I love this drawing by Milton Glaser. It's an illustration for a record by classical guitarist Linda Cohen.
Glaser was internationally renowned as a graphic designer, an intellectual and an all-around fount of creativity. I interviewed him in his office before he died, and discovered he was still overflowing with ideas. He's also responsible for a quote I've used several times on this blog:
There is no instrument more direct than a pencil and paper for the expression of ideas. Everything else that interferes with that direct relationship with the eyes, the mind, the arm and the hand causes a loss of fidelity.... I like the idea that this ultimate reductive simplicity is the way to elicit the most extraordinary functions of the brain.
Glaser was not, however, first and foremost a draftsman. An observer might comment that the wings are awkward and the body is not in a natural posture. And where the heck is that light source?
Glaser borrowed the figure from one of the slaves in Giulio Aristide Sartorio's allegorical painting, Diana of Ephesus and the slaves:
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It's not clear why Glaser chose that particular figure, since the anatomy or the skin tones or the perspective seemed of little interest to him. His only cryptic remark at the time: "angels probably don't have behinds."
But he transformed the figure in a magical and lyrical landscape.
What's the meaning of the falling star and the beam of light shining down on the rock cliff?
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| Why does that ear glow red? The whole palette is quite eerie, combining dark subtleties and vivid contrasts. |
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| While most of the drawing has been greatly simplified, the lateral spines on the feathers in the wings have been individually drawn. |
What does it all mean? This drawing opens a lot of questions for us but answers none. I can't imagine how it is related to its subject record album, or how it could help sell the client's product. What kind of instruction could the art director possibly have given to produce this result?
I suppose the answer is the same as it has always been: when you're that good, and that strong headed, and your designs are that powerful, you can pretty much do what you want.
64 comments:
This is very unusual for the art you usually show here.
Sartorio was a very strong talent, and one of the great draftsmen of the circa-1900 Apollonian-Arcadian type, this particular allegorical piece notwithstanding. He had infinite sensitivity in drawing and edge work, excellent rendering skills and a lot of compositional and technical knowledge. But none of his works seem to break through his influences, which clamped and dampened his poetic potential.
It is interesting that Glaser converted Sartorio’s classical figure into a symbolic figure of the William Blake manner. An imputed intellectualizing process, as per his standard operations. As a constructed graphic thing among a picture built of the same, this allows Glaser to play his interesting games with balances without bothering about naturalism. Its certainly better than the William Rimmer angel that was bowdlerized a thousand times on behalf of Led Zeppelin.
Glaser’s line about seraphim sitzfleisch is a funny one. I don’t think the line is cryptic. Its an earthy point about the unearthly.
Kev Ferrara-- I don't know why Glaser picked that Sartorio painting, or that particular figure in the painting. He doesn't seem to have derived anything special from it that he couldn't have borrowed from a thousand other paintings or photographs. I do know that he loved Italy where he spent many years (among other things, studying with the painter Giorgio Morandi, who he idolized). Glaser lived in Rome where the Sartorio painting hangs, so the figure may have had some significance from his younger days.
There have been endless polemics amongst clergy and art guilds about how angels look and how they should be depicted and how many could dance on the head of a pin. But I don't recall a single word about how an angel's bare bottom should look. A worthy question.
"angels probably don't have behinds."
Glaser's humorous point, as I take his implication, is that the various uses one may list for the rear end all relate to grubby and grubbing life on earth. So why would one be needed in "the heavenly realm?" (My apologies to the comedy gods for explaining a joke.)
My few experiences with Glaser (attending lectures and brief exchanges in person, watching recordings of interviews) reveal a mischievous wit which he didn't telegraph.
graphics plus mythology (not unusual)
Kev Ferrara--The logical extension of what you are saying is that angels could never sit down, which would come as a blow to Abbott Thayer. What are angels supposed to do during long liturgical rituals?
Furthermore, while this blog may be the wrong place for debating the implications of theological dogma, your theory suggests that angels are limited to only certain types of sexual practices. Surely there must be another explanation.
Religion is not my expertise. However, I don't think there are any cloud recliners mentioned the Bible upon which to park theoretical seraphim fannies. Nor are there any mention of angelic trysts of any kind, or lower anatomy. Rather we have this passage: "Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire."
