Painting, aesthetics of

8. Seeing transposed?

To meet the challenge at the close of §6, we do better to change what has in effect been our strategy throughout. So far we have been looking for values found only in painting, since the only alternative seemed to be to resort to values found in exactly the same form elsewhere. (We fall into the latter even if we adopt the second strategy sketched at the start, and locate painting’s aesthetic distinctiveness in a distinctive rangeof general values it exhibits.) Instead, we should try to understand painting as embodying more general values in a distinctive way. That distinctiveness is to stem from the way those values present themselves in pictorial experience. Seeing-in is thus not merely the means by which we grasp the representational content of a picture: it is also the conduit along which all pictorial value passes, and which gives the values thus accessed a distinctively pictorial shape. Seeing-in is not, now we have definitively rejected illusionism, face-to-face visual experience differently caused. But it is importantly related to ordinary vision. And it is so in such a way that what is aesthetically available in seeing-in is significantly linked to what is available in face-to-face visual contact with the world.

Thus suppose that seeing things in the flesh not only presents us with certain individuals and their properties, but can also, on occasion, embody an affective response to those things. The skyscraper looks not merely grey and towering, but threatening, hostile. Perhaps seeing-in can similarly incorporate the affective, as when a De Chirico not merely shows strange buildings and alleys with long shadows, but captures a certain affective response to them, of poignant melancholy. If so, seeing-in offers not just a distinctively pictorial way to represent things, but the chance to represent them along with an affective response they merit. The response need not be one we would usually have to such objects, and might even be one which, in real contact, we would never have. Painting, then, seems to offer us the chance to explore how another might see the world and feel about it. It promises to initiate us into another sensibility.

This is something literature can do also, of course. What is distinctive about painting is that it does this in a specially visual form. It exploits the intermingling of percept and affect in everyday experience; and the way in which seeing-in is able to preserve such structural features of ordinary vision within what is, in terms of its phenomenology, a quite different experience. It thereby allows the artist to speak to us by means, not of words and the images they can convey, but manipulated complexes of seeing and feeling.

This is, at most, only the start of an answer to our question. To flesh out the position we would need to understand more about seeing-in, and in particular how it is able to deploy the resources of seeing face-to-face. We would need to understand those resources themselves far better, for instance, describing properly the role in ordinary vision of feeling. We would then need to spell out the significance provided by the possibility, in painting, of the artist’s controllingour response, and the room thus created for the notion of communication. We would need to explain how such control manifested itself in our experience. And we would need to expand our sense of the phenomena this structure allows for - is the above unique, or the model for a whole range of distinctively visual forms of more general artistic values which painting can offer? Having done all this, we would need to fit the values thus described into a plausible account of the tradition of painting, in something like Greenberg’s sense of an historically extended, practically embodied, discussion between practitioners of the art (see §3).

We cannot do these things here. Although he does not frame them this way, the most serious attempt to tackle these questions is to be found in the work of Richard Wollheim (1987). The interested reader is directed there. Instead we may end by returning to just one of many matters outstanding, the question of abstract art. For the above programme for constructing a pictorial aesthetic may seem already, even in this inchoate state, to ignore abstraction. If pictorial values are distinctive through their involvement with seeing-in, and seeing-in is the experience by which pictorial content is grasped, what are we to say of those pictures which, prima facie, have no such content? Wollheim has an answer. We do see things in abstract paintings. It is just that those things are highly schematic - not flutes, doges and dancers, but, for example, triangles intersecting with rectangles, simple shapes arranged in various planes. Perhaps this is not true of all abstract painting, but it is true of by far the greater part of it. Even Greenberg himself seems to concede as much. For it is hard to know what else to make of his acknowledgement that most abstract painting is not completely ‘flat’. This tactic allows us the hope of treating most abstract painting as exploring the very same, perhaps multiple, values as the rest of the tradition. And if some pictures remain thereby excluded - Wollheim cites early Mondrian and Barnett Newman at his most distinctive - then perhaps that is a price that the aesthetic, once properly developed, can afford to pay.