The saying ‘art imitates nature’ can be understood in radically different ways. It can be interpreted, first, as meaning that art, like nature, is a productive or creative force. Or, secondly, it can be interpreted to mean that the products of art, works of painting, literature etc., are imitations of natural objects and events. The second is probably the more obvious and usual. It conveys the view that what works of art do, essentially, is to imitate or represent various aspects of reality.
This is the oldest of the ‘Art is …’ formulas. It dates back at least to Plato and Aristotle. They apply it particularly to poetry and drama, but make it clear that it also applies to music and painting; and in Plato it is also clear that it applies to performance as well as to composition. The Greek word is ‘mimesis’, which gives us ‘mime’ and ‘mimetic’; and ‘mimesis’ itself is current in critical parlance.
There are two problems about mimesis: what it is and what it is for. They are linked. Plato’s account brings this out very clearly. Using painting as the example Plato says that a picture of a bed is a copy of the appearance of an actual bed, which in turn he takes to be in some sense an imperfect version of the Form of the Bed, so that the picture is at third remove from reality. If that’s what a pictured bed is it’s not surprising that the answer to ‘What is it for?’ is that it’s good for nothing. You cannot sleep on it and you cannot learn how to make one from a picture of the appearance seen from one angle. Painters and poets do not need to know anything about the things they imitate and it is not from their works that we can learn anything. A further objection Plato has is to dramatic impersonation, a practice that has two evil consequences. First, if someone [especially someone young] imitates a bad character she may become bad. Secondly make-believe removes one from reality. The root objection is that all forms of imitation, drama, representational painting, fiction, are contrasted with what is real, and it is reality that should be our business.
Aristotle is less severe. ‘Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation. The truth of this second point is shown by experience: though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to see the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms for example of the lowest animals and of dead bodies. The explanation is to be found in a further fact: to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it.’ (Poetics, 4)
Different views about the point of representation, but little light on the question what it is for a work to represent reality. It may not be easy to provide a single account that will cover three things included by Plato as examples of mimesis: depicting reality in lines and colours; describing things and events in words; impersonating things and persons in speech and gesture.
Prima facie there is a fundamental difference between the first two: that a picture of a cat represents a cat you can tell by looking - a picture of a cat resembles a cat; but a description of a cat doesn’t resemble a cat at all - it may be a truthful description but you can’t tell unless you understand the words. Description depends on conventions, depiction doesn’t. At least that seems to be the view of common sense. But is it correct?
Does a picture of a cat resemble a cat? If so is that what the picture’s representing a cat consists in? A once common - still common? - view of art is that the artist attempts to copy, in lines and colours, what he sees before him. Representing some part of the real world is producing on paper or canvas, or in stone, clay or bronze, an image which will give a spectator the same visual experience as the original.
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The notion of resemblance, similarity of appearance, is not at all straightforward. Depicting can take many forms, and the history of art reveals that different ages and cultures have depicted the world in different ways. Looking at Egyptian art, or pre-renaissance European art, we are struck by a lack of naturalism in the way things are represented. Looking at Victorian painting on the other hand we are impressed by detailed fidelity to natural appearances. What should we say about the difference: does it mean that painting has progressed? Did the Egyptian painters see the world in the same way and aim to represent it realistically, but lack the technique - e.g. knowledge of perspective - to do it? Or did they see the world differently? (See the cartoon by Alain facing the opening of the Introduction to Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion)
There is evidence
1. that representing things depends on the use of schemata or stereotypes and so is, at least in part, dependent on conventions
2. that a representation looks natural to us if it uses stereotypes that we are accustomed to. Painters see what they paint rather than paint what they see, and the way they paint influences the way we see their paintings.
3. that stereotypes influence not only the way artists represent reality but the way they, and we, see reality. The idea that representation is copying what one sees runs into the difficulty that what we see is problematic.
Much of the evidence is in Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion. See especially chapter II ‘Truth and Stereotype’.
Representation can be done by means of the most schematic images, which are immediately recognisable, e.g. a large circle surmounted by a smaller one, with ears and tail added; or a child’s picture of a house, or of daddy. These are ‘conceptual images’. The artist who wants to depict a particular object begins with such an image, Gombrich suggests, elaborating and varying it in order to convey visual information specific to the object to be depicted. This process he calls ‘making and matching’; it helps account for the fact that art can evolve from less to more naturalistic modes of representation. For a particular artist at a particular time there will be limitations to the possibilities of representation imposed by the available schemata and styles. Two examples: first the repetition of Durer’s rhinoceros in a drawing done ‘from life’ more than 200 years later; second a Chinese artist’s painting of Derwentwater, looking more like a Chinese than an English scene (both illustrated in the chapter mentioned above). In both cases although the artist is working - if we believe them - from life, his image owes at least as much to previous images as to the object or scene he is looking at.
