Nissan Motors Musical Box

Here on the sunny isles of Trinidad and Tobago, owning a motor car is as indispensable as food to survive, you need one to drive to the grocery store two walking blocks away. Not long ago, buying a car was a task, and the waiting period for costumers took several months. One of the popular car companies franchised here was and still is, the Japanese manufacturer, Datsun / Nissan. Cars were locally assembled and build to withstand our tropical climate, far in comparison with the quality of roll on roll off used Japanese cars sold on the market today.

There are a few classic Datsun 120Ys still putting along the roads today. If you manage to see one, it generally looks as if the weight of the five passengers crammed in the backseat caused the bonnet of the car to tilt upwards. The 120y looked as if would take off further down the road.

The youth behind the wheel would have his Pioneer tape deck and equalizer stacked just beneath the dashboard, and his two large original Sharp stereo speaker boxes mounted at the back port. The bumpers would be lacquered over using two aerosol cans of black paint, and a pin coloured strip would run along the sides of the car.

To promote the cars, the company had an array of memorabilia; From key chains, envelope openers and a golden cast replica of the model in production. The Nissan Motors marketing team came up with a multi-functional object, a musical box astray as a Cedric 280E, known in Trinidad as a 260c and a Datsun Bluebird.
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The future of transport may be integrated with magnetic compulsion, powered by solar energy. Cars may simply skim along the a particular route guided by tracking devices.

Azure sky – Leonardo Da Vinci

The blueness we see in the atmosphere is not intrinsic colour, but is caused by warm vapour evaporated in minute and insensible atoms on which the solar rays fall, rendering them luminous against the infinite darkness of the fiery sphere which lies beyond and includes it. And this may be seen, as I saw it by any one going up to the peak of the Alps which divide France from Italy.

The base of this mountain gives birth to the four rivers which flow in four different directions through the whole of Europe. And no mountain has its base at so great a height as this, which lifts itself almost above the clouds; and snow seldom falls there, but only hail in the summer, when the clouds are highest. And this hail lies there, so that if it were not for the absorption of the rising and falling clouds, which does not happen twice in an age, an enormous mass of ice would be piled up there by the hail, and in the middle of July I found it very considerable. There I saw above me the dark sky, and the sun as it fell on the mountain was far brighter here than in the plains below, because a smaller extent of atmosphere lay between the summit of the mountain and the sun.

Again, as an illustration of the colour of the atmosphere I will mention the smoke of old and dry wood, which, as it comes out of a chimney, appears to turn very blue, when seen between the eye and the dark distance. But as it rises, and comes between the eye and the bright atmosphere, it at once shows of an ashy grey colour and this happens because it no longer has darkness beyond it, but this bright and luminous space. If the smoke is from young, green wood, it will not appear blue, because, not being transparent and being full of superabundant moisture, it has the effect of condensed clouds which take distinct lights and shadows like a solid body.

The same occurs with the atmosphere, which, when overcharged with moisture appears white, and the small amount of heated moisture makes it dark, of a dark blue colour; and this will suffice us so far as concerns the colour of the atmosphere; though it might be added that, if this transparent blue were the natural colour of the atmosphere, it would follow that wherever a larger mass air intervened between the eye and the element of fire, the azure colour would be more intense; as we see in blue glass and in sapphires, which are darker in proportion as they are larger.

But the atmosphere in such circumstances behaves in an opposite manner, inasmuch as where a greater quantity of it lies between the eye and the sphere of fire, it is seen much whiter. This occurs towards the horizon. And the less the extent of atmosphere between the eye and the sphere of fire, the deeper is the blue colour, as may be seen even on low plains. Hence it follows, as I say, that the atmosphere assumes this azure hue by reason of the particles of moisture which catch the rays of the sun.

Again, we may note the difference in particles of dust, or particles of smoke, in the sun beams admitted through holes into a dark chamber, when the former will look ash grey and the thin smoke will appear of a most beautiful blue; and it may be seen again in the dark shadows of distant mountains when the air between the eye and those shadows will look very blue, though the brightest parts of those mountains will not differ much from their true colour. But if any one wishes for a final proof let him paint a board with various colours, among them an intense black; and over all let him lay a very thin and transparent white. He will then see that this transparent white will nowhere show a more beautiful blue than over the black, but it must be very thin and finely ground.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s notes (1452-1519)

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Pertaining to the study of meteorology and atmospheric phenomena, it can be deduced that Leonardo Da Vinci used this method as a colour chart to accurately match the time of day he wished his paintings to be set. Above, from thebookmann series of classic Gods; Zeus and Venus superimposed over the Caribbean skies.

A gem among ruins

Until further notice…..

This painting is in a place which you would least expect. Located on the upper floor of a decrepit building which is at its last stage of standing. Within the filth, the painting exhibits an American bald eagle cruising in flight over a panoramic backdrop of a sky, terrain and sea. It measures over 5×3 feet in size and is one of two pitted and marked painted murals soon to be destroyed by the elements of decay. Yet, the work stands for a freedom from the reins of man, to a place far and beyond his shores. Free in his fulfillment and deed. To a better future and life his can call his own.