That's hardly a New Yorker cartoon.
An illustrator wouldn’t really need more than the album title, «Angel Alley», to synthesize forth the idea of a fallen slave.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
>>>>>>>>>>>this allows Glaser to play his interesting games with balances
What are balance games?
~ FV
Postmodern Anonymouse-- I'm not sure how the classical guitar melody title "Angel Alley" gets you to either "fallen" or "slave." After all, nobody knew about the connection to Sartorio's 19th century painting of "slaves." As far as I can tell, those choices-- just like the dark palette on an alien landscape or the shooting star-- were Glaser's mind floating free. The result is beautiful, but I'm not sure I'd trust him to illustrate an ad for laundry detergent.
There’s an oxymoronic quality to the phrase «angel alley», no! Alleys are dark and liminal places, not frequently associated with angels, beings of the light. But there’s that one angel, right, the outcast one - the fallen star, the one who refused to serve in heaven. And wasn’t there a 19th century painting featuring sleeping? fallen? slaves…? OK, add some wings, one partially beneath the body, make it dark but weirdly lit, and voilá!
The leap from thephrase to an image of an angel flat on its face in a dark and desolate landscape isn’t that big. What most people think of as «inspiration», «creativity» etc could be more accurately described as the ability to synthesize - smashing ideas together to bring forth something «new».
And I’m obviously not claiming to know how this particular illustration came to be. Merely suggesting how it very well might have happened.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"What are balance games?"
Look at the white arc of the comet in the sky. Now look and compare that white arc to the black arcs between the legs and buttocks.
Now look at the shapes of the flight feathers on ends of the wings pointing rightward. And compare them to the shapes of the mountains pointing upward.
Look at the hair shape (Totally altered from the original painting) and compare it to the shape of the pink body of the angel.
>>>>>>>"Look at..."
Ok, I get you. But why is it a game? What's the point of the game?
~ FV
You're sure that's an ear? I took it to be a beak. An inhuman figure, after all. Interesting, but by and large give me an artist who thinks like an engineer. The light source would be consistently above and to the viewer's left, and not just mostly, and I wouldn't keep thinking the central figure was in a downward spiral. I've seen too many things better designed to look pretty than to work.
But why is it a game? What's the point of the game?
It's a game because he's, turn by turn, "playing" his art-making according to design rules. The point of the game is to end up with a piece of design. Because it's design, the narrative arbitrariness of what he is doing doesn't matter.
I have friends who are modernists, and what they like is the process of creating arbitrary rules that algorithmically develop their picture. (This is why I say that Modernism is a design movement.)
It's on the side of the head where the ear goes. It's not on the front of a bird head where a beak might go.
I like how he included the head of Totoro in the mountains on the left side of the illustration.
"Alleys are dark and liminal places
An alley is just a narrow way. It doesn't necessarily entail city dinginess or trouble.
My first vision at the "Angel Alley" phrase led me to think of Edwin Austin Abbey's Holy Grail image: https://www.alamy.com/abbey-edwin-austin-the-quest-of-the-holy-grail-image222171937.html ...but as a symmetrical gauntlet that one might traverse; a shining celestial corridor bounded by luminous seraphim.
Oh, that’s a beautiful piece.
I think the concept of an alley almost per se carries with it some sense of the liminal. The passageway or path exists between spaces. And only as such is it also dark - the knight must face great danger in The Chapel Perilous.
But yeah, there’s also Tornado Valley. And green and beautiful valleys. And urban valleys that are calm escapes.
My rambling and spelling error-filled post was merely intended to examplify how an illustrator could an find a path from phrase to idea synthesis to image. As I’m certain you are aware, seeingly inspired creative choices usually have mundane origins.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
(Damn autocorrect! All above «valleys» should read «alleys».)
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Postmodern Anonymouse
You should stay away from the word "liminal" for a while. You keep asking it to do too much heavy lifting in your posts. Do not rely on individual words to make your points.
Just to be clear, I was not suggesting the "Angel Alley" album should have been illustrated literally and naturalistically, with an alley full of glowing angels. I think the mythographic vagueness of Glaser's illustration is at the proper level of abstraction to pair with the abstract nature of the classical music within.
