arnheim.art among objects.1987

Art among the ObjectsAuthor(s): Rudolf ArnheimSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer, 1987), pp. 677-685Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343523 .

Accessed: 30/01/2015 17:30

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to CriticalInquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.122.149.154 on Fri, 30 Jan 2015 17:30:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343523?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Art among the Objects

Rudolf Arnheim

Et l'on trouverait mille intermediaires entre la realite et les symboles si l'on donnait aux choses tous les mouvements qu'elles suggerent.

-GASTON BACHELARD, La Poetique de l'espace

With the emergence of man from nature art emerged among the objects. There was nothing to distinguish or exalt it in the beginning. Art did not separate one kind of thing from the others but was rather a quality common to them all. To the extent to which things were made by human

beings, art did not necessarily call for the skill of specialists. All things took skill, and almost everybody had it.

This is the way an essayist of the eighteenth century might have

begun a treatise on our subject. By now his recourse to a mythical past would sound naive and misleading, mainly because we have come to

pride ourselves on defining things by what distinguishes them from the rest of the world. Thus art is laboriously separated from what is supposed not to be art-a hopeless endeavor, which has more and more disfigured our image of art by extirpating it from its context. We have been left with the absurd notion of art as a collection of useless artifacts generating an unexplainable kind of pleasure.

Rescue from this impasse of our thinking is not likely to come primarily from those of us who, established on the island of artistic theory and

practice, look around at what else there is in the world to see; rather it will come from those who are curious about what human beings meet, make, and use, and who in the course of their explorations run into

Critical Inquiry 13 (Summer 1987)

O 1987 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/87/1304-0001$01.00. All rights reserved.

677



678 Rudolf Arnheim Art among the Objects

objects prominently displaying the property we call art. Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have been driven to view art in the context of nature, ritual, shelter, and the whole furniture of civilization. As a characteristic recent example I mention a thorough interview study, The Meaning of Things, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg- Halton, in which three generations of families from the Chicago area were questioned about their favorite possessions.' Pictures, sculptures, and all sorts of craft work turned up at a more or less modest place in the inventory of the home, and the reasons given for their value make wholesome reading for specialists in aesthetics.

As the subtitle of the Chicago study-Symbols in the Development of the Self-indicates, its authors were mainly concerned with the psychological questions of what those cherished objects do for their possessors, what needs they satisfy, and what traits they acquire by the uses to which they are put. This leaves room for further studies focusing on the nature of the objects themselves. Seen in the context of the rest of the world, what are the characteristics of the objects we single out when we talk about art? A few observations on this equally psychological aspect of the subject are offered in what follows.

Art objects like all other physical things are known to us exclusively as perceptual experiences, that is, as things we see or hear, touch or smell. In this respect there is no difference between a tree, a chair, and a painting. There is no difference either as to the two ways we deal with those experiences. We can handle objects, as when we fell a tree or carve a block of marble or crate a painting; or we can contemplate them, as when we admire a waterfall or listen to a concert.

There also is no primary difference between the ways in which we come to know objects as independent entities in the first place. Although we can influence percepts by handling them or by changing our position in relation to them, we learn soon that they have an obstinacy of their own. They cling to their place or move at their own initiative. It is the recalcitrance of the perceptual object's behavior that makes us experience the world as existing independently of our own selves. The psychoanalysts have taught us that this realization causes a traumatic shock which is

1. See Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Symbols in the Development of the Self (Cambridge, 1981).

Rudolf Arnheim retired from Harvard University as professor emeritus of the psychology of art. He then taught as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 1983. His most recently published book is New Essays on the Psychology of Art. At present he is preparing the new edition of The Power of the Center, a theory of visual composition first published in 1982.



Critical Inquiry Summer 1987 679

overcome only by a considerable cognitive effort. At the very beginning of life the infant has to cope with the illusion of what D. W. Winnicott has called the primordial omnipotence of the self.2 Gradually the infant learns how to come to terms with the other wills, embodied in living and nonliving things-a task made easier by the assistance of "transitional objects." The thumb, the teddy bear, and the security blanket are called transitional by Winnicott because they are more readily at the beck and call of the child than other things but also begin to acquaint him with the limits of his power. They will do some things for him but are unable or unwilling to do others.

The problem survives through everybody's lifetime, and there develops a scale of compliance, reaching from the most amenable objects to those hardest to conquer. On this scale, somewhere between a kid glove and a Tibetan mountain, is the place of works of art. It stands to reason that manmade things are among the most obedient, but it is also true that our acquaintance with the nature of physical materials teaches us to be

patient with the limits of the service to be expected from tools and furniture. Wood will not bend, and water will not stay put.

