Three depictive views defended

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 259-278

  Dilworth, John ^a  

^a WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149529935     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/42.3.259     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion; A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 2d edn (London: Phaidon Press, 1962);
2. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1987), hereafter PA.
3. See my paper 'A Representational Theory of Artefacts and Artworks', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41, no. 4 (October 2001), pp. 353-370,
4. and also 'Medium, Subject Matter and Representation', submitted for publication. The following summary in Section I draws most directly on this latter paper. I also refer here to another paper of mine, 'Varieties of Visual Representation', forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 2 (June 2002), for distinctions between depiction (pictorial representation) and other kinds of visual representation.
5. Further evidence of the non-physicality of pictures is presented in my paper 'Four Theories of Inversion in Art and Music', Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 1-19.
6. And I have extended my general representational approach to the nature of visual artworks to literary works such as plays in two papers: 'Theater, Representation, Types and Interpretation', American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2 (April 2002), pp. 197-209,
7. and 'The Fictionality of Plays', forthcoming in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 60, no. 3 (Summer 2002).
8. I use the terms 'representational' or 'depictive' broadly, to cover any cases in which a picture has some subject matter, even if that subject matter is 'abstract' in not being readily recognizable as some familiar kind of object or person, etc. This usage roughly corresponds to Wollheim's broad term 'representation', and I too would reserve the term 'figurative' for the narrower subclass of readily recognizable things as just described. See Wollheim, PA, p. 21.
9. For example, by Malcom Budd in 'On Looking at a Picture', in Jim Hopkins and Anthony Savile (eds), Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992),
10. and Dominic Lopes, Understanding Pictures (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996), pp. 43-51.
11. Patrick Maynard provides a useful summary of many different points of view on these topics in his paper 'Seeing Double', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 52, no. 2 (1994), pp. 155-167.
12. See also the symposium on Wollheim's work with contributions by Richard Wollheim, 'On Pictorial Representation', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3 (1998), pp. 217-226;
13. Jerrold Levinson, 'Wollheim on Pictorial Representation', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3 (Summer 1998), pp. 227-233;
14. and Susan Feagin, 'Presentation and Representation', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 3 (1998), pp. 234-240.
15. For example, Lopes, Understanding Pictures, pp. 43-51, who makes a similar distinction of (physical) design properties from representational content.
16. Michael Podro has made similar points more emphatically, for example in 'Review of Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd. Ed.', Burlington Magazine, vol. 124, no. 947 (February 1982), pp. 100-102,
17. and 'Depiction and the Golden Calf', in Andrew Harrison (ed.), Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Seeing and Abstracting (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987).
18. For as Budd points out in 'On Looking at a Picture', p. 272, because of the claimed incommensurability, the configurational aspect cannot simply be seeing of the 'face-to-face' physical surface - so it is either nothing (his suggestion), or it requires reinterpretation along some such lines as mine.
19. Or, put another way, it provides a basis for a regulative theory as to which cases of seeing should count as being cases of pictorial seeing. However, it should be noted that Wollheim's earlier account of twofoldness, as found in Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects: With Six Supplementary Essays, 2d edn (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge U.P., 1980), in his essay entitled 'Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation', also regards twofoldness as '... a normative constraint upon anyone who tries to appreciate works of those arts [painting and poetry]' (p. 216).
20. For example, it seems likely that many of Ray Lichtenstein's well-known blown-up versions of traditional pictures and cartoons, in which what were originally medium-content features of some other artist's intention and style are transformed into deadpan Lichtenstein subject matter, may have originated in perceptions of this kind. A simpler example would be that of a misinterpretation of a steel engraving of a woman (which includes medium-related cross-hatching and repeated lines) in which it is wrongly seen as a picture of a woman with lines, or a net, all over her face. The example is from Andrew Harrison, 'Dimensions of Meaning', in idem (ed.), Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Seeing and Abstracting (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1987), p. 63, but who uses it for another purpose. Also see my paper 'Medium, Subject Matter and Representation', in which this example is discussed in more detail.
21. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. Arguably this point is of central strategic importance to Gombrich in supporting his general illusion theory of depiction, in that an illusion as of seeing a real thing could hardly be produced if one was at the same time aware of the physical surface of a painting. See Budd, 'On Looking at a Picture', and Lopes, Understanding Pictures, p. 40.
22. Maynard in 'Seeing Double', p. 156, argues that '... there is no general question about people simultaneously processing sense inputs in alternative ways'. I could agree, but my point is rather about a comprehensive, high-level interpretation, of which a person is visually aware at a given moment.