I can't imagine how it is related to its subject record album, or how it could help sell the client's product. What kind of instruction could the art director possibly have given to produce this result?
This is what I was engaging with.
My point remains simply that the illustrator needn’t have had any art direction or even familiarity with the music to have produced this image. The title alone might have gotten him there. The meaning produced by the audience and art critic need not be related to the meaning invested by the artist.
And it’s not for me to unburden you of any annoyance you might suffer by the use of terms that have particular meaning.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I wasn't 'annoyed' at your use of "liminal." Merely pointing out that your over dependence on the word to serially repeat the same vague assertion is subtracting from its utility. I presume you must be trying to say more than you actually are, which is why I suggested writing around the word. Which is good writing advice in general, not original to me.
My point remains simply that the illustrator needn’t have had any art direction or even familiarity with the music to have produced this image. The title alone might have gotten him there.
I don't even think it illustrates the title. Which might be the point. One wouldn't want to locate, and thus limit, the content of the music with literal visuals; an error in artistic judgment. One immediately bounces off, as well, any attempted literal attachment of the art to the title, the presence of an angel notwithstanding. All this disconnection, to my mind, prevents enburdening the music by word or picture content; the absence of coherent meaning relations shields it from interpretation. Which allows it to shine by its own lights.
Also see my earlier comment about pairing at the level of mythographic abstraction. Which, side note, relates to Chagall's mythography-based aesthetics.
The meaning produced by the audience and art critic need not be related to the meaning invested by the artist.
The visual doesn't change depending on the viewer and the content is fairly clear, even in its vagueness. What meaning is gather-able is already set. Whatever the further narrative interpretation is quite parameterized; no matter what the story one might unspool from the image, one still must get to the exact moment depicted in it. The further the added narrative strays from what is in the image, the less it has to do with the image.
I would be insincere were I to deny the truth of your opening observation — for brevity’s sake, I do tend to piggyback on terms that are, uhm, laden with meaning. At best it might come across as hypertextual, at worst - vague and pretentious. At any rate it is bad writing, and the advice is taken in good faith.
Strangely, I find myself agreeing with most of the rest of your reply. Except for the last paragraph, of course, as I still maintain meaning cannot reside, it must be produced.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"I still maintain meaning cannot reside, it must be produced."
When you appreciate a Rockwell, Sargent, or Fechin, how much credit should you get?
My base qualm with your claim is that it is an entirely piddling matter to "close" a meaning that has been sufficiently expressed. In fact, as Stanley Meltzoff pointed out, the suggestions of art are so powerful (as they instantly penetrate our defenses unfiltered and unrecognized) that they're actually commands. To unthinkingly obey a command is hardly part of the production of that command.
The immediate, sensory impact and its cognitive treatment are not the same thing. If immediate impact is to be a measurement of artistic success, a massive, red Rothko must surely always be a supreme masterpiece. If, on the other hand, cognitive work is to be a factor, the success of the Rothko will rather be a matter of temporary taste.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"The immediate, sensory impact and its cognitive treatment are not the same thing."
The initial period of Aesthetic Arrest is where "impact" comes from.
The whole point of aesthetic-poetic composition, rhetoric more generally, and pictorial abstraction most generally - is to create communications in which the sensory impact and the meaning are the same thing. Art is fundamentally built and woven of suggestions, which command their closure. Each of which expresses narrative meanings, in the larger sense of that phrase. (Including, but also beyond and beneath the character-level of action, intention, reaction, plot and drama.)
Sensual meaning is the primary meaning of both experience and art. But in art it is purified and controlled to produce specific intuitable narratives synthesized with specific aesthetic and poetic effects; which are digested in their largest import beginning instantly with the onset of the "Aesthetic Arrest" period. (This is prior to the "detection of fact and technique" period or "imagining what happened before or after the depicted moment" or "interpretation" of the work.)
As Ladislav Sutnar put it, "Poety communicates before it is understood."
The "impact" of Rothko is graphic, not narrative nor poetic. (Though some they get a "floaty" visual effect, which is aesthetic in nature.) The impact of a great image is narrative and poetic. The incredible speed of human visual processing means that both graphics and (the far more complex) visual poetry are processed instantly.
