Usually when looking at this issue you would start
with trompe l'oeil
or optical illusions. These visual lies ask questions about the way we perceive
the world. There are also different levels of representation skills. For
instance when Vasari writes about Giotto, he states that Giotto was the very
best artist of his time because he set new standards of making art that looked like
the world, however he goes on to say that in his own time, artists such as
Michelangelo have far surpassed Giotto’s ability. Vasari sees art as a sort of
journey towards ever greater degrees of realism or ability to control verisimilitude.
However it’s best to go to Gombrich’s ‘Art and Illusion: A Study in the
Psychology of Pictorial Representation’ and read that as a basic starter, it’s
a classic text and no art student interested in how visual images work should
be able to get to the end of their studies without reading it.
Material thinking, mimesis as association.
In his book The Order of
Things, in the chapter The Prose of the World Michel Foucault describes how mimesis or ‘resemblance’
as he would put it used to work historically.
This is his full text:
“Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance
played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that
largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that
organised the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and
invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded
in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in
the stars, the plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use
to man. Painting imitated space. And representation whether in the service of
pleasure or of knowledge was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of
life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its
manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech.
How, at the end of the sixteenth century, and even in
the early seventeenth century, was similitude conceived. How did it organise
the figures of knowledge? And if the things that resembled one another were
indeed infinite in number, can one, at least, establish the forms according to
which they might resemble one another?
The semantic web of resemblances in the sixteenth
century is extremely rich:
Amicitia, Aequalitas (contractus, consensus,
matrimonium, societas, pax et similia),
Consonanti, Concertus, Continuum, Paritas, Proportio,
Similitudo, Conjuncto,Copula. (Foucault, 1970)
Foucault identifies four of these resemblances as essential:
“Convenienta (adjacency, resemblance), Aemulatio
(emulation, a sort of convenience‟ freed from the law of
place and so able to function, without motion, from a distance), Analogy
(convenienta and aemulatio superimposed) and Sympathy, which draws things
towards one another in an exterior and visible movement.)”
From
Glyn
Thompson’ s ‘Erratum
Musical. La Mariée mise à nu par ses Célibataires, même. Erratum Musical.’
1913
Glynn is an ex tutor from the college and his writings
on Duchamp are wonderful. What perhaps you can get from Glynn’s work is how
seamless the move from antiquity to modernism can be. In the end all the great
ideas are re-invented over and over again, each time to fit the climate and
purposes of the age they reappear within.
Association, resemblance and mimesis
Materials carry concepts associated with their
histories and where they come from. For instance charcoal is not only a
particular sort of drawing material that operates in a particular way, it also
comes with a heavy cultural baggage. It is seen as a type of ‘honorific’
material. You can’t use it without acknowledging its history and how as a medium
it is culturally significant. The fact that it is burnt wood is also important,
reminiscent of not just fires but the destruction we can create using fire. All
of these issues are generated because charcoal can be seen as ‘like’ something
else, or it might remind us of an association, therefore it is operating within
the Aristotelian tradition of ‘mimesis’. However similar issues occur with
other materials, if I draw something using chocolate, our past cultural
associations with this material will effect how any drawing made from it is
read. All drawing materials can be looked at in this way, paper, threads, inks,
metals such a silverpoint, wax etc etc. It is important to fish for the actual
issues already identified as well as other potential ‘readings’. For instance
you may have identified a particular sort of earth to make a drawing with and
because of its associations with the Biblical story of the creation of Adam,
other readings may unfold. Adam was made from
earth, hence the name "adamah". Adam is cursed by God therefore so is
the earth. Adam of course like all of us, eventually returns to the earth from
which he was made. Our particular curse is perhaps that we are earthly yet at
the same time, because of self-awareness separated from nature. The read may of course be geographical, the earth
used coming from a particular place and representing a particular soil. Some
soils are red and sandy others grey with clay. Some are good growing soils
others parched and lacking life sustaining elements. Not just the materials
themselves carry concepts but the ‘finish’ applied to them does the same. High
levels of ‘finish’ such as polishing suggest either long-term investment of
human labour or machine ‘finish’; both of course carry different connotations.
Crafting might be vital, or might be incidental, but again is important to the
read. Some materials are gendered, for instance some textile crafts can be read
as ‘feminine’, again these issues need to be unpicked. (Read the Subversive
Stitch)
Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘Ur’ history can be
useful when unpicking several of these issues. He was very interested in
history as a form of allegory. Hanssen (2000, p. 16) suggests that Benjamin’s
use of the term ur-history, was to expose the fact that all human acts of
signification have an ur-history of historical allegory embedded within them.
Therefore any man-made object when examined carefully holds within it stories
of its making and these stories are often, according to Benjamin, seen as
processes of destruction and transience.
Benjamin once said, “history is a petrified, primordial landscape.” This
reading of history as allegory reflects Benjamin’s interest in Marx’s idea of
the fetish. Commodity fetishism is a key Marxist concept, this quote taken from Wikipedia is a pretty good
summery of what it means, “in a capitalist society, social relations between
people—who makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity,
et cetera—are perceived as economic relations among objects, that is, how
valuable a given commodity is when compared to another commodity. Therefore,
the market exchange of commodities masks (obscures) the true economic character
of the human relations of production, between the worker and the capitalist”.
(wiki/Commodity_fetishism) Benjamin would point to the fact that any
manufactured object would therefore have embedded within it the story of this
market exchange, an allegory of how human relationships have been clouded and
shaped by Capitalist constructions. When you use a pencil, look at where it is
made, the more expensive ones usually have made in Germany on their sides, the
cheap ones rarely tell you anything about their provenance.
More thoughts next post
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