This mural has been destroyed.

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Dear reader please note:

thebookmann project began in 2004, and focused on documenting wall paintings, architecture, posters, typography, street graffiti and other kitsch based works in the environment that generally went unnoticed, but thrived in plain sight. thebookmann has become the source of Art pertaining to Trinidad and Tobago and has been approached by artists, curators, museums and universities. This means a comprehensive overhaul is required to insure the consistency. Until further notice, thebookmann is temporarily close.

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Comments under A gem among ruins :

It figures, I guess. That those who have done yeoman service for Trinidad and Tobago ultimately find themselves in the depressing condition of having to beg for sponsorship and support when there is just no other way to carry on otherwise.

In another place, there would be ten thousand comments here, with corporate, and other sponsors falling over themselves to get involved. But this is Trinidad: every man for himself. We’ve got apathy in our genes, and we, deliberately or otherwise, strangle the bright lights among us until they fade away, leaving us the poorer.

“A gem among ruins”, indeed. I hope things work out for you, and I hope also that some lights do not fade. – Rory

Postmodern terms – HABITUS to KRISTEVAN

These Postmodern definitions are a useful gauge to show how academics construct their sentences in Artspeak. The list is compiled by theorists who have set their own standards to the meaning of each word and its terms. It may be wise to double check on the usage to see if the word actually exists in a precise contemporary dictionary.

Postmodern Terminology: A-C D-G H-K L-N O-R S-T U-Z

HABITUS: Person’s predisposition to be affected by something

HAGIOGRAPHY: Writing about saints. Traditionally, saints are not recognized as such until they have been officially canonized (see canon). By extension then, any type of artwriting giving undue praise to an artist or attempting principally to identify an important contribution to an art-historical canon is implicitly a hagiography. In official religious hagiography, certain criteria must be met. The most well-known of these are miracles and martyrdom. The straightforward analogies for these in art history are masterpieces and bohemianism. See also genius.

HAMARTIA: Frequently translated as “tragic flaw,” hamartia is simply a mishap or human frailty which leads to someone’s reversal of fortune.

HAPTIC: Haptic means “relating to or based on the sense of touch.” Since its application in artwriting is almost always about space, texture and/or volume, it is most typically used as an adjective for sculpture. It is less often used of painting (most often as a variation of painterly) and of architecture (in instances where, for example, a tactile sense of space is created by some arrangement of volumes). Jennifer Fisher of Cornell University surveyed some of these in her paper “Haptic Resonances in Aesthetic Experience,” for the 1998 College Art Association conference. I have seen a few occasions in which the concept is applied to photography in the instance of exceptionally detailed prints. (See, for example “A Haptic Theory of Photographic Processes”.) Most recently, the notion has been brought up in the contxext of tactile digital interfaces (see http://www.hpcc.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~dtcb98r/vrhap/vrhap.htm) and media luminary Marshall McLuhan (see http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss1/1_1art9.htm). Readers might also be interested in Art Through Touch, a British group fostering art for the visually impaired.

HAUTE BOURGEOISIE: See bourgeois.

HEARSAY: A legal term denoting evidence not based on a witness’s personal knowledge, but on information reported to him by someone else. As such, in many legal systems, most hearsay is not admissible as evidence without meeting a rigid set of criteria. In some art criticism, hearsay has become so entrenched in interpretive history that facts about an artwork are sometimes obscured (see context [tertiary], King Richard effect). This is a particular problem in popularizing contexts. For instance, general books usually make quite a to-do about Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, but few of them point out that the work was not publicly exhibited for at least a decade after its completion. So assertions that the painting was a direct influence on a host of young artists must be revised to distinguish more clearly between those who had first-hand knowledge of the work and those who either did not know of it or had heard about it only through the grapevine.

HEBRAISM: The subordination of everything to principles of obedient conduct. Matthew Arnold uses the term in Culture and Anarchy to signify “strictness of conscience,” in contrast to Hellenism‘s “spontaneity of conscience.” The contrast is thus between duty and curiosity.

HEDONISM: Although it roots are genuinely philosophical, hedonism is now taken to mean sensual gratification as an end in itself. The term pops up in discussions of the work of Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, and other artists who seem to have made a point of avoiding troubling subject matter or politically specific themes.

HEGELIANISM: Generally, anything pertaining to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. More specifically, the notion that history has a rational end — i.e., history is the manner in which reason realizes itself in human experience. It follows the typical dialectic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. Followers of Hegel disagreed as to what this meant, with the so-called Old Hegelians claiming current political conditions were rational and the Young Hegelians claiming the opposite. The latter preferred to think of philosophy as essentially a call to revolution: one of them, Ludwig Feuerbach, was of particular influence on Karl Marx (see Marxism). See also world-view. Hegel has had considerable influence on art history, especially in his basic distinction between form and content. His idea was that these two could be reconciled in a higher synthesis — as they are in a different way in a paralinguistic theory of art — but his application of thesis/antithesis/synthesis to the trio of symbolical (Oriental) art, classical (Greek and Roman) art, and Romantic (Germano-Christian) art misses the mark by a wide margin. See also idealism.

HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY: See new masculinity.

HEGEMONY: Often linked to the writings of Antonio Gramsci, but by no means exclusive to them, “hegemony” means predominant influence, especially when it involves coercion, as in colonialism. One reads frequently of the cultural hegemony of the capital over the provinces, the economic hegemony of the middle class over the working class (see embourgeoisement), etc. The maintenance of hegemony is dependent upon the ideological effect, which makes the power of the dominant class appear desirable and natural. This in turn makes the meanings chosen by the dominant group appear to be universal. The hegemony of the mainstream media is a case in point, creating common sense beliefs that contradict statistical observations: for example, people tend to think the majority of crack cocaine addicts are black inner-city urbanites when in fact they are white suburbanites, and the elderly are the most afraid of experiencing violence even though they are statistically least likely to. Hegemony is, however, not a stable entity but what Gramsci called a “moving equilibrium” in which positions are ceaselessly revised. The seat of power is thus not the exclusive possession of a particular class once and for all but a series of shifts of power, sometimes across alliances. (A troublesome case in point is that well-meaning advertising can give the impression that women are far more likely to suffer violence at the hands of their spouses than men. Recent research indicates this is not true.) Hegemony thus needs continually to be reconfigured and resymbolized.

HEIDEGGERIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of Martin Heidegger. See Dasein, existentialism, ontological difference, open.

HELIOGRAPHY: See photography.

HELLENISM: The subordination of everything to the intellect, even sensual beauty. See Hebraism for Matthew Arnold’s application of the term.

HERESY OF PARAPHRASE: The notion that anything — an artwork, text, utterance, etc. — means what it means only in its original form, so that any abbreviation, paraphrase, translation, or other form of representation introduces distortions, simplifications, and misunderstandings. When Cleanth Brooks used the phrase in The Well Wrought Urn, he had no idea that the notion would be turned on its head as part of postmodern orthodoxy in the form of mediation. Brooks intended to give priority to the literary work itself, but it is now understood that any act — even reading — is a type of mediation, so there is no real “work” without some sort of paraphrase. This realization gives rise to the death of the author, on the one hand, and to reader-response criticism on the other.

HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE: In hermeneutics, the notion that one cannot understand the meaning of a portion of a work until one understands the whole, even though one cannot understand the whole until one understands the parts. It is not simply a paradox, since it indicates that any act of interpretation occurs through time, with adjustments and modifications being made to one’s understanding of both the parts and the whole in a circular manner, at least until some sort of resolution is achieved (see closure, sense 2). (There are some similarities to the sorts of adjustments made in Pepper’s conception of the consummatory field.) The word “barked” cannot properly be said to mean dog sounds if the sentence in which it appears is “the child barked his shin when climbing the tree.” Similarly, this sense of the word “shin” does not operate in a sentence describing the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Accordingly, a reader will not understand the parts until s/he has read the whole, and vice versa. Such examples are far too simple to characterize what happens in full-blown hermeneutics, however. See prejudice for a different type of example. Cf hermeneutic spiral for a related model which tries to sidestep closure.

HERMENEUTIC SPIRAL: In theory, the traditional hermeneutic circle presumes to reach a definitive conclusion as to the meaning of an utterance. Because it invokes closure, it remains open to attack from postmodern writers, who prefer indeterminacy to determinacy. In historical practice, no statement made about a work of art has ever been truly conclusive (cf reception history), but rather than discard the hermeneutic model, we can find ways to spring it open systematically. One such is simply to acknowledge that something else can always be said, however invalid or irrelevant it might be. The adjustments and modifications one makes during the process of coming to understanding never cease and a true closure is never evoked. But we might want to invent a system which also enables us to create relevant and valid responses, despite open-endedness. One such is a hermeneutic spiral equation, which has two advantages: first, it provides a hypothetical space for all future contributions in structurally schematic form and it provides a mechanism for testing their usefulness; and two, its structural holism assures the practitioner will not be subject to interpretive agnosia.

HERMENEUTIC SPIRAL EQUATION: The use of a formal language to produce a scheme of interpetation which tends towards holism without invoking closure and without excluding future interpretive strategies or new evidence. In its open-endedness, it avoids interpetive agnosia.

HERMENEUTICS: Any of a series of systematic theories of interpretation. Because it originally designated the interpretation of religious texts — a practice which assumed that every aspect of a Biblical text had to be meaningful because it was divinely inspired — hermeneutics carries a similar connotation that meaning is to be derived from every conceivable feature of a text that can be construed as a contribution to some sort of organic whole (see holism). In spite of this, there are all sorts of hermeneutic approaches. For Gadamer’s special contribution to hermeneutics, see prejudice. Paul Ricoeur’s The Conflict of Interpretations distinguished between linguistics, which he saw as a closed system of intrasignificant signs, and the extralinguistic properties of hermeneutics. More recently, the idea that a hermeneutic interpretation must apply in some way to a total meaning has been revised by Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984): formerly, the hermeneutic interpretation had to resolve all traces of contradiction, but Bürger calls for a revised approach replacing the necessary agreement of parts with a stratification of sorts, in which various layers might contradict one another and yet still contribute to the meaning of the whole in their very contradictoriness. See hermeneutic circle, hermeneutic spiral, hermeneutic spiral equation. Cf extralinguistic.

