looking, marking, thinking, and thinking about thinking about marks and their makers

17
This article was downloaded by: [University of Hong Kong Libraries] On: 11 November 2014, At: 02:55 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvir20 Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers Jeffrey Abt Published online: 04 Jan 2011. To cite this article: Jeffrey Abt (2000) Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 16:1, 65-80, DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2000.9658536 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2000.9658536 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

Upload: jeffrey

Post on 14-Mar-2017

215 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

This article was downloaded by: [University of Hong Kong Libraries]On: 11 November 2014, At: 02:55Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Visual Resources: An InternationalJournal of DocumentationPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvir20

Looking, Marking, Thinking, and ThinkingAbout Thinking About Marks and TheirMakersJeffrey AbtPublished online: 04 Jan 2011.

To cite this article: Jeffrey Abt (2000) Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking AboutMarks and Their Makers, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 16:1, 65-80,DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2000.9658536

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2000.9658536

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

Visual Resources, Vol. XVI, pp. 65-80 O 2000 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Reprints available directly from the publisher Published by license under Photocopying permitted by license only the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint,

part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Malaysia.

REVIEW ESSAY

Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

Jefiey Abt

Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis by Whitney Davis. University Park, Pa., Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. xvi + 352 pp., 68 illus., $70.00. ISBN 0-271-01523-3.

Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing by James Elkins. University Park, Pa., Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. xix +300 pp., 39 illus., $55.00. ISBN 0-271-01630-2.

To begin with, I confess I like each of these books. As will soon become clear, however, my appreciation of them is grounded in a discipline which is outside the authors' circle of intended audiences. I find both books deeply engaging on the authors' terms because they offer unusually rich and thought-provoking studies about the processes of looking, image making, and thinking or writing about images. In addition, each book reminds me of the variety of ways artworld denizens select, use, and interpret images.' Perhaps the most apparent differences surface in the interpretive practices of art historians as compared to those of artists, especially in their uses of images and repositories like museums and slide collections. Slide collections are interesting loci to me because they are one of the few contemporary settings where the teaching and research

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 3: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

661 VISUAL RESOURCES

conventions of art historians intersect with the teaching and creative prac- tices of artists. Indeed, collections that are shared by historians and artists offer intriguing sites for ethnographies of their respective disciplinary behaviors. A brief and true story will illustrate what I mean.

The slide collection for the program where I teach (the Department of Art and Art History, Wayne State University) serves both art hstorians and artists. As a matter of fortuity rather than planning, the slides are stored in two types of fixtures: conventional slide drawers and vertical, sliding racks mounted in cases containing light boxes, with most of the slides located in the latter fixt~res.~ The slides in both sets of furnishings are organized in accordance with the usual art history categories of civilization or continent, nation or artist's origin, date, media, and so forth.3 The only user's differ- ence between the two storage types is that the vertical racks allow one to view the images reproduced in slides without removing them from the rack (although it is sometimes a bit hard to read the labels when the back- lighting is especially bright) while the slide drawers allow one to quickly scan the slide labels (although it is nearly impossible to view the images without removing the slides to view them against a light source). A few years ago, the slide collection curator reported that nearly all the fixtures were full and she needed to purchase some more. However, with floor space also running out, she recommended that all or part of the collection be sMed to slide drawers which permit many more slides to be housed per square foot of floor space. While the art historians accepted the sugges- tion, the artists protested. Why? Because the artists ordinarily select images according to the "look" of particular works relative to genres, techniques, compositional issues, etc., rather than by the cataloguing information con- tained on the labels. Of course the artists depend on the broad cataloguing categories used to organize the collection to find, for example, early twenti- eth-century European work. But the search for just the right image to illus- trate a fractured space will not necessarily depend on whether or not the work is by Picasso or Braque, early or late, painting or drawing; rather, the search will favor formal properties whch are best judged by comparing perhaps several dozen images. Take away the vertical display racks and the artists are mightily inconvenienced. Setting up a cross-reference system with catalogue cards organized by formal and technical categories derived from the "look" of images is obviously impractical. This is because we- artists or art historians-do not have a consistent vocabulary for describing the alternative visual properties of such qualities as space, composition, or tactility that are the stuff of studio art classes. Although art historians and artists may use the same images, we use them in different ways; and there

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 4: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

is no way to easily surmount those differences when it comes to the organi- zation of our resources.

