Review of John Willats, Art and Representation more

WILLATS, JOHN. Art and Representation: New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures. Princeton University Press, 1997, 394 pp., $39.50. This is a difficult book to review. Unlike my own Gombrich on Art and Psychology, which had contributors from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds, allowing the specialist reviewer to make choices between disciplines, this book is written by one person and addresses readers from a variety of disciplines. If specialist writers can address their own constituencies in terms of their own specialist expertise and be evaluated on those grounds, a single author is bound to suffer from what might be perceived as failure to address the problems emergent from those specialist expertises. In this context Gombrich's work has had a strange career, being massively influential on the one hand, but being criticized for offering solutions to problems he did not address, on the other. In this context, John Willats has my strong sympathy, because however valiantly he strives to address specialists on their own ground, the specialists are bound to find fault with what he has to say. He is probably most successful when he addresses the internal debate among writers who have taken on the same range of problems; the names of Arnheim and Hagen spring immediately to mind. Within its own tradition of literature by psychologists on the subject of art and representation, Willats's book marks a major achievement. It is generally recognized that while the discoveries of gestalt psychologists about the organization of visual configurations have been lasting achievements, their theoretical apparatus now has little following among mainstream psychologists. Contemporary psychological investigation revolves around cognitive science, which in turn addresses the issues raised by Marr and, somewhat uncomfortably, J. J. Gibson. It was in this context, trying to straddle the divide between Arnheim and Gibson, that Hagen produced her well-known book Varieties of Realism (1986). Willats successfully offers a critique of Hagen through his thorough exploration of drawing systems. He certainly has the edge on Hagen, both in terms of his intimate knowledge of drawing systems, derived from technical drawing, and in terms of his awareness of the work being done by Marr's successors. I believe that his critique of Hagen is successful, though this is not an appropriate place to discuss its intricacies. From the perspective of philosophical aesthetics, Hagen's book was weak in its conceptualization of art. On the one hand she wanted to identify art with figurative or naturalistic imagery, including photographs as well as a broad range of painted and drawn images; on the other she wished to identify it with the conspicuous exercise of artistic skill. Consequently she extolled the merits of Picasso's "quite incredibly life-like" portrait of Ambroise Vollard (p. 223) and denied holiday snaps from any serious consideration. But Picasso was not concerned to produce an illusion of life. Quite the reverse. And holiday snapshots could not but exemplify properties of naturalistic images, naturalism being built into the image. She also denied that developments in Western naturalistic skills were any better than, for example, Chinese skills of depiction, which is true from an aesthetic but not from an instrumental perspective: Willats handles the instrumental perspective very effectively. But while Willats is an excellent critic of Hagen, his own account of art and representation has its own weaknesses. Willats's strength in his interest in technical drawing is a weakness in his account of figurative imagery. Much as Scruton deployed the notion of the ideal photograph, Willats operates with a range of ideal drawings based on a variety of projection systems. It would be a mistake, in the first place, to think that all images identifiable as possible images of things were just representations of the look of those things, under a variety of projective models. Willats should take a look in the direction of pictographs, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, to understand the ways in which notations may be different from depictions (this ground has been covered by Heinrich Schäfer, Principles of Egyptian Art, 1986). Both notations and depictions operate subject to Bühler's principle of abstractive relevance, and the direction of interest for a notation is different from that of a depiction. He should also think again about the development of child art and ask himself whether children are operating with notations or depictions. His analysis of a drawing of a man by a five-yearold boy (fig.1.12) fails to recognize its inherent ambiguities as well as the depictional redundancy of certain of its features. One is bound to ask whether individual parts of the drawings have the characteristics which they do simply because they are notations allowing for a significant degree of redundancy in the profusion of marks. In his analysis of a map of the London Underground (fig 1.11), he says that its squares and circles are "not intended to tell us anything about the detailed shapes of the stations they represent" and overlooks the fact that the circular shapes signify the different line junctions: the squares and circles are different notations; they do not depict features, they represent relations. On the subject of figurative imagery, Willats acknowledges his lack of interest in art history. He is more concerned with ways in which a variety of different figurative images from different cultures exemplify the use of different projective systems. Unfortunately, figurative images not using the Western perspectival model do not exemplify the use of other projective systems (in the sense that those systems are not systematically followed in the creation of overall images). One might find some elements of an image following a projective scheme and this is particularly true of Chinese art but not all of them. Post- Renaissance Western artists developed this possibility. Even so, it has to be pointed out that in the quattrocento artists tended to talk about their "perspectives," i.e., characteristics of particular features of their complete images, rather than an overall perspectival plan; they were more concerned to avoid visual anachronism than to achieve complete systematization. The reason for this is fairly obvious. Painters' interests were as much affected by the way in which elements were balanced out against each other on the pictorial plane as by the ways in which they were seen to relate to each other in a depicted space. Another area Willats understandably ignores (because of his concentration on drawing systems) is imagery that concerns itself with spectator effect. Many ritual marks are endowed with visual characteristics allowing for differentiation and identification; but are they best described under a depictional scheme? This was a question that Gombrich raised in his classic essay "Meditations on a Hobby Horse," but which does not seem to have entered into psychologists' debates over representation. Gombrich's theory, which had a Freudian and biological inspiration, is now translatable into the terms of J. J. Gibson's theory of affordances. But followers of Man keep Gibsonian theory at arm's length and so, it would appear, does Willats, for the understandable reason that it is antigeometrical. This leads us to Willats and Gombrich. A key point of Art and Illusion was its demonstration that "less is more." While Italian Renaissance artists may have explored the wonders of linear perspective, Dutch painters of the seventeenth century explored the generative potential of painted marks for the creation of electric pictorial effects. In the case of paintings of glass, for instance, a few strokes of white pigment generate a fully volumetric object by affording the spectator the possibility of projection. Get too close to the image and the projective possibilities of the paint evaporate. The post-Renaissance development of painting, and particularly impressionist art of the nineteenth century, demanded the presence of the complicit spectator. Nowadays one may ask whether the complicit spectator is the same kind of spectator who can actually look at so-called magic pictures in the right way to realize their potential images perceptually (a phenomenon of a rather different kind from that of waiting for Ambroise Vollard to spring out of Picasso's portrait). Although, like many other books on the psychology of picture perception, this is not an easy book to read, it is well worth the slog, if only to be updated on developments in the field. I do not accept the publisher's claim that it represents an advance on Gombrich's Art and Illusion, though I do believe it represents an important advance in a particular direction of psychological theorizing.