HERSTORY: A neologism invented because of the false peception of affinity (see faux amis) between “history” and “his story.” Despite the etymological fallacy, “herstory” is an economical way to describe women’s history and the feminist project of dismantling a male-only canon.

HETERODOXY: Ideas not in accordance with or critical of established doctrine or received opinion. See also doxa, orthodoxy.

HETEROGENEITY: The state of being fundamentally different in kind. See heterology.

HETEROGLOSSIA: “Different tongues” or “the speech of others.” Mikhail Bakhtin coined the word to describe multiple voices in a text (see dialogism).

HETEROLOGICAL STATEMENTS: A statement which is not true of itself. For example, “Italian,” which not an Italian word. See homological statements.

HETEROLOGY: James George Frazer’s Golden Bough characterized the primitive mind as incapable of distinguishing between the sacred and the impure or filthy. Building on this, Georges Bataille (see Bataillean) drew from German sociology and theology the sacred notion of the “wholly other” (see ganz Andere). Seeking to fuse these notions, Bataille hit upon the idea that that which is most “other” in the human body and therefore most sacred is that which we have actually ingested but cannot assimilate — that is, the undigested material which passes through the intestines. Excrement, then, is an example of the completely other — a heterogeneous “ foreign body [Bataille’s stress]…that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvelous.” Moreover, excrement is a type of expenditure, a basic conception in Emil Durkheim’s theory of social exchange. Bataille thus theorized that the surplus value of the vile/sacred had some effect on the social formation, as in such things as potlatches, sacrifice and ritual mutilations. He proposed that the study of such phenomena should be called “heterology.” The idea has become influential as a strategy for disruption. The terminology of heterology — e.g., bassesse — have started to appear in discussions of disturbing artworks, like those of the Surrealists (Rosalind Krauss) and Jana Sterbak.

HEURISTIC: Stimulating interest in order to make new discoveries and formulations, and/or a teaching method to encourage students to discover for themselves. The term is fairly common in current artwriting. For a specific application, see W. McAllister Johnson, Art History: Its Uses and Abuses.

HIERARCHICAL: The defining characteristic of any system of persons of things given different ranks or statuses, as in a governmental hierarchy.

HIERATIC: Originally, “sacred” or “priestly.” The term is routinely used to designate a formal, conventional, and conceptual style like that in the art of ancient Egypt or the Byzantine Empire. Potential antonyms are demotic and perceptual.

HIERONYMY: Originally, “sacred naming.” The term now means the granting of special status to some thing by virtue of the way it is named.

HIGH ART (CULTURE): Until recently, there has a distinction between high art (also called “high culture,” fine art, or beaux-arts) and low art (also called “mass culture”). Where the former supposedly consisted of the meticulous expression in fine materials of refined or noble sentiment, the latter was the shoddy manufacturing in inferior materials of superficial kitsch. Moreover, the assumption always was that appreciation of the former depended on such things as intelligence, social standing, educated taste, and a willingness to be challenged. In contrast, the latter simply catered to popular taste, unreflective acceptance of realism, and a certain “couch potato” mentality. Although many earlier artists took inspiration from popular and folk art — e.g., Gustave Courbet’s appropriation of woodcuts — the most systematic approaches towards blurring the differences between high and low art were taken by Cubism, Dada and Surrealism. Pop Art further weakened the distinction, and artists as various as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons and the Guerilla Girls, influenced strongly by the different branches of postmodern thought, seem have dealt it the final blow. We now find that formerly “high” artists are approaching mainstream celebrity status: for example, performance artist Laurie Anderson’s song O Superman reached the top ten of the pop charts in England, video and camera artist William Wegman has appeared on The Tonight Show to promote a book of photographs, and both have done segments on Saturday Night Live. In spite of this, one still wonders if the distinction still exists, albeit in a slightly different form. Few would seriously argue that the droves who follow televised wrestling matches and afternoon soap operas have any genuine interest in contemporary art. It is even less likely that the millions who read supermarket tabloids or romance novels would ever choose to read advanced art criticism.

HIGHLIGHT: The point at which an object reflects the greatest light, or the representation of same in drawing, painting, photography, watercolour, etc. Works which follow the logic of perception tend to orient highlights in such a way that the direction of the light source can be deduced from them, but there is no shortage of examples which ignore this principle and use highlights in a rather more intuitive manner. See also reserve highlight.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM: Any criticism which attempts to describe, explain or recreate the meaning a work had in its original context, rather than what it might mean to later generations. See historical methodologies.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM: The foundation of Marx’s (see Marxism) materialist (see materialism) theory of history: that the consciousness of men does not determine the social formation, but that the social formation — particularly the economic structure of society — determines consciousness independent of the will of men.