The differences invite a rich ethnography of art and art history teaching. But there is also the hint of an important and complex problem lurking in my story. If the classification system that serves art historians' teaching and research (albeit imperfectly) is mute with regard to the t e a h g and creative work of artists, might it reflect a deeper, empirical difference in the way art historians and artists approach the work of seeing and think- ing about art per se? And if so, does that difference occur earlier than when artists and historians look for reproductions of paradigmatic objects? Certainly they do not arrive at the extent of those differences full-blown. But if the dissimilarities gradually build, do they begin earlier in the sense of professional development or earlier in relation to the formation of art works generally? For example, might artists' seeing of artworks begin to be different than art historians' seeing of artworks because artists are accus- tomed to visualizing art befbre its making is done? Perhaps artists' thinking about seeing is different because the seeing and thinking commence before the making is done? Then there is the type of thinking I displayed in ana- lyzing my department's slide collection story: that is, thinking about the see- ing and thinking practiced by artists and art historians, or consciousness of these disciplinary practices. Might artists' thinking about seeing during the process of making art differently shape their consciousness in comparison to the formation of art historians' consciousness in relation to thinking about seeing art during the process of writing about art?

These issues of critical methodologcal and self-awareness, or reflexiv- ity, especially with regard to disciplinary production-making art or writ- ing about art-are of great moment in art and art history today.4 The books by Davis and Elkins are evidence of a steadily-expanding number of disciplinary self-critiques among art historians. But more so than their peers, both scholars mount interesting and valuable efforts to analyze how humans perceive the visual, transform such perceptions into images, and the implications of this visual work (or what we can know with cer- tainty about it) for the writing of art's history. Their books offer important and stimulating considerations of the demands and limits of seeing and thinking about images. These turn on remarkable and, to my experience, unprecedented efforts to closely see or "read objects, efforts which model a level of rigorous looking that artists as well as historians would do well to at least occasionally emulate. Davis's text tends to be dense and ungenerous which is particularly striking given his aim of reaching a cross-disciplinary readership of archaeologists and psychoanalysts, as

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 5: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

681 VISUAL RESOURCES

well as art historians. @, xii) Elkins's, which is addressed to art historians on the other hand, is deftly articulated and readily-accessible to those in other fields without sacrificing anything in the way of complexity, detail, or rigor.5 Doing justice to the breadth and intricacy of the authors' ideas, however, is no easy matter. Rather than attempt what would amount to little more than uselessly superficial outlines of the books, I will dwell on the critical set of issues I introduced above and which receive highly orig- inal and exhaustive treatment in each text: making art, seeing art, thinking about either making or seeing art, and thinking about thinking about art.

But before proceeding, and in the interest of full disclosure, I note: first, that I am an artist by training who also teaches studio art at the university level, and I come to scholarly writing without the extensive schooling in art history possessed by most who publish in these pages; next, I follow the methodological conversations represented in these books as a spectator rather than as a participant; and last, I believe that art history's recent criti- cal theory debates are especially important for contemporary artists and studio art teaching. My life is personally and professionally occupied with the tasks of critically looking at and thinking about images-just not as an art historiana6 Insofar as the nature of my disciplinary pratice propels me in a diretion that intersects with the sphere of Davis's and Elkins's con- cerns, it is along a tangent and barely glancing trajectory. Yet this point of contact is where critical scrutiny of art making and critical analysis of art's interpretation converge. It is like the intersection of particles in a bubble chamber in which the actual contact happens too quickly to observe and which can only be estimated by tracing back the innumerable, curiously arching and spiraling trails of particle fragments emitted after an initial flash and ensuing disorder. As these books amply demonstrate, attempting to understand that point of contact is a dazzling and complex problem, but one that is intriguing and worth exploring for artists, historians, and oth- ers trying to making sense of how images are made and what they mean.

Davis's Replications consists of twelve chapters, most of which are longer or condensed versions of articles previously-published in a variety of journals and edited colletions. The methodological specializations of those publications-archaeology, art hstory, and psychoanalysis-indi- cate it is unlikely that scholars working in one discipline would be aware of Davis's research in the others. In collecting this scholarship in a single book, Davis hopes to stimulate a cross-disciplinary dialogue about both

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 6: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

his scholarship and certain overlapping concerns arising separately among the fields for which he has written. The chapters are grouped into three sections according to the methodological readings each of the disciplines offers on "replications." By "replications" Davis means "the sequential production of similar material morphologies-made or imag- ined material forms that are always 'artifacts' and often images-that are substitutable for one another in specific social contexts of use."7 Davis reads across the disciplines for an "archaeology, or history, of the ways in which an artifact or image 'replicates' previous or other artifacts or image^."^ Davis's distinctions between made and imagined "artifacts" or images opens the field of his study beyond the material evidence of image making to embrace something more: the places where they begin, whether internal (imagination) or external (visual stimulation) and the complex interanimations of these causes along with the intricate stimu- lus-and-response mechanism of human marking per se-marking, seeing the marks, adjusting or adding marks, looking again, and so forth.

