Painting, aesthetics of

7. Inflection

One approach that might help uses the materials provided by seeing-in to enrich our sense of whatwe can see in paintings (see Podro 1998; Lopes 2006). As noted, seeing-in involves awareness of both configurational and representational aspects. It is natural to think that these two aspects are radically discrete. Of course, what we see in the marks (representational aspect) depends on the nature of the marks themselves (configurational aspect). But, the natural thought goes, it is always possible to describe each aspect independently of the other: to say what the marks are like without mentioning what is seen in them, and to describe the scene visible in them without mentioning the marks. Perhaps, however, that is wrong. On this suggestion, the representational is ‘inflected’ by the configurational, features of the marks are ‘recruited’ to the scene visible in them. The upshot is that we cannot fully characterize the scene visible in the picture without mentioning features of the marks that compose the picture itself. In these cases, what we see in a painting straddles the divide between the world represented and the object that does the representing. What is visible in the ink of a Rembrandt sketch, for instance, is not just a hand gesturing, but a hand that is itself somehow composed of ink.

This idea offers a particularly forceful solution to the problem of explaining what is gained from looking at a painting of something that would not be gained from looking at the thing in the flesh. If what we see in some paintings can only be described by reference to the nature of the marks in which they are seen, then there can be no face-to-face experience in which we see directly what is seen in these pictures. The items seen in these pictures themselves implicate the marks composing pictures, so that the only visual experience which can have such things among its objects is one of seeing something ina marked surface. The troublesome question (what do we get from looking at the picture that we would not get from seeing its object in the flesh?) thus simply does not arise.

Still, that inflection enables us to dodge in this way the question that so troubled illusionism is hardly enough. For one thing, however effective inflection’s response to that question, a perfectly good response is already available. As noted in §6, once we accept that when we see things in paintings we are aware of the configurational aspect of those pictures, we already acknowledge a key difference between looking at a picture of something and looking at the thing itself. That acknowledgement seems already to meet the challenge the question posed. If inflection is to offer us something more, it needs to provide the basis for some positive account of the value of painting, some purchase on how exactly what is distinctive about seeing things in pictures renders the experience valuable. Absent such an account, the phenomenon of inflection will be no more than a curiosity. After all, lots of things are visible in pictures that cannot be seen in the flesh. Examples include not merely that which no longer exists, or was always only fantasy, but the distortions of real items that we see in caricatures, or those items stripped down to their visual bare bones in a highly schematic drawing. What we see in these pictures could not be seen in the flesh either, yet they need be of no particular value. How, then, is it to a painting’s credit if we see in it a scene inflected by the configurational aspect of the picture? The proponent of inflection owes us an answer, and it is not clear what it will be. (See Hopkins 2010.)