Frances to Michael and others... If graphic marks in pictorial works are held as nothing more than mere formal representations of the physical stuff used, which might be say material and technical and mechanical or chemical and electrical or structural and instrumental and operational and so on, then these subsigns would correctly be immediate syntactic actisigns, and not immediate semantic qualisigns like their referential tones and marks. The issue then is what dynamic or energetic intermediate object is signified by the preparatory subsign to a mark, and what proper sign is subsequently realized by this subordinate act of productive signification. Such an interpretation of marks wrongly and merely as immediate syntactic representations, and not correctly as immediate semantic referentions, subsequently turns the quasi marks as actisigns justly into nothing more than vital indexic signs like signals and symptoms caused by some organism; in the same way for example that aboriginal natives in their natural environments might scan and probe the browse and scat and imprint of passing animals that would be designated and indicated and expressed in the land to some purposive end.
The immediate mark like the immediate morph that is interpreted as the individual skill of an artist in using a tool to fix some medium on a ground can be intermediately sensed as an indexic sign of style or health, but not sensed as a mark. If the artistic stuff in the artwork of an artist is sensed as a mark, then this has no more significance to a signer than the oral sounds or literal strokes that are used in signing to speak a remark or write a text. The mark intrinsically is a part of the grammar and thus the information born by the sign, but only to the extent of being an immediate yet initiate semantic subsign. The mark is mainly the core raw stuff of drawings and writings, and nothing more. To make more of it is to arbitrarily read or impose added meaning into the mark that it does not evoke on its own solely alone in its own intrinsic right. If a tone or mark is used to identify the cathartic speech or graph or style caused by a particular individual person, then the sign bearing this indicative information is mainly an energetic indexical symptom, and not mainly a static subiconic qualisign. This semiotic stance will tend to trivialize marks, but then they should be kept in their semiosic place. Michael partly wrote in effect... In most instances, the graphic marks of pictorial artists in their artworks give evidence of how they applied the paint, and very little else. Much of any differences are driven by the physical materials available and used in the work: the medium or technique of application or the popularity of various pictorial techniques.