Davis accomplishes this by carefully studying the probable evolution of the cognitive psychology and physiology of image making or, more pre- cisely, figurative representation. (D, 47, n. 3) In so doing, Davis calls into question presuppositions about the origins of image makers' cognitive functions present in generally unstated beliefs shared by archaeology and art history. As Davis correctly notes, these and other disciplines mistak- enly compress the development of the human capacity to make images into a single step. For art historians this step marks a birth of "art" that has been "mythologized as sudden, primal, and spontaneous. . . . " (D, 46f) Davis illustrates the point by exploring an "origin myth of rrpresenta- tion," an explanation of how figurative images began in human prehistory that is used by archaeologists and art historians. His example, "the argu- ment from projection," is articulated by E.H. Gombrich as the human ten- dency to discern allusive forms in nature "like the cracks and stains on the aged wall cited by Leonardo da Vinci. . . . At some point in prehistory, this supposedly occurred for the very first time; 'the animal shape,' Gombrich claims, 'had been discovered somewhere in a rock.'" (Davis quoting Gombrich, D, 57) Gombrich's and others' acceptance of this thesis is based on the evidence that so many Paleolithic images incorporated naturally- occurring rock formations. Thus the thesis of projection proposes: "the image was suggested by the natural features-it was imposed upon them as their organic completion, as the projection of what the artist had seen in vague outlines." (Emphasis Davis's, D, 57) Davis smartly dismisses the thesis by noting, first, that there are countless types of irregularities but

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 7: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

VISUAL RESOURCES

they did not suggest as many varieties of images (besides animal forms) to the first image makers; second, any images made on rough surfaces must accommodate such irregularities to get on with the task of representation.

But in dismissing the argument from projection, Davis does not ignore the underlying "idealist and intentionalist" nature of its proponents' assumptions about the image makers' imposition of "representation on a disorder of prerepresentational potentialities, whether clusters of nonrep- resentational lines scratched for other reasons, qualities of a blot of color, or an appealing stretch of s~rface."~ Davis's problem with their approach is that it confuses what he believes to be two sequential sets of develop- ments in the early formation of mark-making activity: first, the evolution of an "image channel," the capacity to recognize similarities between forms observed in nature and forms incidentally made during random markings on a cave wall; second, the growth of the image channel into an "information channel," the capacity to use the image channel to deliber- ately express a visual representation that possesses some type of meaning for the mark-maker. (D, 58-63) In other words, the development of prehistoric marking-from random hatchings to representational marks-required a complex set of presumably evolutionary steps which depended on ever more sophisticated cognitive skills, as well as increas- ingly advanced motor skills and hand-eye coordination. Thus Davis argues the formation of the ability to make marks which the marker began to recognize as akin to images in the maker's "mind's eye" and which the maker then began to select and reinforce--in something akin to a process we now call "drawingn-necessarily precedes the much more complex step of making a particular set of marks or images as an intentional act, one front-loaded with meaning and purpose by its maker. Davis has a purpose in limiting the weight of interpretation images can bear here and throughout his book. He wants to slow down and parse out the investiga- tory predispositions we bring to studying images. In particular Davis wants to sift out our assumptions about representation and meaning because they may obscure a far more complex and attenuated formation of the image-making mechanism. His proposal that this important cultural development took much longer and took place through many incremental steps certainly makes far better sense of the archaeological evidence.

