On Sep 17, 2012, at 3:00 PM, Tom McCormack <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Because all notion is "multiplex" -- a mix of many "parts" which will never be > exactly duplicated again -- a new notion can "remind" us of earlier notion > even though it is not identical to it. There's a man at my gym whose face is > remarkably "like" J. Edgar Hoover's, and I never see him without thinking of > Hoover. Is this sort of thing what you have in mind with "representational > latitude"? It seemed to me the great illustrator Al Hirschfeld had a > remarkable gift for discerning the most telling aspect of his subjects. > Talented political cartoonists -- and "impressionists" one sees on > television -- have also impressed me in this way. I used to say, "He looks like" but now I say, "He reminds me of." When I said "representational latitude" in contrast to my notion of fixed phonemes, I was thinking of how varied and different are the ways of depicting any subject, yet an observer (usually) can discern the subject with no (apparent) difficulty. Your comment about cartoons reminded me that I began a message quite a while ago but never sent, which I will now do (I refer to cartoons in the penultimate paragraph): -------------------------------- For a long time, I thought that visual similitude was an important phenomenon in making art--specifically, that what was put on the canvas, paper, pedestal, etc., bore some kind of direct visual similarity to the object out there. I've been rethinking that a lot lately, and I now believe that the mechanism of seeing a work of art operates more in the manner of reading words than in direct retinal perception of objects. I remember being amused by the occasional comments I'd read from the Middle Ages or Renaissance or some other era (including the 20th century) about how, say, Giotto's people looked "so real" or della Francesca's portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro was so "lifelike," or similar compliments. To me, they looked so obviously like paintings and so contained within the painter's style or the formulas of representation of the time that the "lifelike" accolade seems far too generous. But if one thinks, not of any similarity of the painting to the actual view of the sitter, but rather of how effectively the painting relies on the techniques and conventions of portrayal, then the comments make better sense. In my own work, for example, I look at my charcoal or pencil drawings and evaluate them on how naturalistic they look, how well or poorly I have depicted the figure, etc., completely disregarding the fact that the model in front of me is not the ivory of newsprint with dark gray shadows. One day recently, I was washing the dishes in the sink, and I casually swiped across a plate with a soapy sponge. That was that, a cleaned plate, and I did it just as I would shade and model a figure with the broad side of soft charcoal. But wait! There was still bits of food left on the plate. I had swabbed the surface of the plate much as I would add shading to a drawing, and although that was sufficient in drawing, it really didn't work well for dish washing. In the drawing, the application of charcoal shading served to signal various interpretations (turned plane, thus bulk, thus volume, thus illusionistic space, and the cast shadow showed another plane, source and intensity of light, etc.). The artist's and viewer's degree of sophistication and familiarity with how representations are made in paintings or sculpture shape well they can make and perceive the works. In a sense, people "read" representations. Consider cartoons. Practically no cartoon (that I can think of) approaches the naturalistic similitude of the photorealists, much less of actual photographs or any real object. They are all exaggerated in some way, from Superman to Herblock. When we look at a political cartoon, for example, we can often readily recognize public figures even though they are grossly distorted. Almost unawares, we grasp the conventions almost as an act of reading, such as the big ears and thin face of President Obama or the narrowed eyes and odd mouth with a pointy septum of President Bush; etc. In fact, Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury would draw emblematic images (a feather, a Roman legionnaire's helmet, and other items) so that the reader would identify the undrawn personage by reading the symbol. I am more and more convinced that depictions *remind* us of the referent, and operate in a manner similar to language, more than by the exactitude--and deception--of mimicry. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
