one withhold affection from a painting that satisfies visually and stirs thoughts even in the silent mechanisms of its construction? Sontag (1966: 14) urges us to recover our senses, and that call is no less urgent now. Once we’ve learned to trust our senses, we must also remember to sharpen our judgements of what we perceive: to be fair, incisive and to demonstrate our love for thoughtful, well-crafted art.

Copy after Veronese

Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The effect

Images seep into language, and in so doing they add colour and liveliness. The metaphor chases after the potency of the image, abandoning the bald precision of description for a surprising visual equivalence painted in words. But Lichtenstein (1993: 204) is eager to persuade us that the image itself is something autonomous and specific. Though it can be imported into language, it does not consist in language. Nor is it simply the flipside of verbal description, an illustration of words. Our encounter with the image should reach beyond the boundaries of language.

Lichtenstein’s (1993 [1989]: 4, 63) incredible book, The Eloquence of Colour, champions the unruly and indispensable element of painting that is colour, the rogue party in painting’s troubled relationship with philosophy. She sees in colour–stubbornly material, emotional and seductive–the very thing that makes painting both distinct and effective. It is the part that Plato could not subdue, when he rightly recognised the seductive and deceptive threat of the image. Plato’s move, Lichtenstein (1993: 142) explains, was swift and decisive: he derailed the theoretical hopes of the image by framing the debate on the territory of language. The image must defend itself by the standards of discourse, and so too must painting if it wishes to emerge from the mechanical arts and prove itself a ‘legitimate form of knowledge’ (Lichtenstein, 1993: 204).

Even Aristotle’s defence of the visual does not challenge this founding assumption, which has plagued the visual and performative arts ever since (Lichtenstein, 1993: 62). He resigns himself to the ontologically deficient status of materiality, to the inferiority of appearances and the Spectacle (Aristotle. Rhet. III.1, 1404a1-4, trans. Roberts; Poet. B.6, 1450b17-19, trans. Bywater; Lichtenstein, 1993: 63). Colour suffers from this prejudice more than drawing–for drawing is crisp and measurable, and able to describe a story, and thus more readily tamed for discursive purposes. Yet in defining the image as something linear and illustrative–as the metaphor–philosophical discourse frames the question for its own advantage, constructing a straw man which it then proceeds to dominate (Lichtenstein, 1993: 44; 82). Painting, resplendent with colour, defies discourse because it does not consist entirely in drawing. The image ought to defend itself precisely on its own non-discursive grounds.

This discursive attack that puts the image on the defensive is precisely the fate suffered by rhetoric, and Lichtenstein thus finds in rhetoric an unexpected ally for painting (Lichtenstein, 1993: 205). Discourse seeks to distance itself from rhetoric, demanding logical rigour in arguments above persuasive delivery of them. The visible, theatrical aspects of speech open the door to all manner of deception. The charge of sophistry is levelled at both rhetoric and painting, Lichtenstein (1993: 68) argues, not simply because they are visual, but because of how persuasive the visual is. Their very charm, their incontestable effectiveness, is exactly what sparks this mistrust.

Discourse may colour itself with metaphors, but rhetoric strides to the edge of logical argument, sets its words aside and simply shows us. We hear the image in discourse; we simply see it in rhetoric (Lichtenstein, 1993: 129). Action is no metaphor. A forceful gesture is forceful; a proud bearing is proud; a wavering voice does waver; a heavy silence bears down on us heavily. ‘Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration,’ says Aristotle (Rhet. I.1, 1355a4-5). These actual, active demonstrations threaten language–they suggest a deficiency in language, and they hint at their own independence from language, their escape from the carefully defined terms of language (Lichtenstein, 1993: 92, 111). The hierarchy of language above the image might be overturned, the image might prove stronger.

But neither Lichtenstein nor Aristotle attempt to invert the traditional hierarchy. Lichtenstein (1993: 75, 111) would rather abandon hierarchies altogether, and clarify instead how the visible and the discursive complement one another. Aristotle (Rhet. I.1, 1355a20-25, 1356a20-25) still requires that the orator ‘be able to reason logically,’ and thus considers rhetoric ‘an offshoot of dialectic’ rather than a rival; the orator cannot afford to let truth itself go unnoticed merely because his audience pays too little heed to his intricate arguments. Platonism urges us to look for hierarchies and homogeneity in theories of representation, Lichtenstein (1993: 55) suggests; Aristotelianism tends to permit more heterogeneous theories of representation, the kinds that embrace logically elusive concepts like desire and pleasure.