That Davis's insights are grounded in Paleolithic proto-images and images (Upper Paleolithic period in southwestern Europe, ca. 32,000-26,000 B.C.E.) is crucial because the spare character of that evidence permits Davis to readily lay bare the limits of what we may with certainty conclude about its meaning. Davis's extraordinarily rigorous and close scrutiny of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 8: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

this very lean archaeological evidence yields brilliant insights into the issues of perception, mark malung, visual cogrution, and the emergence and repetition of images as a cultural trait-insights which are applicable well beyond the field of Paleolithic studies. My only and very slight, reser- vation about Davis's work is his use of the term "replications." At the risk of oversimplifying his argument, I find that Davis employs the term to characterize an overarching connectiveness that binds together sequences of - lysical images or sequences of such images and perceptions of them. In particular, Davis wants to argue against the view, held mainly by art historians, that "images or artifacts+specially 'works of art1-are char- acterized by wholeness, completeness, autonomy or self-sufficiency, or, in [Davis's] terms, by nonreplicatoriness." (Dl 2) While I sympathize with Davis's purposes in remaining mindful of the chains of mental and mate- rial events from which individual objects emerge, I wonder if he doesn't overstate the case at the expense of trylng to understand the subtle but important factors that result in objects of unique character and interest regardless of their temporal or cultural proximity to our own time. In my experience, the replication of perception in the form of drawing is in fact a vast arena of discontinuities, breaks, and aporias in which cognition may result in marks, but the connection is sometimes oddly'oblique and has relatively little to do with replication and far more to do with a kind of conceptual interpolation which involves other mental capacities besides the purely visual. But I get ahead of myself. Before pursuing this last line of thinking further, I want to dwell a bit longer on the close study of sim- ple images with particular attention to what James Elkins describes as "close reading," and thereby bring him into the conversation too.

Elkins's book is addressed to art historians-the "we" implied in the first word of the title-and is "about the vexed relations between art his- torical writing and attempts to account for that writing." As such, it is an investigation of the poetics of art history's panoply of methodologies for describing and interpreting images, and most important of all, recent criti- cal theory regarding these multiple approaches. Even so, "each chapter [of the book's eleven] is an independent inquiry and can be read in isolation; but [it] also moves through the issues of art historical writing in a continu- ous argument from the 'outside,' the philosophic perspective, toward the 'inside,' regarding what happens in the act of writing, when the writer is immersed in the objects." (E, xif) Elkins works through these issues with astonishing clarity, precision, and common sense in a convincing proposal that, after all is said and written, art history might best be understood "as an expressive endeavor," one whose "texts appear as history, as fads, as

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 9: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

72/ VISUAL RESOURCES

discoveries, as stories, even sometimes as truths.. . ; but they are also our way of recording who we are." (El 297) Like Davis's book, it can be read as a cautionary tale about the limits of art history scholarship in general, and the flurry of recent methodological initiatives claiming greater degrees of accuracy, rigorousness, or comprehensiveness, in particular. Elkins's argu- ment is constructed around very attentive studies of a number of rhetorical, philosophical, and methodological strategies. One of the most important of these is a consideration of the limits of visual analysis and description contained in the chapter "On the Impossibility of Close Reading." Like Davis, Elkins concentrates on Upper Paleolithic evidence, but in this case on its interpretation by a third scholar, Alexander Marshack, whose stud- ies by general consensus "are among the most careful analyses in all of archaeology as well as art history and criticism, visual theory, connois- seurship, and conservation." (E, 63) Elkins's purpose in closely reading Marshack's readings is to "try to open a critique of close reading.. . [to] argue that in effect close reading does not exist.. . because what we under- stand as a close reading is a promise, something that is evoked and intimated, a specter that can only be grasped by conjuring and then repressing other kinds of reading." (E, 62)

The particular text Elkins explores is less than one page of one of Marshack's studies of an Upper Paleolithic bdton fragment, of bone, engraved with a row of marks which Marshack interprets to be notations of a lunar cycle. As Elkins writes in the introduction to his analysis:

It seems easy to say that Marshack is seeing too much and trying, for example, to interpret careless decoration or meaningless tool-sharpening marks as deliberated calendrical notation. But when these and other problems are brought up, the result is almost invariably the same: the people who object are led to see that they have been operating with certain preconceptions about how accurate marks should be, or what decoration is, or how it is different from notation. What appear to be glaring mis- takes in Marshack's method turn out to be unresolved aspects of our habits of see- ing. The critics are silenced, in effect, by unanswerable questions: What should a Paleolithic image look like? What is decoration, and how does it differ from nota- tion? Marshack's analyses, perhaps more than any others in the history of art, force these questions into the open and allow us to begin to see how we see and what we think images are. (E, 64-5)

Elkins proves his point by meticulously evaluating Marshack's single page of analysis with more than twenty pages of observations illustrated with nearly as many photographs, line drawings, and diagrams. Because an earlier version of Elkins's chapter appeared as an essay in the journal Current Anthropology which was itself followed by a dozen responses from art historians and archaeologists, including Marshack, Elkins continues

