Richard Woodfield, Review of James Elkins On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them more

ELKINS, JAMES. On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 326 pp., 54 b&w illus., $65.00 cloth. James Elkins is a prolific writer, and he is very imaginative and industrious too. His first book offered a thought-provoking study of the poetics of perspective that illuminated the ways in which a technical and scientific discovery could be turned to creative artistic use. His next two approached the phenomenon of looking and the nature of painting. This book continues his established train of thought. Elkins has an obvious enthusiasm for words and is instructive in his use of them to describe the intricacies of imagery at work; he has a talent for description, and his description of (dare I say it?) a figure drawn by Pontormo (pp. 14-18) is a magnificent piece of poetic prose. He also has a good eye for problems, and if critics and theorists are looking for something to reinvigorate their tired minds, this book will certainly give them a fresh pile of issues to consider. It will also give semioticians something to think about. His preface starts "This book may well have been titled The Antisemiotic, since much of what I have to say here runs against the tendency to interpret images as systems of signs," but then it continues, "I have no global objection to contemporary semiotics except perhaps for the occasional claim that it is an optimal, transparent, or trans- theoretical approach to visual artifacts" (p. xi). Bryson, Bal, and company had better watch out because Elkins is determined to throw a spanner into their works. The book has three parts, which divide up eight chapters. Part one, "Elements," contains chapters on the elements of the pictorial field which are not reducible to semiotic description, on pictorial elements that contribute to the naturalistic effect, and on figure/ ground and the relationship between "central mark and surrounding surface." Part two, "Voyages," contains chapters on the identification of signs and writing, on the "common origins of pictures, writing, and notation," and comparing notions of the image from China, Persia, and India. Part three, "Destructions," offers "nine steps down the ladder of disorder" and a chapter on "the unrepresentable, the unpicturable, the inconceivable and the unseeable." The envoi concludes by declaring the author's interest in the "hybrid nature of graphic marks," highlighting the actual nature of those marks as opposed to the simplified descriptions given to them by writers on aesthetics and psychology. In the twentieth century, "pictures have seemed to consist of two immiscible parts: the flood of words and the insoluble wordless image." Well, it can be seen from this list that the book is hardly about aesthetics but, rather, what Gombrich described many years ago as "the linguistics" of the image. That, of itself, would not rule out a review in this journal, but it is a warning to potential readers of what lies in store for them. As I see it, the book poses two main difficulties. First, the author gets so swept along by his argument that he loses sight of the need to convince the reader of the logic of what he is saying, so declarations fall like bolts out of the blue. Take, for example, the one quoted in the last paragraph (p. 268): it opens a twenty-four-line discussion of Wittgenstein' s Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Is the claim any more true of twentieth-century art than earlier art? And why should Wittgenstein's picture-theory of meaning be peculiarly apt for twentieth-century art as opposed to any group of pictures? Or, to take an earlier example at random, why should a truncated version of Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes be peculiarly apt to discussing the figure/ground relationship of psychological fame? Rather than truncate Aristotle, why not adduce an alternative approach? Second, a number of the author' s claims are not credible because his descriptions are seriously misleading. Take, for example, his claim that the so-called Lichtenberg figures (pp. 273-276) "have no representational content, even though people have hallucinated many things in them, and different kinds of Lichtenberg figures have been named after things they depict." These figures are similar to Rorschach inkblots in that they became figures for the use of projection (which is different from hallucination). They are different in that they were the product of magnetic fields; thus a person interested in magnetic fields could, for reasons of her own, choose to regard them as representations of magnetic fields in the same way that clouds may be taken to represent the behavior of gases in the atmosphere. By the same token, Rorschach inkblots could be taken to represent the behaviors of volumes of liquids compressed by folding paper under a variety of conditions. Having said that, Gombrich, who occasionally surfaces like an unwanted boil, has rather more sensible things to say on the subject in Art and Illusion, which is the great repressed Other of this book. Elkins's dialectic is one of engagement with the likes of Mieke Bal, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Rosalind Krauss, and Jean-François Lyotard. The early semioticians did realize a number of the difficulties they encountered in the face of the iconic sign. On the one hand, could a painting have the full coherence of a sentence and, if so, under what conditions? On the other, what was to be done with the minimal units which fell beneath the threshold of signification? In his review of Charles Morris's Signs, Language and Behavior (1949), Gombrich cut through the arguments by faulting the logic of the iconic sign and suggesting, as an alternative, a theory of projection; that is history. This line of thought has a number of yet unexplored consequences. Take yes I will say it the figure drawn by Pontormo (pp. 14-18). First, like many of the illustrations in this book, the remarkably poor quality of its reproduction obstructs our gaining much sense of what is going on across the surface of the paper on which it has been drawn. But then the question obtrudes: Why should a drawing that served Pontormo's purposes for creating and exploring figurative imagery serve our own purposes for examining his own thoughts about w he hat might have achieved through producing the drawing? To use a rather more extreme example, Leonardo's Study for the Virgin with St. Anne (circa 1500, British Museum) looks like an indecipherable mess of lines, but the verso of the paper clearly indicates what Leonardo wanted to see in that mess. Why, in the absence of Leonardo's tracing, would we want to believe that the Study could have any significance for us in terms of its ultimate outcomes? The art historian is up a gum tree, not by reason of any difficulties in the image (because the artist himself had no difficulties in using it), but because of the difficulties inherent in recovering the artist's process, which is not, contrary to received wisdom, mysteriously embodied in a terminated drawing. A process is a process and a drawing is a static object. Leonardo' s tracing offers only a notation of his vision of its compositional potential. His revolution in the art of drawing had an enormous spin-off, which has yet to be compared to the effect of the invention of linear perspective. To his credit, this is a topic which Elkins has opened out for investigation while, at the same time, turning a blind eye to Gombrich's inaugurating work. It is possible to go through the whole of this book raising questions of method and content. I constantly felt like asking myself why Elkins chose one line of strategy for discussing a subject rather than another; but this is part of the richness of the book and is invited by the bricolage of subjects. Elkins uses Vinca artefacts to discuss the problem of when marks can be taken to become writing, and when they might simply be decorative. Given the situation that at the moment no one really knows the solution, it might have been more illuminating to discuss marks where the difficulties had been resolved. Why not treat the more familiar ground of cuneiform, hieroglyph, and Arabic scripts, where the processes of mistake and discovery might be examined in closer detail? The book's biggest problem, "Why stick with even a partial version of semiotics to account for the nature of the visual image?" remains unresolved. It is true that a whole variety of meaningful human marks are visual and it is not obvious that any one semiotic system might cover the complete range. By the way, it is interesting that Karl Bühler's more ample and potentially interesting scheme has been completely ignored; but even that has its limitations. But do the semiotic systems of Bal and Bryson, forgetting Saussure and Peirce, even justify the limited claims that they make? Elkins might not like to be told that he has struck out on the same path that has previously been traced by Gombrich, but he might gain some satisfaction from being complimented on the ways in which he has widened its scope. Heaven knows who will commit themselves to the struggle of reading this book, but the rewards, in terms of the sheer multitude of problems that are raised, would make it worthwhile.