Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze

out') accepts the conclusion that painting is a matter of signs, but works out ways to avoid the kind of formalist trap that 'semiology' or the study of signs, springs on the unwary. The element lacking in Saussure's conception of the systematic nature of signs, I maintain, is description of how signs interact with the world outside their internal system. Painting is an art of the sign, but the particular signs it uses, and above all its representations of the body, mean that it is an art in constant touch with signifying forces outside painting, forces that cannot be accounted for by 'structuralist' explanations. What emerges from the set of arguments against the structuralist or Saussurian conception of the sign is the recognition that painting in the West manipulates the sign in such a way as to conceal its status as sign. It is this self-effacement that is explored in Chapter 5 ('The Gaze and the Glance'), and explored in terms of the actual techniques of European painting: traditions of brushwork, colour, composition, and above all, of the mechanisms determining what kind of viewer the painting proposes and assumes. We cannot, with Gombrich, take for granted that the viewer is a 'given': his role, and the kind of work he is called on to perform, are constructed by the image itself, and the viewer implied by medieval Church art is quite different from the viewer implied by Raphael, and different again from the viewer implied by Vermeer. In the Perceptualist account of art, the viewer is as changeless as the anatomy of vision, and my argument here is that the stress, in Gombrich and elsewhere, on perceptual psychology has in effect dehistoricised the relation of the viewer to the painting: history is the term that has been bracketed out (hence the impossibility, under present conditions, of a truly historical discipline of art history). But to introduce history into description of the viewing subject is to run the risk of producing a determinist art history in which a social base is said to generate a superstructure of art, as its impress or ideological reflection. Indeed, it is in these causal terms that sociological art history is usually carried out. The problem here is essentially this: to which zone do we ascribe the sign? to which side does painting belong-to the base? to the superstructure? I do not believe an answer to the question of the relation of art to power can be answered in this chicken-or-egg way, and in Chapter 6 ('Image, Discourse, Power') I outline a rather more complex model of interaction between political, economic and signifying practices. What we have to understand is that the act of recognition that painting galvanises is a production, rather than a perception, of meaning. Viewing is an activity xiv Preface of transforming the material of the painting into meanings, and that transformation is perpetual: nothing can arrest it. Codes of recognition circulate through painting incessantly, and art history must face that fact. The viewer is an interpreter, and the point is that since interpretation changes as the world changes, art history cannot lay claim to final or absolute knowledge of its object. While this may from one point of view be a limitation, it is also a condition enabling growth: once vision is realigned with interpretation rather than perception, and once art history concedes the provisional character or necessary incompleteness of its enterprise, then the foundations for a new discipline may, perhaps, be laid. Front Matter....Pages i-xvi The Natural Attitude....Pages 1-12 The Essential Copy....Pages 13-35 Perceptualism....Pages 37-66 The Image from Within and Without....Pages 67-86 The Gaze and the Glance....Pages 87-131 Image, Discourse, Power....Pages 133-162 The Invisible Body....Pages 163-171 Back Matter....Pages 173-189