HISTORICAL METHODOLOGIES: Those types of criticism which foreground context, especially information of the environmental or secondary sort. See especially correlational social history, Geistesgeschichte, iconology, Marxism, new art history, new historicism, patronage, and reception theory. The terms macrohistory, microhistory, and quantohistory are also beginning to appear. Cf perspectivism, visuality.

HISTORICISM: Any of a variety of approaches which give priority to history, specifically with the implications that all of life and reality are historically conditioned and that each historical phenomenon must be interpreted according to its own terms. Historicism appears in many guises in aesthetics and criticism, including the following: Hegelian idealism (that culture in general must be understood in terms of a transcendental progression of historical change); positivism (that a particular artwork must be interpreted in the light of the unique, verifiable circumstances in which it was created); new historicism (the revitalized historicism of the postmodern period, emphasizing economic and ideological circumstances), and perspectivism and/or relativism (that no one point of view is central).

HISTORICITY: The historical actuality of a thing, as opposed to putative timelessness.

HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION: See metafiction.

HISTORIOGRAPHY: The theory and practice of historical writing, especially history about history. In artwriting this usually takes the form of extended historical commentaries on the writings of key art historians, as in Michael Podro’s Critical Historians of Art, Michael Baxandall’s Patterns of Intention, Mark Roskill’s The Interpretation of Pictures, and so on. Most of these feature case-studies of an historiographic nature. For postmodern applications, see Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism.

HISTORY: For “history” as a category of content in art, see genre. For various aspects of “history” as a branch of knowledge or an account that records, analyses and explains past events, see art history, herstory, historical criticism, historical methodologies, historicism, historiographic metafiction, historiography, metafiction, metanarrative, new historicism, postmodernism.

HISTORY PAINTING: See genre.

HOLISM: The philosophical notion that the structure and behaviour of a system or an organism in its entirety cannot be explained solely as the sum of the operations of its parts.

HOMAGE: Reverence or tribute, as a serf might give to his lord, or an apostle to his master. artists throughout history have paid homage in various ways to those who influence them, as in Odilon Redon’s À Edgar Poe.

HOMEOSTASIS: The tendency to maintain constant functioning of organic processes or to attempt to restore constancy when one of the processes is disturbed. For a specific application, see jouissance.

HOMO DUPLEX: Man conceived as having two distinct natures, the body and the mind (see Cartesian interactionism, mind-body problem). George Mauner understood édouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, with its impossible mirror reflection of a male viewer, to be a meditation on this theme.

HOMOLOGICAL STATEMENTS: Statements which are true of themselves, as “English” is an English word (compare heterological statements). One of the basic tenets of formalism is that what an artwork symbolizes is external to the work itself and might just as well be discarded in any serious critique of it. In Ways of World-Making, Nelson Goodman uses the notion of homological and heterological statements to undo this assumption. He maintains that what a symbol symbolizes is not necessarily extraneous to itself, since, for example, “word” is a word which applies to itself and to other words, “short” applies to itself among other things, and “having seven syllables” has seven syllables, as do many other phrases. Formalists, he concludes, implicitly and erroneously maintain that the most important characteristic of art is it heterologicality.

HOMOLOGY: A correspondence, relation, or similarity between structures. In sociological writings, the term is likely to refer to a metaphorical match between the values of a group and its lifestyle. Paul Willis’s Profane Culture (1978), for example, shows how the hippie subculture‘s anarchic reputation was a misconception, for the group’s values and lifestyle were highly organized along homologous lines. That is, hippies’ espousal of certain values like bohemianism agreed with (found a correspondence with, matched, paralleled) their taste in music and recreational drugs. Dick Hebdige’s Subculture (1979) does much the same for the punk phenomenon. Similar homologies can be found for most art movements, especially those in which a marked taste for expressionism is also manifest in an artist’s rather freewheeling lifestyle (e.g., Jackson Pollock).

HOMOPHOBIC: Irrational fear and/or persecution of homosexuals.

HORIZON: The limit or range of perception, knowledge, etc. See fusion of horizons, horizon of expectations.

HORIZON OF EXPECTATIONS: The range of values — aesthetic, economic, moral, religious, social, symbolic, etc. — a given audience anticipates it will encounter in an artwork. The work functions either by meeting those expectations or by challenging them. The idea is central to reception-theory.

HORROR VACUI: A tendency, sometimes characterized as medieval or primitive, to fill all the available pictorial space with decorative or other motifs, as if “afraid of a vacuum.”

HUBRIS: Arrogance, insolence, or pride that leads to misfortune.

HUE: See colour.

HUMANISM: Any attitude that gives priority to human endeavours, rather than to those of the gods, the spirits, the animals, or any other non-human thing. The term is frequently qualified, as in “Renaissance humanism,” which is characterized by a love of the achievements of the Greco-Roman world, an optimism that humans are inherently endowed with the skills necessary to reshape the world according to their own needs, and a belief in inherent human dignity. While the Renaissance humanists did not see their enlightened self-interest as a contradiction of their Christianity, a few recent demagogues identify “secular humanism” as a tacitly atheistic preoccupation with human affairs.

HUSSERLIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of Edmund Husserl. See existentialism, phenomenology.

HYMEN: The mucous membrane partially enclosing the vagina in a virgin. Jacques Derrida (see Derridean) used this image in “La Double séance,” in his La Dissémination as a metaphor to invent a hypothetical space for the operation of différance in a text. He chose a female image to counter the notion of the phallus as the privileged signifier.

HYPERBOLE: Exaggeration, whether used simply for effect or because of linguistic inflation. Some Baroque ceiling paintings are extravagantly hyperbolic, as in Pozzo’s Allegory of the Missionary Work of the Jesuits on the vault of S. Ignazio, Rome. Compare bathos, litotes, meiosis.

HYPERETHNICITY: A serious preoccupation with ethnicity. The word should be used with care, since some opponents of political correctness use it in a thinly-veiled contemptuous manner.

HYPHENATION: A common postmodern technique to draw attention to hidden political and other agendas in supposedly apolitical words. Examples include “dis-possessed” (Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology), “photo-graphed” (Jacques Lacan, “What is a Picture?” Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis), etc. Sometimes it is not really necessary, as in “re-vision” or “re-presentation.”

HYPOCRISY: Pretending to be what one is not or to believe what one does not. The idea should be discussed with reference to traditional myths about artistic bohemianism and genius, as well as to new ones like anti-intellectualism and political correctness.

HYPOTAXIS: The grammatical arrangement of words in dependent or subordinate relationships of causality, logic, space and time, usually taken as a characteristic of mature, formal or disciplined speech. It is opposed to “parataxis,” the grammatical arrangement of words in coordinate relationships where subordinate ones are called for. For example, the statement “You should try and get some sleep” is incorrect because “You should try to get some sleep” properly indicates that the second verb is dependent upon the first. The statement “Although Seurat’s intention was to render the canvas more luminous, he failed because the optical mixture was too evenly distributed” is properly hypotactic because the failure is in spite of the stated intention. The statement “Seurat tried to render the canvas more luminous and he failed…” is paratactic because the causal relationship is obscured by “and,” which uses coordination. There is an understandable temptation to interpret art paratactically because images appear to be presented in terms of coordination. I.e., Arnolfini and His Bride could be described in a paratactic sequence: “a man and a woman are standing in a room with a bed, and a dog stands at their feet, and there are shoes set to one side, and there is a chandelier with one candle, and there is a convex mirror, etc.” As soon as we start to speak of figurative meaning, however, we must use causally subordinating relationships: “The wedding vows are understood to be holy because there are shoes set to one side, which is a conventional act of respect when standing on holy ground.” Theorizing a set of criteria for visual hypotaxis and parataxis might provide some useful weapons for the fight against perceptualism. On another level entirely, hypotaxis has occasionally popped up as a metaphor in discussions of political correctness, with white male language construed as a hypotactic grammar of power (i.e., an instrument designed to subordinate those who have not mastered its niceties of expression). This is the ground for the recent debate about Ebonics in California.

IATROGENIC DISEASE: Disorders caused by treatment for a previous ailment or by the practices of the physician, as in the case of a patient who seeks medical help and develops debilitating side-effects or is abused by the doctor, creating symptoms of mental illness. There are implicit parallels in discussions of sexual harassment in educational institutions, as in the case of a male teacher, unaware that he is libidinally driven, who unwittingly harasses his female students. One wonders if the principle could serve as a metaphor for the production of meaning in postmodern contexts. Compare fusion of horizons.

ICON: 1. A picture, image or representation. In conventional art history, “icon” generally refers to images of sacred personages in the Byzantine and Greek Orthodox traditions. Some of these were virtually worshipped in past times, provoking a strong reaction in the form of iconoclasm (sense 1). 2. In various newer approaches, especially those influenced by Peircean semiotics, “icon” means a signifier which resembles that which it signifies (in other words, something which carries meaning by virtue of resemblance). Of course, this is much more common in visual imagery than in spoken language, although there are examples like onomatopoeia. Compare index (sense 2), symbol. 3. In popular writing, “icon” is sometimes taken to mean a celebrity who has come to represent the essence of some quality or characteristic, as Marilyn Monroe was an icon of a certain type of feminine sensuality or Arnold Schwarzenegger is of a certain type of masculinity. The cult-like dimension of celebrity interest in popular culture indicates that the root of this use of the word probably relates to sense 1 above.

ICONICITY: Resemblance, the defining characteristic of an icon (sense 2).

ICONOCLASM: 1. The destruction of images (see icon [sense 1]), especially those receiving religious veneration. 2. By extension, the breaking of traditions, doctrines, convictions, practices, etc. Marcel Duchamp is the modern archetype of the iconoclast.

ICONOGRAPHY: The study of subject matter and symbolism in the visual arts, especially with reference to verifiable traditions, visual dictionaries (like that of Cesare Ripa), and the like. Erwin Panofsky is arguably the most famous practitioner (see his Meaning in the Visual Arts).