The sign itself represents the attempt to ‘master the image logically’ (Lichtenstein, 1993: 51). The sign models representation on language: it assumes that representation, too, must be discursive. It implies that every visual, like a word, stands in for what it represents, and that this is how it acquires meaning. There is a referential relationship between the sign and what it signifies (Lichtenstein, 1993: 179). Lichtenstein counters that meaning exists in the image as a unity, it permeates its materiality; even without precise contours a painting can persuade us through a haze of convincing colours–the part that Descartes (2008 [1641]: 15) says remains true when all else is fictitious. Wherever we try to interpret, we seek a referent for a sign; whenever we speak of resemblance, we are making a comparison between two disconnected things, we are approaching the painting with a discursive attitude (Lichtenstein, 1993: 51). Representation is much simpler if we take rhetoric as our model: the painting, like the orator, simply re-presents the very object or emotion before our eyes (Lichtenstein, 1993: 123). It does not tell, it shows.

The most pressing thing, then, is not how much a painting resembles its referent, how accurately it embodies this information, but rather how captivating it is. The painting must, like the orator, hold our attention, capture our fancy, and move us. Lichtenstein (1993: 180) argues that ‘truth in painting lies in the effect of the representation on those who see it’–that representation consists in perception, which takes place in the viewer, not reference, a relation between the painting and its referent.

Insisting on the effect rather than the internal cohesiveness of the painting itself, and on what the artist intended to embed in it, seems problematic at first glance. But this emphasis on perception has less to do with private, subjective interpretations of a painting by scattered viewers, and more to do with an immediate sensory encounter with it. For interpretations, you will recall, are discursive decodings of images. In placing perception at the centre of our theory of representation, we are exchanging the cerebral encounter with the painting for a sensory one: we are approaching it on material grounds, responding to its material presence with our bodily awareness. We let our eyes apprehend the painting, we let them roam where it urges them, we let its mood wash over us, we trust its silent proddings rather than searching for intellectual substitutions we might make.

Unlike the discordant diversity of subjective interpretations, I would argue that this immediate sensory apprehension brings us much nearer to the intention of the artist. It is the way a painting seems to ‘come across directly onto the nervous system,’ as Bacon (1975: 18) strives after; it reflects Wollheim’s (1987: 43) observation that the artist assumes the dual role of artist and spectator in one, constantly testing and retesting the painting’s effect on herself, in order to know whether it will have the same effect on other spectators. ‘The painter’s pleasure is also that of the viewer’ (Lichtenstein, 1993: 182). The spectator comes nearer the painter’s intention if he simply perceives the painting and lets its silent visual elements work on him.

Yet even the path of perception is fraught with philosophical difficulties. Descartes has long since challenged the ontological status of sensory perceptions, finding a way to convert them into intellectual ideas independent of the body. For if we experience sensations in our dreams, they must, reasons Descartes (2008 [1641]: 14; 20-1), have very little to do with physical experience. Scoring points on the side of discourse, he (2008 [1641]: 23) concludes that ‘perception … is an inspection by the mind alone.’ Kant (2009 [1783]: §1; §10) is clear to point out that we are dealing with metaphysics, not physics; whatever a physical thing is, he argues, all we can measure is our own idea of it. Materiality has suffered heavily under our discursive tradition of metaphysics. Arguing for the significance of the material and our perception of it is no small task within this enduring theoretical domain.

Perhaps the best route out is that suggested by Lichtenstein (1993: 182): to prove that illusion is no deception, for the simple reason that it shows itself. The illusion never asks us to believe in its truth, it never attempts to stand in for reality. It shows us something of the world, all the while admitting its own artifice, and we indulge ourselves momentarily in the illusion because it is pleasurable (Lichtenstein, 1993: 179). Painting is comparable to cosmetics: it seeks to delight us, to captivate us, to seduce us, but not to trick us into believing in a false reality. This playful artifice does not deserve the accusation of sophistry, argues Lichtenstein (1993: 187); rather, the kind of persuasion that promises truth by airtight feats of logic but quietly leads us astray is sophistry. ‘What makes a man a ‘sophist’ is not his faculty, but his moral purpose,’ retorts Aristotle (Rhet. I.1, 1355b15-20). The key, Lichtenstein (1993: 181) insists, lies in realising that truth in painting, like in rhetoric, is measured by its effectiveness in the spectator, not by its relation to reality or our idea of it.