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 10: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

on to consider their readings of his reading of Marshack. A critical issue that emerged was whether Marshack was "'reading' in any sense and that 'close seeing' might be a better term." Indeed, as Elkins notes in quoting Davis (who was one of the respondents), it is a question of "reading read- ability." (E, 96) Elkins's convergence with Davis occurs at the juncture of self-reflexivity over the matter of close reading and its "truth value" as the foundation of rigorous scholarship in art history or archaeology. To put it another way, our attempts to secure an "objective" or "true" inter- pretation of these mysterious Paleolithic marlungs may tell us more about our own desires and predispositions than they can with any certainty tell us about the intentions of the Paleolithic peoples who set stones against bones in the first place.10

It is important to note here that the types of images addressed by Davis and Elkins (through Marshack) are superficially quite different. Davis is writing about figurative images, or renderings of things; Elkins is writing about notations, or marks which stand for things. In my view, and I sus- pect both Davis and Elkins would agree, the differences are not all that great because both types of mark-making are essentially just different types of representations." In both cases the marks lead us back to the for- mation of what Davis calls the "image channel"-the inner dialogue of mark-making and its correspondence with perceptions-as well as the limits of our ability to interpret the marks independent of our condition- ing as late twentieth-century persons and the ensuing problem of "self- reflexivity" raised by Elkins. No matter how we turn the question, the historical distance and inscrutability of Paleolithic mark makers require us to place a great weight of conjecture on very scant evidence.

At this point, I want to complicate matters a bit more by adding some additional testimony that comes from my experience as a teacher of intro- ductory drawing. Realizing that our culture is immeasurably more devel- oped than the Paleolithic, I nonetheless believe it might be useful to closely examine what happens when people who have considerable experience making and replicating one class of images, are challenged to replicate another type of image. In particular, I want to consider a phenomenon which, for want of a better term, I will call "cognitive signature." It is an occurrence that suggests the type of imagistic autonomy or self-suffi- ciency assumed by some art historians which Davis argues against; and it invites a kind of meandering and reverie that Elkins discerns in art history writing. (D, 2; E, 175ff, 257ff)

The evidence I have in mind is produced by students who are suffi- ciently educated to be admitted to a large public university and who thus

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 11: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

74/ VISUAL RESOURCES

possess the cognitive and motor skills to, for example, hand write letters, words, and sentences in conformance with the complex conventions of scale, proportion, relative placement, and order for this type of highly-specialized mark making to be literally and accurately read by oth- ers. However, only some of these students have extensive additional training in making pictorial images (as opposed to the graphic configura- tions of script language), others have only a passing exposure to the craft, and others are taking introductory drawing as a lark or out of curiosity and thus bring only a certain degree of enthusiasm to the task. I structure the class as a life-drawing studio to the extent that each session is orga- nized around the development of various perceptual and manual skills based on making renderings, or images, of objects placed before the stu- dents. The use of still objects is important because their continuing, fixed presence forms the basis for our collectively evaluating the fidelity of stu- dents' renderings to the objects during the studio sessions. Often I begin each new class with an exercise to assess the studentsJ abilities. The exer- cise consists of setting a fairly simple, symmetrical object to one side of the center of the studio and asking the students to make a line drawing of it without concern for certain visual nuances such as cast or contained shadows, contrast, or color. For example, I might use a large (about one half meter tall) white enamel pitcher the base of which is perfectly round (Figure 1)-its size and symmetry assuiing me that all of the about eigh- teen or so students in the studio will easily be able to see (or "read) the pitcher and each student will be seeing about the same profile. Note that the visual field represented in Figure 1 is already narrowed to the extent that it does not show the larger setting in which the object has been placed, i.e., the adjacent wdls, the floor, other furnishings, and so on. Note also that the visual field selected in Figure 1 does show the top and part of the base of the table upon which the pitcher has been placed, shadows cast on the rear wall by the pitcher and table, as well as a variety of visual "clutter" in the form of smudges, marks, and stains. I always make a point of placing the object below the students' eye level so that, from their slightly elevated relationship to it, they have the possibility of perceiving the object's volume or depth.