Here art offers a special difficulty to our thinking because it involves not only the making of physical objects or the bringing about of physical performance, but it is also, and perhaps first of all, a projection of our own mental images upon the world of things. To be sure, such goal images guide the conception of many objects, but the mental anticipation of, say, a boat to be built tends to include the image of the wooden object with its physical virtues and limitations. The goal image of a painting or musical composition, on the other hand, is much more likely to include the properties of the medium only "in the pure," that is, as idealized character traits, fused with the thematic and compositional image of the work, rather than as agents of explicit material constraints. Now, mental

images are the realm of experience over which the mind rules most

completely; therefore, nowhere does the infant's illusion of omnipotence survive more effectively in the adult than in the materialization of mental models. Works of art are the adult's transitional objects par excellence.

Hence the characteristic struggle of the artist with his or her medium, the exasperating discrepancy between the work as envisioned and its realization in the "flesh." The sculptor argues with the wood or stone, the dancer with his or her body. Trying to get around the problem by contending, as some aestheticians have done, that the mental conception of the work of art, uncontaminated by its material embodiment, is the true work, misrepresents the situation seriously, because the incarnation of the artist's vision, his or her version of the eucharistic miracle, is an

indispensable value of the work.

2. See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York, 1971).




Through the struggle with their materials, artists come to realize in a particularly dramatic way that the experiences we call physical objects are anything but inert matter. They are vehicles of behavior, embodied initiatives, and only when their dynamic nature confronts us actively are we likely to notice them explicitly. Martin Heidegger, in his essay "Das

Ding," points out that in the European languages things are closely related to causes, chose or cosa to causa, and in the same vein Hans-Georg Gadamer refers to the kinship of Ding and Sache in German.3 Objects are things that concern us, in the original Latin sense of objectum, that is, of things thrown into our way as obstacles or signs, forbidding or

inviting, calling for response. And soberingly enough, language defines the counterparts of objects as subjects, that is, as what is passively subjected to the things. Language tells us that we are what we are by what we are

subjected to. In the arts, this has been brought home to us by the early filmmakers, who knew that their medium converted the props of the

setting, immobile on the theater stage, into actors. The film mobilized the furniture of nature and the manmade environment by singling out its items, giving them entrances and exits, making them approach or recede, and varying their appearance as demanded by their roles in the

plot. What are some of the character traits that enable objects to play

their active part? Remember, first of all, that the isolated object, the

single thing that comes to mind when we think of art nowadays, is a

secondary crystallization, an enfeebled leftover of what is originally an undivided environment. It is true that within the world of a painting or film, things derive their meaning from the context in which they are shown. The work of art as a whole, however, can no longer rely on a similar support from the outer world in which it dwells. This extirpation from its space and time is due to special cultural conditions. Just as in

society the group precedes the individual, it takes special conditions to detach objects from their surroundings.

Primarily there is the total setting of the space in which we operate. In the practice of daily life this setting is a pattern of constraints and

offerings, the path in the landscape, the streets in the city, the walls and the doors. Only secondarily is this "life space," as the psychologist Kurt Lewin has called it, broken down into a configuration of objects, each endowed with its own messages.4 The art object in particular, the single sculpture or dance or song or indeed the single building, is only a remnant of the undiminished cityscape or ceremony or the integrated interior of, say, a medieval church. By now, the single art object, instead of being

3. See Martin Heidegger, "Das Ding," Vortrage und Aufsatze (Pfullingen, 1954); Hans- Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), p. 71.

4. See Kurt Lewin, A Dynamic Theory of Personality: Selected Papers, trans. Donald K. Adams and Karl E. Zener (New York, 1935).




supported in its partial function by its place and time, is expected to carry a total and complete message against the opposition of an incongruous neighborhood.

Lewin has defined the behavior of objects as their valence or demand quality (Aufforderungscharakter). Naturally, in order to call forth human responses, objects must be known and understood, and the perceiver must feel the urge to approach or avoid them. Sigmund Freud has remarked: "But if I have a path open to me, does that fact automatically decide that I shall take it? I need a motive in addition before I resolve in favor of it and furthermore a force to propel me along the path."5 Even so, the attractions and repulsions are experienced as issuing from the objects themselves.