To establish painting’s theoretical validity, then, on the grounds of its rhetorical persuasiveness rather than on discursive grounds, we need to show how this effectiveness can be deliberately achieved. Generally, a discipline has had to prove itself on both theoretical and pedagogical grounds to be recognised as a liberal art: Lichtenstein (1993: 139) describes the rocky emergence of the Royal French Academy in 1635 and painting’s troubles in both domains, particularly the reluctance of the newfound professors to verbalise their practice. Lichtenstein (1993: 152) surmises that ‘drawing is the only thing in painting that can really be subjected to rules’–and thus the only part of painting which can truly be taught, and systematically theorised about. Here we will raise a resounding objection: colour can indeed be taught, and thus we can put forward an alternate way of theorising about painting, one that suits colour and drawing equally, and that accommodates a perceptual theory of representation.

First we need to be clear what we mean by ‘rules.’ I am not endorsing binding, homogeneous laws of painting. Rather, I am arguing for systematic, orderly but adaptive principles that approximate our perception and work in conjunction with it. They explicitly avoid the strict recipes and dogmas of the studio; they permit great but knowledgeable flexibility in technique. They require each artist to develop her own sensibility, to order her perceptions according to her own aesthetic preferences–they demand great facility and understanding but also offer the greatest liberation from rules and haphazard fortuitousness alike. They are not rules at all.

They are the kinds of systems described by Panofsky (1991 [1927]: 28-30) in his book on perspective, which emphasises the difference between the rigid mathematical space that our linear perspective imposes upon space as we actually perceive it through two spherical eyes, but which we adapt to our aesthetic purposes nonetheless, and the kind of systems described by Runge (1810) and more lately by David Briggs (2017) which describe colour space three dimensionally, either strictly geometrically like Runge, or in conjunction with light indices like Briggs. These systems deny absolutes; they acknowledge that what we perceive is difficult to describe, but they find relational ways to do so that encourage the active participation of the artist.

And, being able to be taught, these systems meet both the theoretical and the pedagogical requirements of a liberal art (Lichtenstein, 1993: 151). They achieve all this far from the narrow demands of language and discourse, holding fast to a rhetorical conception of representation, embracing what is explicitly visual in painting, preserving and promoting its characteristic and autonomous effectiveness.

Aristotle. 1984. The Rhetoric and the Poetics. Edited by Edward P. J. Corbett. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater. New York: The Modern Library.

Briggs, David. 2017. The Dimensions of Colour. www.huevaluechroma.com

Descartes, René. 2008 [1641]. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Translated by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University.

Kant, Immanuel. 2009 [1783] Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können. Edited by Rudolf Malter. Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, Nr. 2468. Stuttgart: Reclam.

Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. 1993 [1989] The Eloquence of Colour: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age. Translated by Emily McVarish. Berkeley: University of California.

Panofsky, Erwin. 1991 [1927]. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone.

Runge, Philipp Otto. 1810. Farbenkugel: Konstruktion Des Verhältnisses Aller Mischungen Der Farben Zueinander Und Ihrer Vollständigen Affinität. Köln: Tropen.

Sylvester, David, and Francis Bacon. 1975. Francis Bacon. 1st American ed. New York: Pantheon.

Wollheim, Richard. 1987. Painting as an Art. London: Thames and Hudson.

Geometry & painting

Adèle (c) Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

Importing mathematics into painting has some potentially grand implications. The idea makes me flush with uncontainable excitement; it smacks of Descartes (2006 [1637]: 9) and his methodical approach to knowledge, and I would echo his rationalist sentiment: ‘I was most keen on mathematics, because of its certainty and the incontrovertibility of its proofs.’ This unlikely marriage between mathematics and painting is especially dear to me because it offers something steady and dependable in terms of colour and not merely in terms of drawing; it promises to embrace the entirety of painting with its sober orderliness. This systematisation hardly destroys the poetry of painting. Rather, it allows us to sharpen our technical methods, which equips the genius (of the Kantian flavour) to paint something deeply insightful and moving. And it promises a double elegance: the sight of the painting itself, just like the sounds in music, may please us, and at the same time be grounded in delightfully crisp mathematical relationships, just like the improbable mathematical elegance of harmony in music.

