The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Arnold Berleant
Does Art Have a Spectator?
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
45 (4)
Summer 1987, 411-412.
In an analysis of the aesthetic situation,
painting must surely offer the clearest paradigm.
The presence of a specific object that
can usually be located with reasonable clarity, of a viewer who attends to it,
and both in a setting that encourages focussed experience - these three
elements in combination seem to provide a model condition under which
aesthetic perception might take place. While
questions can be raised on all sides about the actions, reactions, and
contributions of each element in the situation, its structure seems to shine
through with a clarity all the more appealing in discussions of a subject that
carries more than its own share of obscurity.
The one disconcerting factor in this comfortable equilibrium comes
from the uncertain nature of the key relation here, that of the viewer with
the object. In “Art and Its
Spectators” (JAAC 45, no. 1 [1986]: 5-17), David Carrier offers
a lucid assessment of the various ways in which that relation has figured
among some recent commentators, most of whom are art historians.
He discovers a continuum of four
stages, a sequence that ranges from Gombrich’s classical Albertian account, in
which the spectator stands before the work in a one-way perspectival relation
to the painting, to Foucault’s account, which denies that the picture is seen.
Between these poles he places two
intermediates: Steinberg, who finds a reciprocal relation between spectator
and painting, and Fried, who eliminates an external, separate spectator
entirely (p. 6). Implicit to Carrier’s
order is the notion, obtained from Svetlana Alpers, of a fundamental
opposition between Albertian and non-Albertian art, that is, between art in
which space is constructed on the basis of linear perspective that begins at
the eye of the spectator, and art that in one fashion or another denies this.
We can be grateful for every effort to detect an
order in this morass of viewpoints, but certainly it should not be at the
expense of the subject. One is tempted
to think that this is what has occurred here, and that Carrier has shaped the
acute observations of these commentators into an appealing but misleading
conceptual order. For not only are the
differences among the four not as severe as Carrier (or Alpers) would have
them; these critics are attempting in piecemeal fashion to articulate their
growing sense that this very aesthetic structure we find so attractive is
slowly being undermined by the burrowings of historians, shaken under the
assaults of psychologists of perception, and abandoned by whole regiments of
artists. Let me show, for the limited
purposes of this discussion, how the four commentators Carrier cites in
creating his ordered sequence do not fully subscribe to that model, and then
indicate what this anti-analysis suggests.
Gombrich, to begin, is no true Albertian.
He does not regard a painting as an
object of the spectator’s unidirectional perspectival gaze, of a
discriminating but disinterested regard. In
fact, one of the major sections of Art and Illusion examines “The
Beholder’s Share” in great detail. There
and in other writings Gombrich explores various ways in which the viewer
contributes to what he or she sees. Gombrich,
in fact, is at pains to point out “the beholder’s share in all reading of
spatial arrangement” (Art and Illusion, p. 246), whereas the art of
perspective errs in wanting “the image to appear like the object and the
object like the image” (ibid., p. 257). Gombrich’s
discussion is replete with references to optical illusions, an immediately
persuasive type of spectator participation intended to illustrate what often
(but not invariably) occurs in painting in less bluntly confrontational forms.
Gombrich not only calls on such
illusions but turns to a variety of other evidences in visual perception to
support the same point, drawing examples from caricatures, portraits, and the
experimental work of psychologists like Ames and Thouless, among other things.
Steinberg’s case suggests something different -
the mistakenness of construing the aesthetic situation as the relation between
a viewer and a discrete object. Carrier
uses Steinberg’s discussion of the Caravaggios in the Cerasi Chapel as an
example. Steinberg argues that the
placement of the paintings reflects the artist’s recognition of the fact that
they would be viewed from an angle and that the subsequent transference of
The Death of the Virgin to the Louvre would require knowledge of its
original location in order to appreciate it properly.
Carrier interprets Steinberg to be
calling attention to the interplay of spectator and painting, where the art
object expands to include its historical background and its architectural
surroundings. Recognizing the
interdependence of painting and spectator, however, not only entails the
acknowledgment of their physical relation, but of their mutuality as well -
their reciprocal interplay. Carrier’s
reliance on the initial assumption of an aesthetic situation structured of
essentially discrete elements tends to obscure the essential point of
Steinberg’s discussion, namely that there is a fusion of viewer and painting
in the Cerasi Chapel, one which literally incorporates them into a single
perceptual ambiance.
Fried’s intention is to show that this
engagement of the viewer is part of the very design of certain paintings.
The absorption of the beholder into
the painting is a deliberate occurrence in certain French
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art of Diderot’s time, in the work of Greuze,
for example, as it was in that of Courbet and other progressive painters of
his day. Carrier has difficulty
accepting this claim and tries to show its triviality and impossibility (pp.
9-10), since he seems committed to the viewer as standing before the painting
as a discrete object - the very presupposition these three art historians are
so painstakingly trying to dispel. And
when he introduces Foucault’s deconstruction of Las Meninas, in which
the painter’s gaze forces the spectator to enter the painting, while the
mirror which shows a reflection of the royal couple throws the location of the
spectator into confusion and suggests his disappearance - Carrier claims that
there is an interpretive ambiguity here. (But
surely this ambiguity is the reason that so many commentators have been
intrigued by this Velasquez.) Part of
Carrier’s difficulty with Foucault, like his uneasiness with Steinberg and
Fried, follows from his apparent commitment to the idea of a separate and
discrete art object, which, ironically, is part of the very Albertian heritage
these critics are attempting to dispel.
Carrier’s casting the issue in terms of “art and
its spectators” reflects that presupposition.
A spectator is not identical with the aesthetic viewer or beholder as
characterized (variously) by Gombrich, Steinberg, Fried, and Foucault.
The spectator occupies a special sort
of position, a place apart that is so central to the eighteenth-century
account of aesthetic experience. The
classic description was that of Joseph Addison, who characterizes “Mr.
Spectator” as a person who lives “in the world rather as a spectator of
mankind than as one of the species without ever meddling with any practical
part in life” (The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers [1711], no. 1).
For all its clarity and initial plausibility,
the traditional model of the aesthetic situation, in which the viewer is
discrete from the object, is both inadequate and misleading.
Indeed, this model no longer holds, if
it ever worked at all. Not only has
the viewer entered the painting; the boundaries of the painting have
themselves extended both to engage the space in front of the painting, as in
the Cerasi Chapel, and to incorporate the viewer into the picture space, as in
the works of Courbet. We might even
consider the disappearance of the spectator in Foucault as a playful rendering
of that same point. What these
commentators are showing us, carefully and in convincing detail, is the
inadequacy of that classical model, a claim demonstrated in a direct manner
ever more insistently by this century’s artists themselves.
These workers in perception have
increasingly expanded the boundaries of the art object to incorporate its
perceiver. They offer us a realm of
experience in which art and object are not “separate but equal,” but rather
one in which both are fully integrated into a single perceptual field.
It is a hard lesson for an eye guided
by custom, but then, good painting never did pander to convention.
C. W. Post Center
Long Island University
Arnold Berleant
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