The students' initial exercise drawings invariably fall into one of three broad types of relationships to the object. For the sake of discussion, and in no particular order of priority, I would characterize those relationships as follows (in each of the following illustrations the central image took up the greater part of the drawing paper used by the students): (a) pictorial, renderings that more or less skillfully follow the conventions of linear

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 12: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

perspective as developed in Western European art since the Renaissance to convey both the inner proportions and volume of the object (Figures 2a and 2b); @) schematic, renderings that suggest the profile of the object not unlike engineering elevations or side views, but without particular fidelity to the inner proportions of the object (Figures 3a and 3b); and (c) pictographic, ren- derings that suggest different elements of the object none of which could be viewed from one position but, taken together, convey a summation of views or understandings of the object (Figures 4a and 4b). Note that the drawings suggest each student possesses a relatively sophisticated "image channel" to the extent that each one has filtered out the visual clutter in

Figure 2(a and b)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 13: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

761 VISUAL RESOURCES

Figure 3(a and b)

Figure 4(a and b)

order to isolate the pitcher, and in three cases the table, as though clean or "pure" forms. Since the purpose of the drawing course is to develop the students' rendering skills, those whose drawings fall into the pictorial or schematic categories are most likely to succeed in the curriculum because they have already learned to select, assemble, and convey visual perceptions in accordance with some if not all of the standard pratices of depition in the western visual art tradition. From experience, I know that those students whose renderings fall into pictographic category will have the most difficulty with the course. Nonetheless, this latter group is far and away the most interesting to me because of the nature of that difficulty.

Without exception, the students making the pictographc renderings are skillful writers in the sense that they can communicate language in printed or cursive letters with clearly discernible personal styles and noteworthy consistency. In other words, each person has a distinctive handwriting, it is legible, and each person will correct letters he or she perceives to be misshapened, all characteristics suggestive of a relatively advanced "information channel" through which the differences between an expected image and an actual set of marks are compared and the latter adjusted.12 What gives, then, when these same students have such difficulty rendering a simple and regular object? Why after the course of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 14: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

several subsequent weeks of training, will they continue to have difficul- ties? Clearly manual dexterity is not the problem. Don't they "see" the visual evidence apparent to the others? If they are seeing that evidence, are they interpreting it differently for some cognitive reason? I find that given enough time and various aids-such as an etched glass grid through which students can view objects to help them gauge angles, curves, proportions, and other visual clues-they can acquire a rudimen- tary ability to "read" and render an object. But take away the aids, or relax the expectation of a fidelity to pictorial convention, and the students will snap back to the initial type of pictographic marking illustrated in Figures 4a and 4b.

I dwell on this phenomenon because it bespeaks differences in visual cognition wluch are difficult if not impossible to accurately measure but which are nonetheless clearly evident. And these differences throw into sharp relief the extent to which certain rendering conventions, such as lin- ear perspective, may tell us more about the adaptability of some among us to particular visual languages than they do about others' artistic capacity or visual acuity.13 However, what strikes me most forcefully about this phenomenon is the persistence with whch students in the pictographic category will repeat the same types of rendering "mistakes" with the same classes of objects regardless of the objects' sizes, proportions, colors, etc. In other words, if these students were simply lazy lookers or careless renderers, their drawings would vary dramatically from one image to the next in their degree of fidelity to the objects. But the regularity with which a given person would repeat, for example, the configuration of the flat bottom and round top of a funnel or cylinder (Figure 4b) throughout a semester of study tells me that the images they are making are fairly accu- rate representations of what he or she perceives to be the object. It is an image that consists of an amalgam of visual and conceptual information: the round top representing the circular shape of the pitcher, the sloping sides its silhouette, and the flat bottom and square outline the fact of the pitcher's resting securely on a table. This is not a fixed view or consis- tently visually-based "text"-like the image in Figure 1, but rather a com- pilation of information which the student could only acquire by moving around the object, collecting different observations, and then reconstitut- ing them in a single image which is partly pictorial, partly schematic, and partly conceptual. In this sense, Figure 4b is a replication of the object. Yet it is offered with a different visual vocabulary than the image in Figure 2a. It represents, if you will, a cognitive signature that is repeated with the type of consistency one would otherwise associate with a person's

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 15: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

781 VISUAL RESOURCES

nominal signature. Unlike the image in Figure 1 and those in Figures 2a and 2b, Figure 4b is certainly not consistently optical. It suggests the per- sistent presence of other types of information in the "image channel" which the maker cannot readily filter out in order to arrive at a more narrowly-defined picture of the object.