These longings for order and systematisation sound rather like seventeenth-century aspirations to elevate painting to a science, or at least to a liberal art, which has much to do with shedding its humble craft status, as a trade practiced by illiterates. Painting has certainly made many efforts in this direction; it may boast of its academic status now that it is so commonly taught in universities rather than in ateliers, now that it defends itself verbally and indeed often consists more in its verbal conception and explanation than in its visual execution. But perhaps these victories are no victories at all: they strip painting of the very things that distinguish it as painting. Painting might have done better to have sought an intellectual ally in mathematics rather than in language, for there it would have found ways to describe its visual concepts succinctly and precisely.

Copy after Rodin, Burgher of Calais

This camaraderie is most apparent when it comes to colour. Colour is the rogue that has been seized by painters who want to defy philosophical discourse, and it is the uncontainable element that philosophy has used to subordinate painting. It seems to defy principles, thus it eludes philosophers, and it seems to operate largely by inspiration, superstition and magic, which seems to be attractive to painters. Across both disciplines, there is general agreement that colour is definitively not rule-amenable, while drawing is. Jacqueline Lichtenstein (1993 [1989]: 4; 62-3), in The Eloquence of Colour, traces this long-standing tension back to Plato and Aristotle, observing that ‘being material, colour has always been seen as belonging to the ontologically deficient categories of the ephemeral and the random.’ Philosophy has, she writes, thus favoured the more conceptually manageable element of painting: drawing (Lichtenstein, 1989 [1993]: 4).

If colour does not lend itself to principles, this has another, more practical, result. Philosophy aside, it means that colour cannot be taught. This lends itself to all varieties of unwelcome mysticism, that I personally would like to see chased out of the discipline of painting. It suggests that painters are ‘gifted,’ that they are conduits for ‘inspiration,’ or that they must operate by chance–all of which deny that painting is a disciplined skill that can be developed and improved and harnessed for aesthetic purposes. This is an unhappy state for painting to be in, for it grants artists license to all sorts of nonsense and self-indulgence, and abuses the viewer with all manner of ineptly executed work. In short, it encourages carelessness and invites decadence. Painting is visibly decaying before our eyes.

Copy after Rodin, Burgher of Calais

In the face of these two apparent deficiencies, I want to argue that the emphasis on drawing–both as philosophically acceptable and as practically teachable–is misplaced. Drawing certainly does lend itself to principles which can indeed be taught, and perhaps this fact is even overplayed. There are elements to drawing that cannot be taught, because each draughtswoman will adapt the learned principles to her own sensibility; she will interpret them, introducing a quality of line that no one else has. And, more broadly, the principles that are discussed and taught are not incontestable facts of existence. This is very clearly described by Panofsky’s (1991 [1927]: 37) contrast of spherical and linear perspective. Lastly, I want to raise a surprisingly little-grasped fact, one that is also popularly rejected by painters: colour is indeed amenable to principles, and there are painters who work with these principles and succeed in teaching them. Colour is very acutely described by geometry. In our infatuation with language, this straightforward ordering of colour has persisted largely unnoticed for at least two hundred years.

Lichtenstein (1993 [1989]: 142) notes that ‘ever since society has set a hierarchy among human activities, their relation to language has been the ultimate criterion for the establishment of a division, both social and philosophical, between the noble arts and the servile trades.’ Because of this, she explains, painting has sought to prove itself by ‘literary credentials;’ in order to do this, it has been expected to ‘satisfy both theoretical and pedagogical objectives,’ as we have already considered (Lichtenstein 1993 [1989]: 142; 151). Since she accepts that colour defies principles, she looks to rhetoric to redeem the intellectual status of painting, a fascinating move that demands more attention elsewhere, but we may here respond with our geometry of colour.