If you have the sensitivity, the difference between them is immediately felt. But if one's only ability and reference for "cognition" were intellectual - not only would Rothkographics™ and a Narrative Image seem equivalent in meaning-complexity - but instantaneous visual processing would seem a wild and fantastical notion.
Anyway, your assertions are tantamount to; denying that the intuition ascertains, develops, conducts and orchestrates meaning. (Anybody with a functioning imagination knows this to be true. Further, anybody who walks around the world interacting with it and not getting wounded constantly would also.) And, as well, denying that all narratives -- thus all thoughts -- are fundamentally abstract in composition at every scale of analysis.
I’m not denying the existence of pattern recognition. Over time, and with experience, first responders are able to make intuitive and also qualified (sensitive) split-second decisions without thorough analytic deliberation in advance. They read the scene seemingly by perception alone.
Similarly, I don’t doubt you have considerable Recognition-Primed Aesthetic Decision making abilities. But the meanings you «uncover» are rather the result of your aggregated experience and exposure than of any inherent aesthetic qualities in the art you consider. As such, you should get considerable credit when you appreciate a Rockwell, Sargent, or Fechin.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
'the meanings you «uncover» are rather the result of your aggregated experience'
No, that's just honing. Like paying attention to music, or the play of light. Children have instantaneous quality/meaning experiences - in book of pictures, a gallery or a field. Blurry, dizzying, overwhelming sometimes, sure. But also subtle, broad, infinitely varied, often indefinable to them (ie, with little and even no relatables from other sources to spin out 'meaning' at the secondary, post-experiential level).
So do adults, if they are aware of or can silence the things that 'spring off' the experience, and the coagulating associations that thread and network into it.
Mapping isn't the creation of meaning, it's the ordering of it, to make manageable or prevent inundation.
Bill
"But the meanings you «uncover» are rather the result of your aggregated experience and exposure than of any inherent aesthetic qualities in the art you consider."
I'm not sure you're understanding what I'm locating and describing in the connection between art and the art experience.
Suggestions convey meanings subliminally and force "closure" of those meanings unbidden, undetected. These commanding suggestions are not 'found' or 'uncovered' with any kind of willful, conscious effort over time; because they are not written in the language of consciousness. Hidden and distributed unnaturally in the meaning field, building on one another, "written" in uncoded personal signs - micro sensations and ghosted commentaries of a thousand varieties - by the most talented and hypersensitive artist-magicians; almost nobody can read subliminal information directly. Art's commanding suggestions - phenomena that force the reception of meaning - simply happen to the viewer.
Further, whereas sentences spool out linearly, suggestion structures weave every which way over one another, and at four size-scales generally. We are not built to "read" such material in the standard understanding of that term. We can only intuit it. And we can only do so because the visual cortex is just so much more able as a processor than any other part of our apprehension. Thus we absorb unconsciously at "impact" an entire suite of interwoven and nested suggestion structures, each of which gives us meaning by itself and in the context of its brethren.
Curious affected laymen are unprepared to analyze any of this; boxed out by the inherent cunning (and uncoded strangeness) of the language. They'll have no idea how to look, where to look, or when to look to tease out what just happened to them. And so they tell themselves stories they've made up, from the ego out.
'Uncovered' meanings come later, after the aesthetic arrest/suggestion download period, when we have regained conscious control. Such found late meanings, if they weren't suggested aesthetically or poetically, are, anyway, interpretations. Interpretations are the currency of the talkative mind. Art is a different language.
I'm not sure you're understanding what I'm locating and describing in the connection between art and the art experience.
This seems likely.
I definitionally resist the notion of pre-lingual language, and maintain that meaning is a product of thinking minds. If a tree falls in the forrest, and there’s no around to consider the event, it is meaningless. When light bounces from a Velasquez and onto a facing wall, no meaning is conveyed.
Also, if there is some meaning that exists beyond language, I …believe, I suppose, that it cannot be meaningfully spoken of.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I definitionally resist the notion of pre-lingual language
Whose definition?
