I recently visited an art gallery specialising in portraits of people who are deemed significant to Australia. (But who decides significance and on what basis?)
My interest is in the messages of the paintings. Not so much the messages of the messages as the manner of the message.
I have little interest in abstract art, beyond examining what viewer-response it evokes. Those responses seem to say more about the viewer than about the work. Such abstract art can evoke or suggest moods or general feelings, but the meaning seems to depend largely on the context of a viewer. In this sense, such works become mirrors of the self.
I suspect that much the same happens with music unaccompanied by text. The aural images are abstractions that evoke moods, just as visual images of abstract art are abstractions that evoke moods. However, the content of the mood depends on the hearer of the music – just as it depends on the viewer of abstract art. Note how this changes when text is added to the music – the text shapes the content associated with the mood.
What was of greater interest in the portrait gallery was to view portraits of people I know something about. Some were clearly representational rather than correspondence in form. That is, the artist did not strive for a ‘photo in oils’ but chose to re-present the subject in some way to bring this or that feature out and to give a message of some kind. Hence portraits of two politicians that exaggerated this or that feature to present what they stood for.
The contrast here is with what I will call ‘correspondence’ portraits. A correspondence portrait has the appearance of being photo-like in that what appears in the image has a close facsimile-like correspondence with the subject. (Of course, a photographer can choose settings that render an impressionistic or representational image but let us set that aside for now.)
Representational portraits have certain honesty about them. By that I mean that the artist intentionally signals that s/he is not attempting a photo in oils.
But what of the portraits that were presented as a photo in oils? The artist’s skill is seen in the attempted production of a facsimile. But is this truly correspondence art in which the painter is just a neutral technician? Or is there a hidden deceit?
Think about the scene:
• A particular artist asks or is asked to do a portrait of a particular person?
• The subject is dressed and posed in a certain pose and in a certain context.
• The artist chooses aspects of the person to represent and others to fade to lesser significance.
And so on.
Each of these steps involves choices. Who makes them and on what basis? The ‘deceit’ is that these choices are concealed rather than being intentionally signalled.
I’m not suggesting the deceit is malevolent or even intentional. But rather, that the ‘photo in oils’ can be taken as giving an impression of a correspondence that it does not have.
Can there be any truly and purely correspondence portrait art? Or are we left with the conclusion that all portraits are representational due to the layers of choice in making the portrait? And that these layers add up to interpretations that block correspondence. If we then add in the interpretative layer(s) imposed by the viewer(s) we seem to get further and further away from the subject. Are we left with nothing but impressions and representations?
These are all old themes in philosophy and what is said of the visual arts can be said elsewhere. Do we, and can we, know anything as it is, or can we only know our ideas and impressions of things? Locke, Reid, Kant and a hundred others have written on these themes.
The same problem occurs with words.
Correspondence theories of language hold to the possibility of a direct correspondence between our words and the reality they refer to. Symbolic, deconstructionist and perspectivalist theories of language hold otherwise. Words can only represent reality, not correspond to it. And when we add the hermeneutical issues of words shared between people and across contexts the problem deepens.
Can words ever be other than malleable symbols, representations and deceits in the sense identified above? Can we say anything about ourselves, the world and God that is other than symbolic representation?
Yet we use words and visual images to communicate and assume on a daily basis that there is significant correspondence. In fact we stake our lives on correspondence. Think of a visual image warning that something is poison or that crocodiles abound in a waterhole. Or think of the words on a Stop sign or in a recipe. Even further, I can use the above words to communicate doubt about words as do many others who write words conveying meaning about deconstructing meaning from and into words.
Is there something being missed in the whole discussion? And does it relate to God who used words to speak creation into life, whose Son is described as the Word of God, and through whose Spirit men were carried along to write words that bring God’s word into our language? In short, is it God who sustains our words and their meaning, just as he sustains all else?
And, when we stand before a portrait, is there something of a shared community of God’s image that means we can catch something corresponding to the person behind an artist’s image, even through all the layers between that person, the portrait and us?
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