Pictorial orientation matters

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 39-56

  Dilworth, John ^a  

^a WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347296140     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/43.1.39     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. ' J. Dilworth, 'Artworks versus Designs', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41, no. 2 (April 2001), pp. 162-177.1 proposed a distinction between design intentions, activities, and products, as opposed to artistic intentions, activities, and artworks. Examples of design products would include a specific type of car (or any other invention or device) as well as closer relatives of art such as decorative wall designs. In order to distinguish artistic from design intentions, I presented an example in which two sculptors independently worked on a single object to produce two sculptures that were distinct just because the artistic intentions of the sculptors were distinct. This case was then contrasted with an attempted parallel example for design intentions, which failed to produce two correspondingly distinct design products in spite of the different design intentions of its designers. 1 argued that this failure occurred because designs are types, for which any single token of a given type could not simultaneously be a token of some other type of the same general kind; whereas the possibility of my sculptural 'double artwork' example showed that such artworks could not be types.
2. In subsequent papers I have argued that the relation is one of representation: the physical painting represents the artwork. See 'A Representational Theory of Artefacts and Artworks', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41, no. 4 (October 2001), pp. 353-370;
3. 'Three Depictive Views Defended', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 42, no. 3 (July 2002), pp. 259-278;
4. and 'Medium, Subject Matter and Representation', Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring 2003).
5. For a useful general discussion of the concept of an artefact, see Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1991).
6. One could further investigate smaller increments of rotation of 45°, so that the four square pictures considered would he interspersed with four diamond-shaped pictures. But that would unnecessarily complicate the discussion, as would any consideration of three-dimensional cases. Also distinguish the current kind of orientation from (what could be called) 'compass orientation', which concerns instead rotations of an object around a vertical axis. I discuss other such orientational issues in 'Varieties of Visual Representation', Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 2 (June 2002), pp. 183-205.
7. In scientific studies of perceptual orientation a distinction is commonly made between intrinsic orientation and 'deictic' or indexical orientation, e.g. George A. Miller and P. N. Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard U.P., 1976), ch. 6. But my concept of field orientation is not observer-relative as is their 'indexical orientation'.
8. Miller and Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception, chs 4 and 6, refers to this as the 'characteristic' orientation of an object.
9. -14 In a related paper, 'Four Theories of Inversion in Art and Music', Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. j (Spring 2002), pp. 1-19, I (among other things) defend the legitimacy of such a noticed but artist-unapproved picture".
10. Arthur Danto's general view regards artworks as interpretations of such 'mere real things'. See, for example, his book Hie Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1981).
11. The point is a significant hut apparently generally unrecognized one; for example, in my paper 'Three Depictive Views Defended', I defend Gombrich's thesis that one cannot simultaneously perceive a physical painting and the relevant picture by appeal to the idea of a comprehensive interpretation of low-level visual data. The general assumption that artistic interpretation must start with physical objects rather than with visual data may have led previous commentators to overlook such possibilities.
12. As illustrated by his ongoing debate with Margolis: see J. Margolis, 'Farewell to Danto and Goodman', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 38, no. 4 (October J998), pp. 353-374;
13. A. Danto, 'Indiscernibility and Perception: A Reply to Joseph Margolis', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 39, no. 4 (October 1999), pp. 321-329;
14. and J. Margolis, 'A Closer Look at Danto's Account of Art and Perception', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 40, no. 3 (July 2000), pp. 326-339.
15. On which issue see the two contributions by Danto to a symposium on his views: Arthur Danto, 'Seeing and Showing', Journal oj Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 59, no. 1 (2001), pp. r-9:
16. and 'The Pigeon within Us All: A Reply to Three Critics', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 59, no. 1 (2001), pp. 39-44.1 offer some criticism of related views of Danto in my paper 'A Representational Theory of Artefacts and Artworks'.
17. This is a very different concept than Peg and Myles Brand's thus-described concept which Danto accepts as relevant to his own view in the following way: 'Constitutive interpretations just are what I had in mind by surface interpretations: it is what the audience grasps when it understands the work, and, so far as this interpretation answers to the artist's intention, to understand the work is to know what the intention was' (Mark Rollins, Danto and His Critics [Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993J, p. 201). This Dantoesque concept is much closer to my concept of an identifying interpretation (apart from the differences as noted in Section IV).
18. In that the object after interpretation has acquired properties it did not have prior to being thus interpreted. But such constitutive interpretation by artists should be sharply distinguished from more controversial issues as to whether critical interpretation is ever genuinely productive; e.g. Margolis claims that it can be in 'Reinterpreting Interpretation', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 43 (1989), pp. 237-251,
19. while Robert Stecker denies it in his 'The Constructivist's Dilemma', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 55, no. 1 (1997), pp. 43-52.
20. I discuss pictures exhibited in non-upright positions in my paper 'Four Theories of Inversion in Art and Music', which also discusses various competing theories regarding the role of orientational factors in defining the identity of pictures.
21. For example, two species of animal can only he distinct species if there is no animal that is simultaneously an instance of both species. See my paper 'Artworks versus Designs' for more discussion on this point, which paper also argues (as previously noted) that singular artworks such as individual sculptures cannot be types, because of an example I present which shows that a single sculptural object could embody two distinct sculptures. I extend this result to undermine type theories in the performing arts as well, in a forthcoming paper, 'A Counter-example to Theatrical Type Theories', Philosophia 30 (2002),
22. See also my 'Theater, Representation, Types and Interpretation', American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2 (April 2002), pp. 197-209, for other antitype arguments.
23. As is well illustrated by the near total lack of discussion of such issues in the literature. But Richard Wollheim does briefly discuss the process by which an artist chooses an orientation in Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1987), p. 20).
24. For example, because of Danto's well-known arguments (e.g. in Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace) to the effect that qualitatively indistinguishable objects can nevertheless be distinct artworks.
25. An analogy may be helpful. A piece of wood could be used as a hammer, or a support, or a barrier, and so on, without it being the case that it actually is a hammer, or a token of any other such functionally defined type. For an account of how pictures acquire an intrinsic orientation independently of the current functionalist considerations, see my paper 'Varieties of Visual Representation'.