Just because the root of the word "language" is lingua meaning tongue? Thus if utterances aren't involved, it can't be language? What about the words you read and you only think you hear in your head? Those aren't tongue-to-ear based utterances. What about sign language? Is it the codification alone that makes it a language?
Here is the broader understanding of what constitutes a language: Some plastic form or medium from which a lexicon with an understandable and logical grammar can be produced. Which grants the ability to specify, generalize, state, imply, or suggest component ideas in order to convey, overtly or subliminally a personal narration or expression of more complex ideas that should be apprehended by the receiver. And which can be broadcast, distributed, or exchanged as meaning-currency. (Or something like that.)
Truly, I don't know how anybody can be as interested in art as you and not believe in a visual language. I find your resistance as bizarre as I find it curious. The visual language is so much more interesting than English.
Also, if there is some meaning that exists beyond language I …believe, I suppose, that it cannot be meaningfully spoken of.
Leaving aside the tautological problem of bootstrapping meaning entirely from solipsism... Everything I write or teach, everything that any halfway decent art teacher says or teaches, begs to differ. Do you think everybody drilling down on this question is and has always been speaking nonsense?
I thought you studied art? Did you study relations in those classes? (I can't fault you for having had fraudulent art teachers. I certainly had them. Most artists have suffered a similar fate.)
Postmodern Anonymouse: "Also, if there is some meaning that exists beyond language, I …believe, I suppose, that it cannot be meaningfully spoken of."
I assume you think that 'meaning' is that which can only be spoken of - and agreed upon collectively - between two (or more) people in the form of a verbal or written language ?
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Kev: "Truly, I don't know how anybody can be as interested in art as you and not believe in a visual language"
We've argued before about whether the type of visual art we discuss here constitutes a 'language' or not and I've always said it doesn't, and I haven't changed my position.
Laurence's "whether [...] visual constitutes a 'language' or not"
It comes down to, i think, looking at it as whether language is a symbolic system sharply and totally detached from that to which it refers. Or whether you can see it as a part itself of those things.
There's the onomatopoeic. There's whether a cry from a human is part of the thing that produced it. Both have produced words that, in origin or still now, had/have a form relative to what they express(ed). I think there are words that are believed to have presumed or known 'aesthetic' relation to their referents (in subtler ways than words born of vocalised bursts of emotions; 'yahwe' is supposed to be the intake and exhalation of breath, thus 'inspiriting', for instance). Or have had recreated these in poetry, the furnaces of language. The question is whether or not we lean to this real but scattered way in which we can see language as a continuous part - the overused 'fractal' - of the world, or the way in which it has become a algebra.
In pictures, the relation is clearer. In a discussion a few weeks ago, Kev described it as 'illusion', and I don't disagree but was trying to emphasise that the illusions of art (which neither of us were alleging as any kind of 'algebra'-language) were intimately related to the things they 'picture' because they work in the same continuous system of colour, pattern...etc as the things in the world, and our bodies (and our inner realities, if we own up to it) are conformed in the same way and continuous with the things they experience, and recreate. The 'art'/illusion side of it can, of course, be emphasised instead, but as a 'language' hasn't diverged into x = this/that in the way of language proper.
But even though our vocal language does this, to the point of habit that it has mostly lost ways which show its parts to be echoes or continuums of the things to which they refer (that 'art' has maintained), it still circles back to these.They recur in the mind, so language can still be seen as a part of the world it represents in the same original and fundamental way, the word-conduits still sprout the same 'fruiting bodies' as it were.
What I'm trying to get at here is that it's better to see 'language' as a special case of 'art' than viewing art as lamguage due to the way language has developed; but it's just as true to call art a language.
Bill
(lamguage ? 🧐)
Bill
"We've argued before about whether the type of visual art we discuss here constitutes a 'language' or not and I've always said it doesn't, and I haven't changed my position."
Anybody can have a position. I'm interested in your argument.
My argument is that a language uses plastic form, out of which comes a lexicon with an understandable and logical grammar. Which grants the ability to specify, generalize, state, imply, or suggest component ideas in order to convey, overtly or subliminally a personal narration or expression of more complex ideas over a whole range of subjects or topics. The communication is meant to, and should be apprehended by the receiver. And can be broadcast, distributed, or exchanged as meaning-currency.