Copy after Rodin, Burgher of Calais

A fascinating little tract by Philipp Otto Runge appeared in the early 1800s. His Farbenkugel, or ‘colour sphere,’ is a mathematically pure way of conceptualising colour. It conceives of the relations between all colours three-dimensionally. He begins with a flat triangle that represents the three unmixed colours of red, yellow and blue. Each line is bisected to indicate that, mathematically, the secondary colours are the halfway points between each of these: orange, green and purple. These six points are extended out to the edges of a circle, which is then pierced by a perpendicular axis at whose poles stand white and black. The mid-point of this pole is, mathematically, a mid-tone grey. As colours move directly across the horizontal axis, they are neutralised by their mathematical opposite, entirely cancelling each other out as grey at the mid-point–yellow becomes, not more purplish, but more grey, as it moves towards purple, its opposite. Green and red exist in the same relation, and orange and blue. The knowledge of these relationships means a painter in fact need not use a black paint to recreate these relationships in paint: grey is not the absence of colour, but the annihilation of one colour in its mathematical opposite–‘alle einander auf derselben Gerade gegenüberliegenden Farben [sind] als Kräfte anzunehmen, welche einander entgegenstehen und sich durch ihre Vermischung zerstören in Grau’ (‘all colours that lay across from each other on the same line are to be assumed opposing forces that, upon mixing, annihilate each other in grey’) (Runge, 1810: 28). The rest of the sphere is filled out by every conceivable mixed colour and in every level of lightness and darkness, vividness and neutrality. The whole thing is most easily grasped visually, and this is the advantage of geometry.

(After Philipp Otto Runge)

It is a very beautiful model, one developed concomitantly with discussions with Goethe, and a living idea still used and taught by artists who appreciate the more rugged borders of three-dimensional colour-space. But more than this, the emphasis on relationships allows a shift in thinking: rather than considering colours as absolutes, bound to precise recipes of two-parts cadmium yellow to one-part prussian blue, they may instead be managed and manipulated as a complex but entirely rational web of relationships. This means, in fact, an emancipation from the types of dogmas that more mystically-inclined painters tend to bark at other painters: it means a shift from objectively defining colours to subjectively experiencing them. It allows a painter to recreate her perceptual experience of seeing colours; it allows for the fact that a certain mixture can appear pink or green, depending on the context it is set in. It marks a dramatic difference between painters who ask ‘what colour this really is,’ and those who ask how they perceive it. The second mindset affords far greater flexibility and dexterity with colour. And it can be taught.

(From Philipp Otto Runge, Farbenkugel)

This kind of dexterity is important because ultimately, while we might define our concept of colour in a pure mathematical way, paint itself does not respond to such precise geometrical divisions, and does not correspond so precisely to light. The painter must cope with two additional overlays to her mathematical concept of colour: the chemistry of paint and how the mixtures are achieved by actual pigments of vastly different physical properties, and the physics of light and the fact that her eyes take in a much broader gamut of colours than her paint is capable of mixing. A swift and nimble understanding of the relationships as geometric proportions is a solid conceptual ground that can be modified empirically as the painter’s experience with using paint and approximating it to what she sees grows. Runge (1810: 62) notes this as an aside to Goethe in one of his letters: ‘Ich kann mich hier nicht über die Praktik ausbreiten, weil es erstlich zu weitläufig wäre,’ (‘I cannot expand upon the practice here, firstly because it would ramble on too long,’) but he mentions that the artist requires ‘den nötigen chemischen wie mathematischen Kenntnissen’ (‘the necessary chemical alongside the mathematical knowledge.’)

Such systems equip us with knowledge, and thus confidence, and in the case of colour, adequately describe and organise the material reality of paint and at the same time accommodate our subjective, perceptual experience of it. Runge (1810: 42; 61) hopes that these pure insights will permit more definite expression; he thinks that being secure in the mental connections of the elements is the only means of setting a painter’s mind at ease, in the face of such superstition and chance. It would be well at this point to remind ourselves not to take the implications of these principles too far, and thus to return to Panofsky.

