Synaesthesia and epistemology in abstract painting

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 241-251

  Cazeaux, Clive ^a  

^a CARDIFF METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149509701     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/39.3.241     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. We have not even had to wait until the millenium. August 1998 saw the publication of the Saatchi Gallery's New Neurotic Realism: a catalogue of paintings and sculptures by young artists who, the catalogue essay informs us, enjoy traditional forms of art-making precisely because they are a response to the process-based, conceptual art of the 1990s. Painting has been 'forced back into the limelight' (Dick Price, 'Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough', New Neurotic Realism [London: Saatchi Gallery, 1998] p. 11). The art-press, though, has heavily criticized both the book and the concept, admonishing Saatchi for trying to hype 2 new 'ism' into existence. Interestingly enough, the content of the accompanying exhibition which opened at the Saatchi Gallery in January 1999 bore little relation to the catalogue, mainly due to the fact that very few paintings made it into the show.
2. Quoted in Bernice Rose, 'Allegories of Modernism', Allegories of Modernism: Contemporary Drawing (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 44.
3. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977).
4. Quoted from Kandinsky by Richard E. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes (London: Abacus, 1996), p. 56.
5. Kantian scholarship continues to discuss the epistemological status of the thing-in-itself. Opinion is divided over whether Kant, by admitting the ultimate unknowability of the noumenon, is either reducing human knowledge to a form of subjectivism or making a more radical claim about the relation between appearance and reality. Hegel replies to the former interpretation. I support the latter and expand upon it below. For papers representing contrasting positions, see Ruth Chadwick and Clive Cazeaux (eds), Critical Assessments: Immanuel Kant (London: Routledge, 1992).
6. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin, 1997), 2.13.19;
7. George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1988), para. 16.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 90.
9. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures in Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1975), p. 301.
10. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, pp. 93-94.
11. Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1, ed. K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 154.
12. Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, vol. 2, ed. K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 772.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), para. 808, p. 492.
14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1990), A51, B75, p. 93.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense', Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks from the Early 1870s, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 79-97, see p. 86.
16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1990), 4.014.
17. Richard E. Cytowic, 'Synaesthesia: Phenomenology and Neuropsychology', in Simon Baron-Cohen and John E. Harrison (eds), Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 17-39, see p. 17.
18. John E. Harrison and Simon Baron-Cohen, 'Synaesthesia: An Introduction', ibid., pp. 3-16, see p. 3.
19. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.1.23.
20. Neurological research into the condition is made in the hope of both relieving sufferers from it (although a large proportion of synaesthetes either derive pleasure from or are indifferent to the experience) and achieving greater understanding of how the brain organizes sensory stimuli. There is evidence to suggest that we all experience sensory fusion to some degree (e.g. activation of the auditory cortex during silent lipreading) and, therefore, that the empiricist model of particular cortical pathways for particular sensations may need revision. See Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes,
21. and Gemma Calvert et al., 'Activation of Auditory Cortex During Silent Lipreading', Science, vol. 276 (25 April 1997), pp. 593-596.
22. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A141, B180-181, p. 183.
23. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 20.
24. Cytowic documents a case of a synaesthete who felt shapes in response to tastes. For example, the taste of mint made him experience 'cool glass columns': 'a round shape... a curve behind which I can reach... very, very smooth... it must be made of marble or glass, because what I'm feeling is this satiny smoothness' (The Man Who Tasted Shapes, pp. 121-122).
25. Gerhard Richter, Painting in the Nineties (London: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, 1995).
26. The painting is reproduced in Rose, 'Allegories of Modernism', p. 41.
27. Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting Writings and Interviews 1962-1993 (London: Thames and Hudson, and Anthony d'Offay Gallery, 1995), p. 163.
28. Heiner Stachelhaus, 'Doubts in the Face of Reality: The Paintings of Gerhard Richter', Studio International, vol. 184, no. 947 (September 1972), pp. 76-80, see p. 78.
29. Quoted in Obrist, Gerhard Richter, p. 216.
30. Stachelaus, 'Doubts in the Face of Reality', p. 80.
31. The 'recipe' metaphor has been used in relation to synaesthetic art in a third sense. Postwar composers, such as Cardew, Cage, and Crumb, departed from traditional musical notation and began using colour and freely expressive, gestural marks to evoke the kind of sound or music they wanted to perform. These synaesthetic scores are fascinating as images in their own right but, against their fetishization, Frank Zappa warns us that 'you don't eat the recipe'. One takes delight in the meal, not in the page on which the directions and ingredients are listed; in other words, the score is just a means to an end, the marks which enable realization of the music, and not something to be enjoyed in itself. I disagree with Zappa though. His use of the metaphor ignores the interpretation or translation which takes place from one domain to the other, and does not consider the major differences in the way images and words signify. See John L. Walters, 'Sound, Code, Image', Eye, vol. 7, no. 26 (Autumn 1997), pp. 24-35.
32. For extensive bibliographies of metaphor in the theory of knowledge and language, see: Eva Feder Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989);
33. David E. Leary (ed.), Metaphor in the History of Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1994);
34. Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1979).
35. Psychologists have established that there is a difference between the genuine experience of synaesthesia and merely using metaphors to give colourful descriptions of experience. See Baron-Cohen and Harrison, Synaesthesia,
36. Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense', p. 84.
37. Clive Cazeaux, 'Metaphor and Heidegger's Kant', Review of Metaphysics, vol. 49 (1995), pp. 341-364.
38. Max Black, 'More About Metaphor', in Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, pp. 19-41.