Art has this.
What's your counter argument?
That there is no common vocabulary or grammar when it comes to a visual art such as painting, because there are so many variables at play per artist and per work, that each work is essentially a one off.
Kev: "... a language uses plastic form, out of which comes a lexicon with an understandable and logical grammar."
What's the common 'lexicon' (vocabulary) or 'grammar' in use between three different artists such as Caravaggio, Van Gogh and Grant Wood ?
it's better to see 'language' as a special case of 'art' than viewing art as lamguage
It is extraordinarily difficult to reference objects using sounds. Thus sound-labels were quickly developed - names/codes -for static and known entities. But these are merely akin to visual conventions developed by cartoonists and graphic artists.
It is quite easy, aside from those objects that cannot be resembled in sound, to replace words with sounds. "A car sped down the street" is easily replaced with "A (vroom vroom engine noise) (zooming noise with doppler shift) down the street."
The resemblance of the sign to the reference was called Iconicity in C.S. Peirce's semiotics. Codes or conventions are sign types called symbols.
"What's the common 'lexicon' (vocabulary) or 'grammar' in use between three different artists such as Caravaggio, Van Gogh and Grant Wood ?"
Lexicon: All known objects or people, animals, etc. All colors, values, and saturations, all rhythms, all textures, all gestures and shapes, all edge qualities, aesthetic effects, poetic effects, etc.
Grammar: Visual relations that create meaningful effect structures or pictorial units.
Kev, you've listed a lot of things that each artist I mentioned would handle in their own personal way (which is why their work looks quite different and easy to tell apart). I asked what the COMMON 'lexicon' or 'grammar' was in use between them.
If you're arguing that art is a 'language' then surely that language would have a common lexicon and grammar that everyone uses and we could point at, if not name.
"Kev, you've listed a lot of things that each artist I mentioned would handle in their own personal way (which is why their work looks quite different and easy to tell apart). I asked what the COMMON 'lexicon' or 'grammar' was in use between them."
You are confusing style and language. Every speaker and writer uses the language in their own personal way. People from Appalachia and people from Dublin both speak English, yet probably wouldn't understand each other.
"It is extraordinarily difficult to reference objects using sounds. Thus sound-labels were quickly developed - names/codes -for static and known entities"
Yes, but it's impossible to believe that sound-fitness was not the primary mover in the multiple 'beginnings' of language-making, though it quickly became codes and labels through the whittling of use, & syncretising, etc.
Especially since that type of (re-)creation is a feature of poeticisng - 'keen' instead of sharp...'ruin', 'harrowing', 'tumble',....'lullay-lu-lay' begets 'lullaby', (and lullaby fits even if the sung carol has never been heard) and so on.
All later numbed by familarity, and lost inevitably as habit became code.
But at the multiple 'origin' points where roots of sound were wedded to experiences, it can't have been just unrelated sound-substitutes. Temperament, and even environment must have been factors, too.
Bill
I think we're in general agreement, Bill.
Kev: "You are confusing style and language. Every speaker and writer uses the language in their own personal way."
Notice that you used written / spoken language in this example which DOES come in pre-made meaning-units (words) which everyone utilises but can stylise in their own way. You didn't answer the second part of my previous comment; I'm still waiting for you to tell me what the equivalent is in visual art.
Laurence, is the 'common lexicon' not the shapes, shadow, light, chroma, pattern.... of the world, modified for the enclosed 2d surface ?
Bill
Bill: " is the 'common lexicon' not the shapes, shadow, light, chroma, pattern.... of the world, modified for the enclosed 2d surface ?"
If you can show me that all art uses the same 'common lexicon' to translate those things to the 2D surface then yes, but the problem it is doesn't. As I said above, the variables per artist and per work are infinite. 'Realistic' art is basically illusionistic (mimicking what we see in the real world) and you're allowed to use any means necessary to make the illusion 'work'. i don't see how that constitutes a common 'language'.
Becuse the 'illusions' work on similarity. Despite all the variables.
Bill
Eg, just one, the distance in 'pitch' between light and shade are typically related to that distance between light and shade in what they're picturing.
