Abstract
The aesthetic dimension is demonstrated with reference to the model of seeing art. In experiencing visual artworks, we are confronted with visual material that is, both in terms of its reflexivity and its character as an act, paradigmatically suited to generate insights into the processes that weave together the visible and the invisible. This chapter discusses this with reference to Gary Hill, Paul Cézanne and William Kentridge. The kind of seeing their works involve and represent is particularly appropriate for considerations in the theory of perception, because of the way, in each case, the artist’s gaze and the shape of their works break with the routines of seeing as identifying. Art sets out systematically to see in different ways.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Interestingly, Jacques Rancière (2007, p. 13) qualifies the rupture between classical and modern art as the difference in the way they relate the visible and the utterable to the invisible and non-representable. This consists in the fact that words and forms, the sayable and the visible, the visible and the invisible, are related to one another in accordance with new procedures.”
- 2.
Georges Salles (2001), the former conservator of the oriental antique collection at the Louvre, has given penetrating elucidations of this.
- 3.
With the French regarder, Didi-Huberman (1992) intends the two meanings the word also has in English: to look and, in the reflective form, to concern.
- 4.
See Jean Luc Nancy (2000), who distinguishes three different functions of the portrait: ressembler, rappeller and regarder: resemble, remind, regard, respectively.
- 5.
The many close-circuit Video works from the 1970s were about confronting the self as the other. Hill’s piece is about the self of the other, who we are supposed to bear seeing.
- 6.
Alfred Neumeyer (1964) explained in this vein the gaze, framing and internal divisions in images as aesthetic measures for removing borders.
- 7.
For the aspect of the imaginary that opens up the image and co-performs iconic seeing, it would be worthwhile considering the gazes out of the image in Rembrandt‘s group portrait “De Staalmeesters” where the gazes are not directed at the observer but, as in Velasquez’ “Las Meninas,” at a space in front of the space seen in the painting. Max Imdahl (1996) analysed this phenomenon. In the present book, the concern is more with the gaze as a form of communication between the image and the observer.
- 8.
On Rembrandt’s treatment of the theme, see M. Bockemühl (1985).
- 9.
- 10.
For more on this concept, see G. Boehm (1973).
- 11.
Even if we concede that tables and chairs can possess a certain appellative force, there remains a difference between seeing objects and imaginary seeing.
- 12.
The problematic nature of Simmel’s ethno-sociological interests compromises his insights into the theory of seeing.
- 13.
Incidentally, Simmel makes similar points in his aesthetic of the portrait, where the portrait shows “the meaning of its appearance, not the meaning behind its appearance” (Simmel 1995a, p. 321).
- 14.
For more particulars, see W. Kemp (2003).
- 15.
On the use of this motif since antiquity, see Johann Konrad Eberlein (1982).
- 16.
Pliny the elder reports in the 35th book of his Naturalis Historiae the superlative achievement by which Parrhasius deceived Zeuxis, whose painted grapes only deceived the birds.
- 17.
On the theatricality of seeing, see the comprehensive study by U. Haß (2005).
- 18.
For good reproductions, see F. Baumann (2000).
- 19.
For good reproductions, see D. Cameron (1999).
- 20.
For this reason, the landscape around Aix-en-Provence can appear like a Cézanne to visitors with eyes trained by the paintings. This shows not so much how the gaze can be formed by education but rather demonstrates the curious fact that what Cézanne shows indeed resembles the objects since resemblance cannot rely on mere replicative copying.
- 21.
In his “thing” poems, Rilke seeks a form of utterance that is not entirely contained in what is said, i.e. in predication. Cézanne seeks something similar in seeing. See M. Dobbe (1992).
- 22.
Consider the oft-cited statement that Cézanne sits before nature “like a dog,“ which evokes anew the mistaken notion of a basic ocular activity. Instead, it appears precisely to be an “intelligent eye” that could with Max Imdahl be termed “iconic,” a focus on the picture-immanent, simultaneous force of expression due to the action of representation achieved by form, colour and composition. Imdahl’s concept of the iconic involves a method of analysing the syntactic order of pictures as a primal element of artistic expression in analogy to Cézanne’s concentration on the autonomy of the visible world (Imdahl 1988).
- 23.
On the temporality and experience of the image, see E. Schuermann (2004).
- 24.
Rodin’s sculpture “L’homme qui marche” can be usefully employed to explain the problems of representing movement. See Merleau-Ponty’s (2007, p. 272ff.).
- 25.
Meyer Schapiro (2004) emphasised for this reason the permanence of the phenomena in Cézanne’s paintings.
- 26.
Artist Lecture as Max-Beckmann-Stiftung Professor at the Frankfurt Städelschule in April, 2005.
- 27.
In the lecture, Kentridge mentioned in passing that he spent two years searching for special technical means to erase marks completely. Only afterwards did he realise that the traces of the drawing process can be deployed as a particular means of representation.