Gombrich does not tell us that resemblance is irrelevant to representation, or even that there are no degrees of fidelity to the appearance of the object represented. But he contends that it is more than a metaphor to speak of ‘the language of art’, and that to see a work as representative involves a process of ‘reading’. We have to know how to read cubist paintings,for instance, to see the mandolin, or the head or the bottle depicted.
The analogy with language is taken much further by Nelson Goodman (Reality Remade in Wilkinson, Theories of Art and Beauty). Goodman denies that resemblance has anything to do with representation; it is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition. Resemblance is not a sufficient condition: that a and b resemble one another isn’t enough to ensure that one represents the other - ‘In many cases neither one of a pair of very like objects represents the other: none of the automobiles off an assembly line represents any of the rest; and a man is not normally a representation of another man, even his twin brother.’ But, you object, we’re talking about pictures. So can’t we say: if a is a picture and resembles b then a represents b? No replies Goodman. ‘A Constable painting of Marlborough Castle is more like any other picture than it is like the Castle, yet it represents the Castle and not another picture - not even the closest copy.’
Nor is resemblance a necessary condition: ‘almost anything can stand for almost anything else’.
‘The plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, refer to it’. Depicting depends upon a system of symbols. Just as ‘The cat is on the mat’ denotes an object of a certain sort and characterises it, so a picture of a smiling woman denotes a woman and characterises her as smiling. The system for depicting is similar to language in having the functions of denoting and predicating - standing for and characterising. The symbols are pictorial symbols, not verbal. For example a colour on the canvas represents the colour of (part of) the object depicted. But the relationship between them is conventional, not natural. Thus the colours of the object may in a particular system be represented by their complementaries.
Such a system may strike us as unnatural. Surely realism demands that similar colours be used in representing the object to those of the object. Goodman points out that, given the conventions of the complementary system, the reversed colour picture gives the same information as the normal one. It strikes us as less realistic only because it is not the system we are used to. Realism is dependent on habit.
That representation is to a high degree conventional is surely right. But the account of realism in terms of habituation is less plausible. Is it inevitable that the system of representation familiar to people in a particular culture strikes them as realistic? Maybe not all cultures think in those terms, that is, do not expect realism. To suppose they do brings us back to the idea that the Egyptians thought that people looked the way they painted them. Besides, aren’t we familiar with quite a variety of representational systems, all of which we can learn to read with more or less ease? But they do not all seem equally realistic to us.
Another theory, this one too inspired by the fertile mind of Gombrich, has been put forward by Kendall Walton (Make-Believe and the Arts in Feagin and Maynard). This theory picks up on two points mentioned earlier - the connection between what representation is and what it is for, and the third form of representation: acting or impersonation.
In an essay called ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse’ Gombrich compares pictures to a child’s hobby horse. Rejecting the view that the hobby horse is an imitation of or a symbol standing for a horse, he suggests instead that it is a horse substitute. By analogy a picture of a tree or a woman is a tree or woman substitute. Pretty unsatisfactory substitutes you might think, but the theory proposed by KW is that just as the hobby horse figures in a game of make believe in which the child rides hither and yon, so pictures function in games of make believe.
Walton picks out two central ideas from Gombrich. First that artists create rather than imitate. Second that function is more important than form -‘Any rideable object could serve as a horse’.
Walton’s contribution is to introduce the idea of fictional worlds. The child’s hobby horse is a horse in the fictional world created by the child in which he is Paul Revere, or Dick Turpin. Similarly when I look at a picture - W’s example is Dali’s etching of Don Quixote - I create a fictional world in which I am looking at Don Quixote. The world is not just the world of Don Quixote created by Dali, but a world that includes Don Quixote and me.
The theory brings together visual and language arts and assimilates both to performance arts. It has great potential for illuminating our experience of representational works, but it is debatable whether it is an alternative to either the resemblance theory or the conventionalist theory proposed by Goodman.
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Last revised 16:03:05 |
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John Benson |
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A module of the BA Philosophy programme Institute of Environment Philosophy and Public Policy | Lancaster University | e-mail philosophy@lancaster.ac.uk |
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