In their most radical social manifestation the motivating forces of objects are revealed by the pathology of what Karl Marx described as the fetishism of commodities. Recently, Gaspare Barbiellini Amidei and Bachisio Bandinu, in what they call "a disquieting investigation of our

captivity among the objects," have derived from the Marxist concept an

analysis of traditional and modern attitudes based on the observation, "the fact is that the objects speak, and that people speak through the

objects."6 I shall refer later to this study but will cite here a striking illustration of its thesis in a short novel, Les Choses by Georges Perec, which describes a group of Parisian students in the 1960s. Employed by market research agencies to trace the responses of consumers, these students themselves are hopelessly addicted to the lure of objects offering comfort and prestige. "In their world it was almost the rule always to desire more than one could acquire. This was not of their own making, it was a law of the civilization, a given fact most aptly expressed in

publicity quite in general, the magazines, the art of window display, the

spectacle of street life, and in certain ways even in all of what goes by the name of cultural products."7 The novel opens with a long, ghostly panorama of a dream apartment, filled with all the luxury objects of enviable living, an assembly of silent sirens, each displaying its seductive charms, but all in the total absence of human beings. Presented here is valence in the abstract, attractiveness as such.

It is particularly pertinent to the valence of art objects that quite in

general so many of the properties inviting response are directly contained in perceptual appearance. Lewin speaks of forces going out "from a

sharp edge, from a breakable object, or from the symmetrical or asym- metrical disposition of objects on both sides of the path taken by the

5. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (Garden City, N.Y., 1943), p. 43; translation modified.

6. Gaspare Barbiellini Amidei and Bachisio Bandinu, II re e unfeticcio: romanzo di cose (Milan, 1976), p. 24; my translation.

7. Georges Perec, Les Choses: une Histoire des Annees soixante (Paris, 1965), p. 44; my translation.




child."8 Another psychologist, James J. Gibson, has somewhat elaborated on the description of the perceptual qualities that invite action and has given them the name "affordances."9

The basic affordance of a work of art is that of being readily perceivable. Since the human senses are geared biologically to the apprehension of relevant signals, a bugle tune, a fire alarm, or a piece of music detaches itself from a background of noises by its definable tones, and this com-

prehensibility arouses in the hearer the urge to respond. Similarly in

painting, sculpture, or architecture, the orderly visual structure of shape, size, and color in a well-made work attracts viewers through its immediate

readability. This primary affordance gives access to all the obvious allures

deriving from the subject matter of the work and the various personal associations that may bind the consumer to it. In the most general sense it is the very order and harmony of its appearance that distinguishes the art object as an oasis in a disturbingly chaotic world. And only this organized perceptual structure enables the art object spontaneously to illustrate definite constellations of forces that underlie physical and mental func- tioning in general. The purified experience of such basic dynamic themes as harmony and discord, balance, hierarchy, parallelism, crescendo, com- pression, or liberation is an affordance of fundamental cognitive value.

The social history of Western art during the recent few centuries has shown that art is not necessarily deprived of these values when it is torn from its moorings in space and time. By now, a Raphael or Picasso belongs everywhere and nowhere, and the relation of the Acropolis to modern Athens is essentially geographical. Like watches, barometers, or books, such art objects perform their service wherever they are put. In fact, the detachment from their birthplace tends to stress the timeless wisdom of works of art, overshadowing their more local meaning. At the same time there can be no question that Michelangelo's David was gravely impaired when the original of the statue was moved from its politically defined location in front of the Palazzo Vecchio to the anonymous tribuna in the Academy. When sculptures and paintings are kidnapped by our museums they offer a vital gain to the places to which they have been taken, but they are no longer of and about those places.

This detachment interferes with the symbiotic intimacy tying art to its users. Heidegger, at the beginning of the essay I cited above, complains about today's reduction of all distances in space and time. The relation that used to distinguish between close by and far away, present and past, has been leveled by modern technology to a uniform optimal distance. Heidegger asserts that this practical convenience has destroyed true "nearness" between the viewer and the object viewed. His observation reminds us that in an undisturbed spatial and temporal context the variety of distances symbolizes degrees of belonging together or being

8. Lewin, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, p. 50. 9. See James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, 1979).




remote. One is close to a lover but distant from a judge, close to one's

workshop or away from home. In the organized architectural environment of a church, one's distance from the altar or ceiling or the sharing of a

pew with one's neighbors are symbolically defined spatial relations. Within the pictorial space of a painting the relations between the

objects it represents are similarly defined by meaning. In Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte, chilling gaps keep the figures at a distance from one another. The distance from the viewer outside the frame is also determined, but only to the extent of the picture's power. The location of the viewer is curiously twofold. The situation is similar to that of reading a novel, which can place the reader at a chosen distance from what is to be seen or heard in the story while leaving him bodily seated at a fixed distance from the book. Similarly the painting splits the viewer into two persons-one nailed to a fictitious place through the outward

projection of the pictorial space, the other free to move back and forth before the wall to which the canvas is attached.