Copy after Claudel, Vertumne et Pomone

For the principles of vanishing-point perspective, the mainstay of principled drawing, are, indeed, a construction devised during the Renaissance, as Panofsky (1991 [1927]: 27) notes early on. It provides us with a mathematical space that is actually at odds with our perceptual experience of space, but that does not undermine its usefulness to us. Panofsky (1991 [1927]: 29-30) contrasts the visibly rigid ‘structure of an infinite, unchanging and homogenous space–in short, a purely mathematical space’ with ‘the structure of psychophysiological space.’ Our working concept of perspective demands that space conforms entirely to reason, that it is ‘infinite, unchanging and homogeneous’ (Panofsky (1991 [1927]: 28-9); but that demands certain assumptions that deny our experience of it: firstly, ‘that we see with a single and immobile eye,’ and secondly, that a flat plane adequately reproduces our curved optical image–two ‘rather bold abstractions’ from our perceptual experience.

‘In a sense,’ write Panofsky (1991 [1927]: 31), ‘perspective transforms psychophysiological space into mathematical space.’ And there is indeed nothing wrong with that if we recognise it as such, and do not take our theoretical underpinnings too far, thus over-emphasising the theoretical validity of drawing over colour.

Copy after Claudel, Vertumne et Pomone

Beginning with (helpfully visual) geometric principles, we can thus devise rigorous and teachable theoretical systems for both of the equally important parts of painting, for drawing and for colour, describing them in pure, abstracted, mathematical terms, whose constancy is beautiful in and of itself. We can reclaim the liberal art of painting, award it some intellectual prestige, and even ground it in scientific principles that draw on chemistry and physics as well. Descartes’ project might not prove so alien in the murky and superstitious realm of painting.

Copy after Rodin, The sculptor and his muse

Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. 1993 [1989]. The Eloquence of Colour: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age. Translated by Emily McVarish. Berkeley: University of California.

Panofsky, Erwin. 1991 [1927]. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone.

Runge, Philipp Otto. 1810. Farbenkugel: Konstruktion Des Verhältnisses Aller Mischungen Der Farben Zueinander Und Ihrer Vollständigen Affinität. Köln: Tropen.

I think

Returning to Descartes after my own (continuing) decade of communing with the ‘great book of the world’ brings some refreshing sentiments (2006 [1637]: 10). Descartes, described as vaguely averse to social interaction, and whose own words betray an intellectual confidence that would commonly be described as arrogance, shines nonetheless as a glowing example in my current scholarly position. For while I am ironically obliged to memorise his key precepts, he, with a weary sigh, sets aside his books, and even abandons the whirlwind of travel, feeling compelled above all else to set to work—to order his own thoughts (Descartes, 2006 [1637]: 11).

Faced with the thought of a few extra bachelor-level exams, I come upon an unexpected internal resistance. This method of learning—which once consumed my time and absorbed my hungry mind—seems dull and soulless; it does not stir the movements of my mind as it used to. I note with some surprise that all those years of rote learning and trustingly following teachers have worked their effects: new and complex ideas are not threatening; entire books are not half so laborious as the scattered chapters I used to wrestle with. The hunger for interesting ideas is coupled with an aptitude for working related ideas into one another, for noticing points of contact and of difference, and for seeing the broader themes and sensing the overall direction of a work in its entirety.

But it remains a formidable step from gathering and organising the ideas of others to casting them aside and asserting one’s own position. Such articulation depends on the kinds of skills accumulated by following in the mental steps of others, probably even on being fluent in the language of their concepts, and certainly familiar with their debates; but it ultimately requires a blank page. A blank page and a few other indulgences: time, space, and courage, often cloaked as misanthropic arrogance.

Inwardly, my convictions begin to bite. I do not read with the same wonderment and open curiosity, trying on the outlooks of others, judiciously weighing the matter from all sides. I clash with these books: I tear at their holes and prod their weak spots, wanting them to help me but finding them inadequate. I am reaching the point where I will have to abandon my books and establish my own framework, my own method. These snarling convictions, peering here and there through the cracks left by others, need a clear ordering, explanation and defense. I must take a good look at them. I must decide—even plan—how to go about this.

