Abstract
This article builds on the cultural sociological program for the study of materiality, material symbolism, and iconic power. Having a theoretical basis in Durkheim’s claims regarding the social potency of totems and other material symbols, two new concepts – sensuous surface and conductive surface – are introduced. These concepts, which distinguish between icons’ formal aesthetic power and their power as repositories and conduits of symbolic principles of control, elaborate and extend Jeffrey Alexander’s notion of iconic surface. The analytical purchase of these concepts is demonstrated in an analysis of the works of the 19th century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt. Bierstadt played a key role in the genesis of the variety of iconic nature – the aesthetically potent, symbolically resonant, and conductively efficacious image of the physical landscape – characteristic of American modernity. The sensuous features of Bierstadt’s work offer a representation of nature carrying constitutive power that is autonomous from its symbolic resonances. This case is significant, given the role played by iconic nature in modern American experience. By shining light on the genetic roots of the American variety of iconic nature, this article helps nuance accounts of the role played by material symbols in the process of cultural differentiation.
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Notes
This is evidenced, for example, in the reception of Benjamin Britten’s 1943 Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings. Julian Johnson notes that audiences at the premiere were bewildered by the “out-of-tune” quality produced as a result of Britten’s directive not to use the valves on the French horns – modern improvements to this classic instrument (Johnson, 2015, p. 196).
This power is a constitutive property of material symbols. It is through empirical analysis that knowledge of this power is known. A sidetrack into the metaphysics of social causal powers is unnecessary here. It is enough for science that the powers of material symbols are postulated as theoretical entities and critiqued on the basis of theoretical analysis and evidence.
Hence the perceptibility of material symbols is assumed. McDonnell defines perceptibility as the “physical availability of an object” (2010, p. 1805). By this he means literally the extent to which an object can be a reached by actors’ senses. As McDonnell helpfully illustrates, a material symbols’ perceptibility may be increased or reduced according to its setting (1820–1828).
The power of symbolic principles to exert control over action (whether as condition or cause) at the core of the concept of symbolic depth may be actualized in varying ways. The program for the study of material symbols does not see actors as cultural dopes. As McDonnell’s (2010, pp. 1807–1808) and de Certeau’s (2002, p. xiii; cited in McDonnell) work suggests, actors have the capacity both to interpret the intended meanings of material symbols and to realize unintended meanings and uses.
Recent work draws attention to the importance of the physical availability of material symbols as well as the influence of physical setting on their accessibility (McDonnell, 2010; Griswold et al, 2013). Questions addressed in these works complement inquiries into the efficacy of conductive surface.
As Griswold, Mangione, and McDonnell show, contingent factors such as “the physical distance or intimacy between audiences and art objects” and “how bodies are oriented to experience and move through exhibition spaces” contribute to understanding how experience is shaped by material symbols (2013, p. 351). Such analyses highlight perceptual psychological considerations in assessing outcomes.
The idea of an affordance was originally James Gibson’s (1986 [1979]) and was theoretically embedded in debates in perceptual psychology. Anderson and Sharrock (1993) reconceived the idea for the field of computer-supported cooperative work. Tia DeNora has made the most use of the idea sociologically, and a review of uses and citation patterns of the idea of affordances indicates that DeNora’s view of the matter is taken as authoritative. As DeNora claims, “objects do not offer, in any fixed sense, some pre-given set of affordances that can be described in advance of how objects come to be used. One cannot make definitive lists of what something means, what it might offer users, independent of use, because use (realignment, reappropriation) may profoundly transform what we discover about objects” (2014, p. 93; Cf. 2014, pp. 91–94, 103, and 136).
Questions of this kind have been raised before. In one well-known instance, Oscar Wilde argued that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” and claimed that it followed from this that “external Nature also imitates Art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings. This is the secret of Nature’s charm, as well as the explanation of Nature’s weakness” (1891, pp. 44–45; Cf. 1889).
Although a more complete discussion of the other facets of the symbolic depth of Bierstadt’s paintings cannot be offered due to limitations of space, many of these facets should be well-known to readers. American mission, manifest destiny, and romanticism, to name a few, are rather important. Another was the notion of American national greatness. Writing, for instance, about Domes of the Yosemite, the New York columnist cited above claimed “This picture will advance Mr. Bierstadt’s reputation…We recommend our readers to go at once and see the work. They will feel that the world is progressing and the Americans are a great people” (Mayer [undated]; my emphasis). Themes such as American national greatness were not only communicated through imagery but also via interpretive texts available at exhibitions of the paintings. Bierstadt’s pamphlet for Rocky Mountains, Linda Ferber notes, “concluded with the hope that, upon the painting’s foreground plain, ‘a city, populated by our descendants, may rise, and in its art-galleries this picture may eventually find a resting-place’” (1990, p. 25). Henry Tuckerman claimed “No more genuine and grand American work has been produced in landscape art than Bierstadt’s ‘Rocky Mountains.’ Representing the sublime range which guards the remote West, its subject is eminently national” (1867, p. 396). Here we see not only evidence of symbolic depth but also what Jeffrey Alexander calls the interpretive or hermeneutic power of the critic (2012) amplifying symbolic depth. (For more on the link between national identity and the arts see Benoit 2011.)
As the scare quotes suggest, the question concerning representational accuracy is not followed by a simple or obvious answer. Take Audubon’s and Ehret’s illustrations, for example. As William Cronon argues, such scientific illustrations “inevitably reflect the science of their day, recording only those elements that contemporary theory defined as essential” (1992, pp. 45–50). While it is important not to overstate the case, the sensuous surfaces, while retaining their aesthetic autonomy, may be seen from another standpoint as being under the control of symbolic depth principles – namely, seen as reflecting the artists’ preoccupation with taxonomic knowledge. Other issues concern the archetypal nature of such representations (which strip the observed subjects of their peculiar individual characteristics) as well as either the lack of environmental context or, by contrast, saturation with a specific environmental context that shapes how any given phenomenon is seen to be constituted. For a more general discussion of the role of values in science bearing on these concerns, see Malczewski (forthcoming).