ICONOLOGY: The study of iconography with greater emphasis on historical and contextual constraints on the possibilities of meaning (see context). Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg are arguably the most famous practitioners (Studies in Iconology and Gesammelte Schriften, respectively). See also semiotics.

ICONOPHOBIC: A rare neologism meaning irrational fear of images. It has recently been used to describe the conservative desire to suppress the more explicitly sexual images of such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe. See, for example, Thomas Sokolowski in Artforum 25.9.

ICONO-SEMIOLOGY: See semiotics.

ID: That portion of the psyche which is the seat of the libido, out of reach of the outside world, driven only to satisfy the basic urges of the body (see drive). Compare ego.

IDEALISM: 1. In art, the elimination of what is undesirable in the treatment of any thing, as in a visual image, until it reaches a predetermined standard of perfection. 2. In philosophy, any of a number of theories sharing the notion the reality has no objective existence but is produced in some way by the mind. Among these theories are Berkeleian idealism (also called “immaterialism”), which holds that all matter consists only of ideas in the mind of God (or in the minds of those whom He has created); objective idealism (usually associated with Hegelianism), which holds that everything is a manifestation of one “Absolute Mind”; and transcendental idealism (usually associated with Kantian thought), which holds that objects are nothing more than appearances. These theories should be debated in any thorough- going investigation of psychologically orineted art, especially Surrealism.

IDEOLOGICAL EFFECT: Ideology works by making what is economic/political/social and historically contingent appear apolitical and timeless. This process needs to be unconscious, so it functions by creating myths like common sense. The resultant appearance of naturalness (for example, the illusion that sense is genuinely common) is said to be the ideological effect. See Stuart Hall, “Culture, the Media and the ‘Ideological Effect’,” in J. Curran, et al., eds., Mass Communication and Society (1977).

IDEOLOGY: The philosopher Destutt de Tracy coined this word in the early nineteenth century to describe a science of ideas which would reveal unconscious habits of mind like prejudice and class consciousness. Karl Marx and Karl Mannheim separately introduced the word into modern sociological discourse, where it has come to mean a range of things related to the social production of people’s ideas, still usually without their conscious awareness of it (compare political unconscious). Thus it means beliefs, horizons of expectations, ideals, Weltanschauungen, and the like as interpretive mechanisms superimposed onto the world by identifiable social groups to impart some sense of order to their experience of it. The result, particularly in Marxist thought, is a distortion of reality to maintain authority over it. In this regard, the most succinct definition is in Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction: “those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power.” Various applications of this sense of the word can be found in feminist, Foucauldian, and other types of critical activity. One of the strongest streams is Althusserian. Although as individuals we are the products of social determination (see structuralist Marxism), we do not feel simply as small cogs in a larger mechanism. Instead, we relate to society at large in a political variant of the Lacanian mirror stage: ideology gives the individual the notion that s/he is a fully integrated, coherent and centred self, and the individual accepts this fiction, thus becoming subject to ideology (see interpellation). Ideology in this sense is preconscious and taken as “natural” (see ideological effect). In contrast, Clifford Geertz and others use the term with less political load, meaning one type of symbolic system among others, like art, religion, and science (see text, thick description). See also James H. Kavanagh’s essay “Ideology,” in F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study.

IDENTITY: Sameness. The distinguishing character of an individual or social group.

IDENTITY POLITICS: See politics of identity.

IDIOLECT: The speech patterns peculiar to a particular individual, usually in a particular period of his or her life. The farther art is from language — in the sense that it does not subscribe to rules which guarantee intelligible dialogue — then the closer it is to idiolect. This is a profitable analogy since traditional artwriting has usually prized works which are readily identifiable as the productions of specific individuals.

IDIOM: A figurative expression in one language that cannot be translated literally into another, as in “carrying on” (for “foolishness”), or an expression whose meaning cannot be deduced from the sum of the meanings of its constituent elements, as in “kick the bucket” (for “die”). For some of the problems confronting the notion of “idiom” in visual art, see translation.

IDYLL: Conventionally, a charmingly simple, pastoral and/or sentimental written work. By extension, anything that exhibits similar characteristics, as in Giorgione’s Concert champêtre.

ILLIBERAL EDUCATION: Title of a controversial popular book by Dinesh D’Souza espousing an extremely conservative position in the debate on political correctness. D’Souza’s thesis is that postmodern thinkers are literally attacking “common sense,” free speech, and traditional scholarship, and in so doing are destroying the value and integrity of American education. The subtitle of the book is The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus.

ILLOCUTIONARY: See speech-act theory.

ILLUSIONISM: The principle characteristic of an artwork which attempts to convince viewers that they are not looking at a representation but at the thing itself. In other words, illusionism means making an image as “realistic,” in the conventional sense of the word, as possible. Especially when accompanied by the word “optical,” “illusion” is often used to indicate an image which we recognize as playing a deliberate trick on us, like alternating figures. This is precisely not what is meant by “illusionism,” which refers instead to coherent images which pass for the real. The classic examples of illusionism have to do with extending into fictive space the linear perspective of a real space, as in Masaccio’s Trinity or Pozzo’s Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius. There is no reason why the concept would not apply to sculptural illusionism like that of Duane Hanson’s Tourists. See also trompe l’oeil.