Bill
Or aother - look at an unbalanced wall or shack, people viscerally feel it. Draw an unbalanced composition, the same - perhaps because of our innate physical feel for balance. Counterweigh the imbalance, it's harmonised. Push it to but not beyond the limit of tolerability/presaging-collapse, you get tension.
Bill
Bill, are you saying the mimetic / illusionistic game of 'this looks like this' that artists engage in when they're translating reality into 2D marks on a surface IS the 'language' ?
That's fine if that's your take on it. Again, it's not what I would call a 'language' but we obviously have different expectations for the term.
Yes, but not just purely mimetic, which is why I added the balance-composition example - it includes making in the same 'manner' as does nature
You mostly won't see clear-cut arrangements in nature as in a composition (other than artificial compositions), but the same balances and harmonies are there, nested and flowing in and out of each other. We don't see Carravaggios artificial chiaroscuros - they are only similar to even the most extreme real-world instances of light-shade dramas. But they are *really* similar. Or Van Gogh's colours....but those red-green (berry from leaf) and violet-yellow (purple iris) pairings do occur.
I'd take 'the world' to be prime or proto-language, to be honest. The more abstract and code-like language becomes, the more it moves away to seem free-standing, but language is still wholly based and dependent on being mimetic to reality. Attributes belong to something. Verbs are narratives of the change of nouns in time. Good prose has balance; poetry balance and music.
Reality is language in the first kind, and visual recreation of it a close runner-up.
I think any other expectations or definitions of language exclusive of these would be defining language on the basis of an a-priori deficiency in appropriate, close fit to what it 'refers' to. Which would be fine in terms of distinguishing the two, ie, in terms of their 'unalikeness' +/alongside a similarity.
But that leaves the question as to why language feels better when they approach nearest, such as in poetics.
And, in any case, are those insurmountable differences between two-dimensional pictures and that which they represent not sufficient to maintain the distinction necessary to qualify as 'language' in that sense ?
Bill
[ < '(other than in artificial compositions *of* nature)', Bill ]
(What if those giant squid-aliens squirted pictures in their ink ?)
Bill
"Notice that you used written / spoken language in this example which DOES come in pre-made meaning-units (words) which everyone utilises but can stylise in their own way."
I'm explaining to you the abstract structural similarities across languages, so I do need to keep referring back to the one language you base your personal theory of languages on.
Since new words come into being every day, small groups (families, for instance) develop private lexicons, word meanings change, and old words stop being used, I think it hardly matters that a verbal/text language is "codified" in pre-made units. There are English speakers of different sects or dialects or fields of interest who barely share much in the way of vocabulary; a Dublin pub drunk and a dainty hyper intellectual theoretical physicist, say.
Malleable too are the grammars. Wildly so. At times.
Regarding pre-mades. Again a great deal of art consists of codified pre-made units, which we call conventions. Archetypes are a kind of symbolic convention. And the very act of creating images results in a complex gestalt symbol which is defined by the way it is expressed. Like a dictionary entry that uses sentences and other words to define the given symbol-label under question. Frazetta's Death Dealer image has become a visual symbol used as a convention.
are you saying the mimetic / illusionistic game of 'this looks like this' that artists engage in when they're translating reality into 2D marks on a surface IS the 'language' ?"
Illusory identities are part of the language. So are the effective relations that build those identities (like the methods of expressing sculptural form), and the effective relations that use those identities to build out compositions (like the methods of expression volumetric depth and depth relationships between illusory identities).
You can see the same sculptural and volumetric effects in Caravaggio, Van Gogh, and Grant Wood if you know where to look. However, there are idiosyncrasies to each artist's handling of the effects. Which amounts to poetic style.
" it includes making in the same 'manner' as does nature"
Art is purified and more elastic version of nature. It is also scalable. If one doesn't understand that, for instance, illusionistic structural form can be scaled like music, while nature rarely offers such phenomena - you aren't appreciating what's different between art and life sufficiently. To scale is to poeticize, to say as much or more with less.
Furthermore, nature offers no commentary on itself. Art does.
Laurence...
Maybe the simplest question to challenge your belief is the following...
How can there by visual metaphors without there being a visual language?
* I'm presuming you don't dispute the existence of visual metaphors.