The things looked at also lead a double life. As physical objects they remain unaffected by being viewed. As percepts, however, they are subject to the idiosyncrasies of the viewer's mind. Furthermore, percepts are transformed into memory images, and they may assume the material shape of works of art. Removed from the control of the original stimulus, they are manipulated even more freely-an exclusively human trick, which made it possible for Freud to accuse art of serving gratuitous wish fulfillment. This same distinction between physical things and mental images, however, suggests that the Freudian approach calls for some amendments.

First, it seems curious for a psychologist to accept the preeminence of the world of bodily action to the extent of rejecting imagination as an escape from reality. Is it not at least equally in keeping with the special gifts of human nature to acknowledge the alternative standard of value? Why not anchor true reality in the creations of the mind and treat the "physical" world as a mere resource supplying the materials for the exalted and purified images of the artist or thinker? This certainly is the attitude of many devoted artists, poets, or scientists, even though it puts them in conflict with almost any civilization.

Freud, of course, came to disapprove of the imagination as a cheap product of the childish illusion of omnipotence, used by the mind to shape things at its own selfish pleasure. The defeatist effect of such daydreams is well illustrated in Perec's novel: "But between those oversized reveries, to which they abandoned themselves with a strange complacency, and the nonexistence of their real actions, no rational project that reconciled the objective necessities with their financial possibilities asserted itself. The immensity of their wishes paralyzed them."'0

10. Perec, Les Choses, p. 21; my translation.




True imagination, however, is quite another matter, and in fact we have noted that psychoanalysis has come to recognize "transitional objects" as ways of introducing the immature mind to a world in which each

component displays a character of its own to be coped with during the adventures of living. In this perspective, art must be recognized as a

prime instrument for weaning the mind at the adult level. An impressively large service is thereby demanded of art objects,

and indeed of objects in general. Heidegger makes this request most radically when he expects a humble waterjug to reflect nothing less than the cosmic quaternion of heaven and earth, the divine and the mortal. More modestly we may be willing to limit the symbolism of the jug to the humanly relevant activities of receiving, containing, and giving." But even this smaller request insists on "making the objects speak." Gadamer has observed that talk of respect for things has become more and more unintelligible in an ever more technological world. Things, he says, "are simply vanishing, and only the poet still remains true to them. But we can still speak of a language of things when we remember what things really are, namely, not a material that is used and consumed, not a tool that is used and set aside, but something instead that has existence in itself."'2

Understanding the language of things is not a privilege of the so- phisticated. On the contrary, nonverbal language speaks most loudly where the original rapport between man and his tools is still preserved. Barbiellini Amidei and Bandinu, in the treatise I mentioned earlier, offer a moving description of one of the most primitive populations left in

Europe, the shepherds of the Barbagia plains on Sardinia. Their simple huts are equipped with two kinds of objects. A few are gotten in town and have to be paid for. "Not being natural objects, they are not protected by nature: they are always in possible danger and may suddenly refuse to function." All the other objects are made by the shepherd himself of

granite, wood, hide, bone, or cork. "They don't cost money nor can their price be translated into working hours." Making them emerge from nature "is never a chore, even though they serve practical needs; in making them there is always an element of playfulness. They are essential but replaceable, and their presence can be invented at any time. The things of nature offer themselves as materials. Therefore the attitude is not one of anxiety but of trust, almost an affectionate carelessness. [The shepherd] treats them as he pleases because they are his, and he understands their course from life to death."'3

All those tools and implements are carved and kept in good shape with the knife the shepherd always carries in his pocket. There is a

11. See Rudolf Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays (Berkeley and Los

Angeles, 1966), p. 192. 12. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 71. 13. Barbiellini Amidei and Bandinu, II re e unfeticcio, p. 68; my translation.




closeness between making and consuming that by now we rarely enjoy. There are no paintings on the walls of the shepherd's home, no objects that specialize in providing images of distant worlds, but there is a family resemblance between the utensils and their makers by which the objects reflect the style of life of their users. Having been made the right way from the right materials, the objects reflect standards of honesty and

solidity for human conduct. They are guiding images, leading the

thoughtful mind by the symbolism of their appearance to the foundations of life and behavior. They do so without giving up their primary location as tangible agents in the world of bodily action. Their intimacy with the

setting in which they operate as companions of their users makes it easier for them to be not only handled but also seen and heard.

In a world like ours in which objects, limited to practical function and endowed with artificial values, no longer speak, works of art need a special dispensation to do their duty, and their users need to be awakened for a couple of hours at a time to be able to look and listen. And whereas more normally it is the eloquence of the objects that makes art possible, our hope for reviving the objects now comes from the arts.



arnheim.art among objects.1987

Documents

nature art

image of art

jstor terms

objects objects

jstor archive

pmall use subject

absurd notion of art

terms conditions of