Notably, Moran for his part created the exemplary images of the Grand Canyon (1873–1874) and Yellowstone (1872) that were among the first and certainly among the most well-known images of those places seen by most Americans of the 19th century.
Although the discussion here focuses on the public’s direct experience of Bierstadt’s original works, it is important to note that his paintings were made widely available as reproductions. Bierstadt was known to have reproduced his work using various types of engraving (e.g., wood engraving, steel engraving, and chromolithography) and photomechanical processes (e.g., collotype, photoengraving, and photogravure). As Helena Wright (1990) demonstrates in her authoritative study, Bierstadt not only employed the latest technologies of the time to reproduce his artworks but also aggressively marketed them. The publication plan for Rocky Mountains, for instance, called for a limited edition of 750 prints of which 200 were artist proofs signed by Bierstadt and his engraver, James Smillie (Wright, 1990, p. 272; also see Sandweiss, 1992, p. 129). In this way, the conductive surface of Bierstadt’s vision of nature reached a broad audience. The prints indeed were smaller than the originals – they were not “Great Prints” – although many were in color and had high fidelity to the originals. Sandweiss reports that “British print publisher Thomas McLean wanted to promote his chromolithographs of this painting [Rocky Mountains] and its companion piece, Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie…[at] an exhibition…The chromolithographs, rather than the paintings, appear to have assumed center stage” (Sandweiss, 1992, p. 131). See Wright (1990) for exemplars of Bierstadt’s prints and their dimensions.
These two paintings may be found under the same roof in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Formerly, they were housed in the (now-closed) Corcoran Gallery of Art.
To offer a sense of the relative prices of these paintings, in 1863 the median taxable income of residents of New York City was just under $1000, and only 744 of New York’s households earned over $20,000 – one of them, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s, reported $680,728 in taxable income (Stelzner, 2013; Cf. 2015).
Bierstadt was not alone in lighting his work to advantage. As this excerpt from a 1864 review of Frederic Church’s Niagara makes patent, the role of illumination was seen by one perceptive critic as imparting an effect of its own: “[Niagara] seems to have exhausted the artist’s power, for it has had no successor. It holds its own bravely all these years – although its color is not all it seemed to be when it was exhibited, and borrowed a grace or two from artificial light…” (New York Daily Tribune, “The Exhibition of Pictures at the Metropolitan Fair,” April 9, 1864: 12; my emphasis)
This development raises the question of the nature of automatization – the tendency of aesthetic properties or forms to become hackneyed or banal (thus losing their sensual resonance). The concept of automatization is a Russian Formalist term initially developed to shine light on, among other things, variations in appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of language. I translate the Russian term “oshchutimost” (ощутимость) as sensual resonance, although noticeability or perceptibility may be more common literal translations. Liah Greenfeld translates the term as palpability in her work exploring the sociologically significant bond or linkage between the symbolic and the material (1987, p. 46).
The question concerning the organizing principles underlying the decay of collectively resonant aesthetic forms is one that merits further examination. In the present case, one marks analytically the difference between the loss of favor with pictures of great size and the loss of favor with a type of subject matter. The variability with which automatization proceeds along these two dimensions (i.e. size and subject matter) is a general empirical question yet unexplored and not taken up here. Concerning how this question bears on literature and its sensually resonant aesthetic properties, Yury Tynyanov theorized:
(1) In relation to the automatized constructive principle an antithetical constructive principle is formed in a dialectical fashion; (2) its application is under way – the constructive principle searches for areas of easiest application; (3) it spreads to the widest possible mass of phenomena; (4) it becomes automatized and calls for antithetical principles of construction. During periods of decay of central dominant trends[,] dialectically new constructive principles appear. Large forms in the process of automatization accentuate the significance of small forms (and vice versa). (1929; quoted in Greenfeld 1987, p. 46)
The analytical value of this view for studying such diverse material symbols as art, music, and fashion is immediately apparent. It is said that there is a fine line between love and hate – and this certainly appears to be the case when fashion that initially stuns, for instance, transforms into something even the dead would not dare to be caught wearing. Jonathan Eastwood (2007, pp. 167–168) follows up on Liah Greenfeld’s lead (1987) in making the case for the sociological significance of Russian Formalism in arguing against Pierre Bourdieu’s view of Russian Formalist thought as bearing simply on properties internal to form. One suggestion offered by my evidence is that conductive surface – particularly when it is highly effective – may bear on the degree to which the “oshchutimost” or sensual resonance of the sensuous surface decays.
In point of fact, while Bierstadt’s various representations of California’s Sierra Nevadas and Yosemite Valley were at the height of their fame in the 1860s, young John Muir had not yet set foot in California. It was not until March 1868 that Muir disembarked a steamship in San Francisco and, shortly thereafter, made the pilgrimage to Yosemite.
See quotation from Thomas Moran above (cited in Sheldon, 1881, p. 125). In this way, biography meets history.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose criticism and commentary proved especially valuable and to Michael Mitchell and Mark Simes for their insightful feedback on an early draft. For their intellectual fellowship during this paper’s conception and creation, I thank the organizers of and participants in the Workshop in Cultural Sociology at Yale University. This article benefited from audiences at the Eastern Sociological Society Meetings (2016) and from the Center for Cultural Sociology Conference at Yale University (2016).
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Malczewski, E. Materiality, iconic nature, and Albert Bierstadt’s “Great Pictures”. Am J Cult Sociol 4, 359–384 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0011-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-016-0011-9