I spent some time once in a patch of primal forest in eastern europe, thinly populated area, little village in the woods, very little english spoken by anyone which intensified the break from environment- and thought-conventions/habits. Everywhere in that forest was a superabundance of insects and plants, mosses, lichens, coloured beetles, all similar to things I knew but very different. One day I was actually made dizzy by the strange weeds, weird snails and so on outside a train station, I might as well have been dropped on another planet. Out of the cacophonic mass of strange nature, gradually you became attuned to the little harmonies in that small section of the forest floor you'd attended to to keep out and not be overwhelmed by the whole. 'Harmony' isn't a metaphor, but a synaesthetic relation to what was going on. By degrees you could move out of this, take in the larger agencies of the trees, the multiple identical oak pillars first like a drum rolling off into the distance, then the puctuations of light and other trees that broke the monotony became dominant.
I saw a documemtray once about a scientific trip to Greenland where the participants (not all scientists) seemed to experience something similar, one or two spoke of actually feeling their 'self' could be annihilated by the experiences they had.
For 'purified' I'd put 'distilled', but yes. But not because the things in 'art' aren't to be found in nature, but because there is too much of them. Not always, though, because of that kind of intensity, but sometimes to draw in what is so thinly spread out, subtle or diffuse that it's not readily apparent, such as larger 'composition'.
If that is related by what you mean by scalable, then yes - we need to 'scale' or distil what we see in a world of infinite attributes, but the 'scaling' gets its model from a harmonising that already exists in nature, in the larger vista or the little tiers of a few square feet of plant life.
Bill
Kev: "How can there by visual metaphors without there being a visual language?”
It's weird but I've never, ever looked at images and thought that I was seeing 'visual language' in front of me. I just can't make it happen. Must just be me. And now I'm interested to know if anyone else feels this way too ?
As long as I know what you mean though by 'visual language' (all of the above) I won't bring up any objection to it again.
I've never, ever looked at images and thought that I was seeing 'visual language' in front of me. I just can't make it happen. Must just be me.
It is definitely not just you.
Because, to make good art, akin to stage magic, requires the obscuring of the tricks. As Mucha said, "Hide your artistry!" As Joseph Pennell wrote, "Art is the hiding of art by art."
The very point of poetry is that it expresses things to you that you don't recognize intellectually; that you don't detect consciously as you get the point intuitionally.
Therefore hiding the causes of effects is paramount in artistry. All the best users of the language are hell bent on fooling the viewer at every turn. In order to deliver their meanings effectively; as mystery and magic.
If that is related by what you mean by scalable, then yes
Grayscale grades from black through dark, then medium, then light grays, to white. Such a gradation is a continuous smear through the entire range.
To scale means to break up the gradation into individual notes. So as not to smear the changes in value. A 12 tone scale breaks up the gradation into 12 distinct notes. As per the piano keyboard. 7 notes is a standard major scale in music (do re mi fa so la ti and the final do makes the octave). Break the gradation into five distinct notes, and we have a pentatonic scale. Which is indistinguishable from a 5 note/pentatonic chord. A chord being a scale with a lot more of the range absent. A triad chord elides more of the range still, but is rarely understood as being a scale anymore. Because so much of the range is now absent it is difficult to sense the overall scaling of that range.
Anyway, the less notes one can use to create any visual effect, the more poetic it is. Until the reduction of the effect becomes so graphic that it feels denuded of naturalism. (The less that does less is simply lossy rather than poetic. )
Oh, those ones. I was thinking scaling (down) as a condensation of a whole scene into a picture - not just tones. Fitting a portion of the world into an image that's a kind of 'microcosm' of all the desired elements, rather than either a 'snapshot' framed by a rectangle, or something big and unwieldy.
Bill
(...or hyperdetailed)
Bill
Fitting a portion of the world into an image that's a kind of 'microcosm' of all the desired elements, rather than either a 'snapshot' framed by a rectangle, or something big and unwieldy.
It's the same principle of saying as much as possible with the least material. Harvey Dunn, coming out of Pyle's teaching, taught to include objects that are fairly radiant with everything that needs to be said of the setting and mood. And the more those singular objects evoke the outer world, the fewer such objects need be in the picture.
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