Kant cuts a fine example. Forced to support himself, he turned to teaching immediately, privately at first, only managing to secure a teaching position at university after several years. But his pay depended upon the attendance of students, and so he had to take on a huge workload and court a dedicated following of students. This occupied him for decades—decades!—before he secured tenure, at which time he promptly sat down and (I believe the technical term is) busted out the Critique of Pure Reason. What captures my imagination is the thought that Kant did not waste a moment, though his route was a slow one. Teaching is a battlefield; it offers ample opportunity to test one’s ideas. My own experience of teaching drawing makes plain to me that ordering the content is the easy part; the greater burden of teaching falls on defending one’s ideas. Students concoct all manner of contradiction; they embody resistance. The cunning teacher needs a sack of reasons to stay ahead. But if she can stand by what she presents, she can sharpen it from every conceivable angle with the rigorous discourse that the classroom offers. When a quiet desk presents itself, the work is almost done.

Rousseau (1953 [1781] : 328; 374) sought not the solitude of the desk, but the open air and physical movement. The rolling fields of France, kissed by the sun, were his blank page, and as he wandered them without company he turned his thoughts over in his mind, working and reworking them, embellishing them, tasting them aloud and testing them against the breeze—and forgetting them, and whipping them up again, until they finally found their way onto paper in a gush of impassioned certitude. ‘For never having been able to write or think at my ease except in the open air, I was not tempted to alter my methods … The forest of Montmorency, which was almost at my door, would be my study’ (Rousseau, 1953 [1781]: 376). Such leisure yields no precise and referenced scholarly articles—and that is the point. We can all sit down with our notes and produce something technical. But can we commune with our own thoughts until we know them inside out? Until their structure becomes self-evident, emerging organically, as if from nature itself, and not in the forced and reference-laden form that the shackles of the desk impose?

Arendt says, with no fuss, that the writing is easy. ‘Schreiben Sie leicht, formulieren Sie leicht?’ her interviewer inquires (‘Do you write easily, do you draft easily?’). Through plumes of self-assured cigarette smoke she assures him that writing happens with little effort. Because she only starts writing once she knows what she wants to say—a simple but easily overlooked method of working, one that reveals the same attitude as Rousseau and Kant before her.

Deleuze, as we have remarked, uncovers concepts in unlikely places, such as in the observations of the painter Francis Bacon, demonstrating a remarkable fidelity to Bacon’s statements and at the same time an impressive inventiveness in kneading them into Concepts. For the philosopher, as he and Guattari (1996: 2) emphasise, creates concepts—actively creates from the fodder of the world, unlike science, which tries to categorise and explain it. He seeks connections across the vast and fluctuating plane of philosophical thought, and finds delightfully original ones (Deleuze and Guattari, 1996: 90). But that, of course, is the philosopher’s job (1996: 51):

‘In the end, does not every great philosopher lay out a new plane of immanence, introduce a new substance of being and draw up a new image of thought, so that there could not be two great philosophers on the same plane? It is true that we cannot imagine a great philosopher of whom it could not be said that he has changed what it means to think. …

Those who do not renew the image of thought are not philosophers but functionaries who, enjoying a ready-made thought, are not even conscious of the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim as their models.’

To return to our original model, Descartes, who captivated us from day one of our bachelor’s degree with ‘I think,’ those fateful words that knocked us spiralling into years of doubting, probing and stipulating, we must likewise, upon casting aside our books, establish for ourselves a method. It might look look like limited but exacting principles derived from logic, geometry and algebra, it might look like rural France (since people ‘are all they can be only in temperate climates’—(Rousseau, 1991 [1762]: 52)). Descartes (2006 [1637]: 15) would never thrust his own principles on anyone else, but we might regard his example and set about deciding upon how we are going to reach this intellectual clarity, and let our own ideas flourish. For ‘it is not enough to possess a good mind; the most important thing is to apply it correctly’ (Descartes, 2006 [1637]: 5).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1996. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University.

Descartes, René. 2006 [1637]. A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Translated by Ian Maclean. Oxford: Oxford University.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1953 [1781]. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Translated by J.M. Cohen. Melbourne: Penguin.

———. 1991 [1762]. Emile, or, On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. London: Penguin Books.

The Duchess

Kunst & Philosophie.

Tag Archives: philosophy

Die Fälschung

Common ground

Indifference and the look

Organisms of paint

Knowledge or experience

Blueish yellow

Just trying to say it right

The effect

Geometry & painting

I think