The variability of human-fashoned images over the history of civilization is no doubt a product of highly personal "styles" that, through the processes of imitation and replication, become the traits of "culture." But this concept does not give sufficient weight to differences in the develop- ment of perception, the extent to which sight is or can be trained, and the complex ways visual observations are transformed into visual signs or images. Our notion of the emergence of consistently "readable" and coherent Paleolithic notational or image systems may just be a byproduct of our capacity to find the origins of only one visual dialect, the one that evolved into the dominant mechanism of "reading" and "writing" images with which we have become comfortable after about 30,000 years of human development. I cannot help but wonder if we do not also witness in the now apparently "meaningless" parietal marks and engravings from the Upper Paleolithic period a "lost language" of visuality from a time when the perception and projection of images functioned in a now unimaginably different way. And this brings me back to the place where I began: the alternative ways art hstorians and artists use slide collections.

In the context of a long view of human history, the separation of art mak- ing and writing about art into two distinct disciplines only just happened. After all, Vasari was creating paintings and writing the Lives about 450 years ago. Perhaps h s schism reflects a necessary division of labors in a civilization that seems to develop best through the increasing specializa- tion of tasks, or maybe th s division is only an accident of history. Regardless of the reason, the distinct orientations artists and art hstorians bring to their uses of images might also be vestiges of more fundamental differences indicative of just a few of a variety of capacities humans bring to perceiving, replicating, and contemplating the visual. Davis and Elkins offer very original and important observations about the physiological and emotional foundations of our relationships with the visual. Both scholars are posing essential questions which deserve more scrutiny, and I hope their books constitute the beginning rather than closure of a more search- ing exploration of the ways in whch we perceive, recite, and think visually.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 16: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

NOTES

" D and " E followed by numbers refer to pages in the books being reviewed, respectively, Davis's Replications and Elkins's Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts.

1. By using "artworld," I am accepting for the purposes of this discussion Arthur Danto's neo- logism and definition of it, see: Arthur Danto, "The Artworld," The Journal of Philosophy LXI, 19 (October 1964): 571-584. See also: Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1982). For a critique of Danto's position that is particularly applicable here with regard to the "pure gaze," see: Pierre Bourdieu, "The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic," in Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 254-66.

2. For readers unfamiliar with either one or the other of these types of fixtures, the catalogues of suppliers specializing in photography-related storage equipment are a good place to see examples. I recommend the catalogues of Light Impressions, P. 0. Box 940, Rochester, New York, 14603-0940, U.S.A. or (800) 828-6216.

3. By "usual," I mean the categories of art history practice which, in turn, shape the organization of slide collections that serve programs where art history is practiced and taught. For a thoughtful study of the disciplinary context in which art history's parts are classified (or "mapped"), see: Robert S. Nelson, "The Map of Art History," Art Bulletin LXXIX, 1 (March 1997): 28-40.

4. One could argue that a fundamental questioning of the institution and ends of art began among artists nearly eighty years ago. See, for example, Marcel Duchamp, "The Richard Mutt Case," Blind Man 2 (1917): 5 [reproduced in Theories and Documents of contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1996), 8171. At that point art history was still a rel- atively young discipline if judged by such measures as cohesiveness, professional identity, and stan- dardization of training. For the United States, see: The Early Years of Art History in the United States, ed. Craig Hugh Smyth and Peter M. Lukehart (Princeton: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993). Art historians did not begin probing the foundations of their field until much later: "The Crisis in the Discipline," ed. Henri Zerner [editor's statement and special issue title], Art Journal 42,4 (Winter 1982): 279.

In using the term "disciplinary," I realize that-at least with regard to D u c h a m p I am retrospec- tively naming a level of awareness which was then only just being adumbrated. But Duchamp does evince both a critical sense of artistic practice and the places where "art" occurs. If that understanding is not directly articulated, it is because Duchamp defines the critical site of the Richard Mutt Case "by the exteriority of its vicinity." Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knozuledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 17.

5. (E, xif, xvi-vii) Both texts are skillfully printed and I commend the publisher for the high qual- ity of the illustrations, as well as the reader-friendly use of footnotes which are especially welcome in closely-argued books like these. If I may be permitted a digression, I am not persuaded, in this era of

~ -

the muchIheralded efficiencies of computer-aided design and typesetting, that so many book and journal publishers (including the College Art Association which issues the journal Art Bulletin) must exchange footnotes for endnotes for the sake of economy.