- 28.
Didi-Huberman (2002) worked beautifully through this theme using a photograph by Victor Regnau, in which one of the people portrayed remains as a partly erased presence.
- 29.
This is reminiscent of Foucault’s description of artistic fiction: “Therefore, fiction consists not in showing the invisible, but in showing the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible.” Quoted in Maurice Blanchot (1987, p. 116).
References
Alberti, Leon Battista. 1970. On Painting. Yale: Yale University Press.
Badt, Kurt. 1956. Die Kunst Cézannes. Munich: Prestel-Verlag.
Baumann, Friedrich (ed.). 2000. Cézanne: Vollendet unvollendet. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1987. The Thought from Outside. New York: Zone Books.
Bockemühl, Michael. 1985. Die Wirklichkeit des Bildes: Bildrezeption als Bildproduktion, 107–134. Stuttgart: Urachhaus.
Boehm, Gottfried. 1973. Die Dialektik der ästhetischen Grenze. Neue Hefte für Philosophie 5: 118–138.
Boehm, Gottfried. 1988. Paul Cézanne: Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag.
Cameron, Dan et al. (eds.). 1999. William Kentridge. London: Phaidon Press.
Christov-Bakargiev, Carlolyn. 2004. Über Fehlerhaftigkeit als Ressource. In William Kentridge, 3–10. Milano: Skira.
Crary, Jonathan. 2001. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Da Vinci, Leonardo. 1802. A Treatise on Painting. London: J. Taylor.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1992. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde. Paris: Minuit.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2002. Superstition. In Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit, ed. Peter Geimer, 434–440. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Dobbe, Martina. 1992. Wie sollte einer von Farbe sprechen können? Diagonal: Zeitschrift der Universität-Gesamthochschule Siegen 2: 74–84.
Eberlein, Johann Konrad. 1982. Apparitio regis – revelatio veritatis. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Elkins, James. 1996. The Object Stares Back. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Fried, Micheal. 1980. Absorption and Theatricality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gamm, Gerhard, and Schuermann, Eva (eds.). 2007. Das unendliche Kunstwerk. Berlin: Philo.
Haß, Ulrike. 2005. Das Drama des Sehens. Munich: Fink.
Hill, Gary. 1999. Exhibition Catalogue. Aarhus: Aarhus Kunstmuseum.
Imdahl, Max. 1981. Cézanne, Braque, Picasso. In Bildautonomie und Wirklichkeit, 9–50. Mittenwald: Mäander.
Imdahl, Max. 1988. Giotto. Munich: Fink.
Imdahl, Max. 1996. Regie und Struktur in den letzten Gruppenbildnissen von Rembrandt und Frans Hals. In Zur Kunst der Tradition. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, 285.396. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Kemp, Wolfgang. 2003. Rembrandt: Die Heilige Familie mit dem Vorhang. Kassel: Museumslandschaft Hessen.
Kentridge, William. 1992. Drawings for Projection: Four Animated Films. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery.
Kentridge, William. 2004. Felix in Exile: Geography of memory. In William Kentridge, ed. Carlolyn Christov-Bakargiev, 22–24. Milano: Skira.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. L’inhumain. Paris: Galilée.
Menke, Christoph. 1991. Die Souveränität der Kunst. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1993. c. Cézanne’s Doubt. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2007. Eye and Mind. In The Merleau-Ponty Reader, 351–378. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Le regard du Portrait. Paris: Galilée.
Neumeyer, Alfred. 1964. Der Blick aus dem Bilde. Berlin: Gebrüder Mann.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, 139–153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plessner, Helmuth. 1982. Mit anderen Augen. In Mit anderen Augen, 164–181. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Rancière, Jacques. 2007. The Future of the Image. London: Verso.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1983. Briefe über Cézanne. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag.
Salles, Georges. 2001. Der Blick. Berlin: Vorwerk 8.
Schapiro, Meyer. 2004. Paul Cézanne. New York: Abrams.
Schulz, Walter. 1972. Philosophie in der veränderten Welt. Pfullingen: Neske.
Schuermann, Eva. 2004. Zeitlichkeit als Form und Inhalt der ästhetischen Erfahrung. In Licht und Zeit, ed. Gernot Böhme and Reinhard Olschanski, 94–104. Munich: Fink.
Simmel, Georg. 1995a. Ästhetik des Porträts. In Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, Vol. 1, 321–332. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Simmel, Georg. 1995b. Der Bildrahmen. In Sämtliche Schriften, Vol. 7, 101–108. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Simmel, Georg. 2013. Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art. London: Routledge.
Snyder, Joel. 2002. Das Bild des Sehens. In Paradigma Fotografie, ed. Herta Wolf, 23–59. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Valéry, Paul. 1970. Odds and Ends. In The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14, 1–156. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schuermann, E. (2019). Seeing Art. In: Seeing as Practice. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14507-1_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14507-1_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14506-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14507-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)