6. In qualifying the extent of my art history schooling, I should acknowledge that I have had some training in the subject. Like most university-based studio art professors of my generation (and proba- bly the-previous one, i.e. beginning in the-post Second world War period), 1Gas required to take art history surveys and a handful of more specialized art history electives to qualify for my baccalaureate and graduate degrees. While it would be foolish to claim that art history leaming was new to post- war higher education in studio art, I suspect it has evolved into something different than what was offered in the late nineteenth-century. ~f am right, there would be severaI reasons for the change, including the professionalization and specialization of higher education, the nascence of art history as a distinct academic discipline, the arrival of studio art training in colleges and universities, and the pressures of all these developments on independent art academies and schools to conform to them. In any event, the training of artists in academies and art schools in the west, from the Renaissance th;ough the end of th; nineteenth century, included an eclectic use of selected exemplars from art's history, but presented by artistfmasters, often for copying or imitation. There is little indication that exposure to art's past approached anything like the systematically-organized art history surveys and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Page 17: Looking, Marking, Thinking, and Thinking About Thinking About Marks and Their Makers

801 VISUAL RESOURCES

special topics courses-ordinarily taught by university-trained art historians-required for all aspir- ing artists training in accredited colleges, universities, or art schools today. Regarding the studio art teaching tradition in the west, see: Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For some episodes in the professionalization of art history in America, see: The Early Years of Art History in the United States, ed. Smyth and Lukehart.

I dwell on the extent to which art's history today is learned by art students from art historians rather than artists for a reason. The discipline of art history has come to play an important if subtle role in studio art teaching and practice. Art history's disciplinary presence shows up in the taxonomic figures artists use to cite individual works, schools, and eras from art's past. Indeed, I think it is safe to write that the language of art history has become the lingua franca of artworld discourse in gen- eral, such that any discussion that would depend entirely on strictly formal, ahistorical analyses (like the popular eighteenth-century approach of Roger de Piles) would be wholly incomprehensible to most artists, collectors, critics, and curators, as well as art historians. This is why I am so interested in art history's methodological debates. To learn about art history's inner workings is to learn about the subtle mechanics of contemporary discourse about art in most spheres of art making and reception today. On de Piles's nomenclature, see: T. Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

7. D, 1. Davis elaborates on and qualifies his definition in the subsequent few pages. 8. D, xiii. Davis's use of "archaeology" in this context is suggestive of Michel Foucault's use of

the term in Foucault, Archaeology, 7, 135ff. While Davis shares some of Foucault's epistemological concerns, the former's focus on the individual's acts of observing and knowing must be distinguished from the latter's interest in structures and systems of knowledge at the level of disciplinary and insti- tutional formations-archaeology as the "genealogy" of knowledge at a systemic level in western civ- ilization.

9. D, 58. While he does not dwell on the point, Davis accepts the practice of modem scholars to assume things about earlier peoples' states of mind based on what "we" observe of our own, e.g.: "[Wle assume tentatively that similarity between sign and object was much the same for Aurignacian people as it is for present-day users of signs." (D, 56) Davis is thus attempting to narrow and specify more precisely the workings of that cognitive psychology along lines that allow scholars to "make sense of the evolutionary record as we have it." (D, 64) This assumption does risk reading back into the prehistoric record conceptions which may only be applicable to our own civilization. As will become clear below, however, I accept Davis's proposition for the sake of argument and even build upon it for my own purposes.

10. See also, James Elkins, "Before Theory," Art History 16, 4 (December 1993): 647-72 [a review essay on Davis's Masking the Blow, the Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)l. The journal issue containing the responses to Elkins's original article is: Current Anthropology 37, 2 (1996). Elkins's insights regarding close reading include the nature of reproductions employed by art historians as well. See his comments on the much overrated advent of digital imaging -in the service of art history scholarship: James Elkins, "What Are We Seeing, Exactly?" Art Bulletin LXXIX, 2 (June 1997): 191-98.

11. Davis would refer to both types of marks as "semantic." See his chart Fig. 2.5 "Types of markine," D. 53. - .

12. I am able to observe the students' handwriting in the form of notes on the backs of drawings, forms they complete for me, signatures, etc.

13. In persistently refemng to linear perspective as a "convention," I do not mean to suggest that I believe it to be a single, uniform technique for conveying the illusion of three-dimensional volume. To the contrary, I agree wholeheartedly with Elkins's findings about the various types and uses of lin- ear perspective systems, as well as their adaptations by artists in the service of fompositional ends and their misinterpretation by historians in the service of theoretical ends. See: James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). That being said, however, linear perspec- tive is routinely and nearly universally taught in most studio art drawing courses today as a standard feature of the curriculum. In a sense, it is as central to the studio art curriculum as grammar is in language arts curricula.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f H

ong

Kon

g L

ibra

ries

] at

02:

55 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014