ILLUSTREMENT: Stephen David Ross’s term in A Theory of Art for a multimodal approach to art discourse that is better suited to express the multiple locatedness (see inexhaustibility by contrast) of any artwork. Ross reduces the complex variety of art discourses given under the headings art history, criticism, and historical methodologies to four basic types: they are description, criticism, intepretation, and theory (or philosophy). These correspond respectively to assertive statements, statements of active judgements, constructive statements, and statements concerning the relations of the work to general themes or to a broad human order. Within each of these categories, statements about a work can be traditionary (re its historical location), intramedial (re the physical composition [see form] of one work), intermedial (re the relations between the physical composition of various works), intermodal (re the modes of judgement applied to a work), and intersubjective (re the diversity of audiences). The more easily an “articulative response” — a prolonged verbal consideration of a work — shifts into any of these different levels of discourse and critical perspectives, the more effectively it will transcribe the work’s multiple locatedness, and thus its apparent polysemy. Illustrement’s verb form is “illustre,” and its adjectival form is “illustrive.”

IMAGE: In Ways of Seeing, John Berger stipulated that “image” means a “sight which has been created or reproduced…, detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved.” In other words, an image is an aspect of culture, not nature. Since images are made by humans, they embody “ways of seeing” — i.e., the assumptions, desires and values of the makers (compare horizon of expectations). The implication, then, is that an image can not be an unmediated reality (see mediation and compare perceptualism).

IMAGINARY: Translation of Lacanian term imaginaire, meaning the psychological dimension of all images, conscious and/or unconscious, whether simply imagined or genuinely perceived. Lacan once felt the imaginary was the most basic psychological process, but he later felt that the imaginary was displaced by the Symbolic. See also Real. For a different application in political thought, see ideology.

IMAGINATION: See fancy.

IMAGO: An idealized recollection of a cherished person, formed during childhood and very resistant to subsequent change.

IMAGORRHEA: Go here.

IMBRICATION: A successive overlapping, like shingles or tiles. The term has become fashionable as a figurative description of the ways meaning is produced by the interrelations of various forces, rather than in a linear, non-reversible manner. Compare codeterminacy, constellation, interpretive web, stratigraphic fallacy. This term is not be confused with imprecation.

IMITATION: A close copy, as in all art which endeavours to reproduce natural appearances. Imitation has played a role in aesthetics since Plato, who banished artists from his hypothetical republic. Material things, he argued, are imperfect reflections of the ideal forms underlying all existence. As an imperfect reflection of something already imperfect, art could only lead men further from the truth. Compare expression theory, mimetic theory. See also perceptualism, realism.

IMMATERIALISM: See “Berkeleian idealism” under the heading idealism.

IMPERIALISM: The expansion of a state’s authority through the procurement of territory, typically through conquest, and the suppression and exploitation of the native populace. Although historical applications involved conscious policies of dominant states, current references often target unconscious attitudes, as in Eurocentrism. As such, imperialism is a central issue in debates on political correctness. See colonialism.

IMPLIED ARTIST: See implied author.

IMPLIED AUTHOR: Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction distinguishes between the real author of a literary work and the author implied by the fiction in the work. The conception is close to Aristotle’s ethos. Note, however, that an implied author can actually have the same name as the real author. There is material for a reconsideration of the role of the visual artist along analogous lines.

IMPLIED READER: In The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading, Wolfgang Iser maintains that one of the functions of a text is to construct a conception of a hypothetical reader who will possess all the propensities required for the text to create the effect of meaning. The implied reader, therefore, exists within the text and not in external reality. A similar phenomenon occurs in some visual art which achieves a meaning effect with an implied viewer, as in Velázquez’ Las Meninas, Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, and numerous other examples.

IMPLIED VIEWER: See implied reader.

IMPOVERISHMENT: Reduction to poverty; depletion of something considered valuable.

IMPRECATION: A curse. There are historical precedents for visual images having the power to curse the viewer, simply by having been looked at. Notorious examples are the curse of the mummy’s tomb and the sight of Medusa turning men to stone. This term is not to be confused with imbrication.

IMPRESSIONISM: See subjective impressionism.

IMPRESSIONISTIC CRITICISM: See subjective impressionism.

IMPRIMATUR: Literally, “let it be printed,” a term originally signifying an ecclesiastical stamp of approval to publish something. By extension, the endorsement of critics who exercise, according to their enemies, too much influence on public taste.

IMPROVISATION: A work which places emphasis on spontaneous performance without premeditation, or at least without the appearance of premeditation. Improvisation can be found in varying degrees in virtually all art forms, from film to literature, dance to painting. In many of these, the improvisation is something which is suggested by, but departs from, specific features of a text, as in a written piece of music which is spun into something quite different by a performer. Rarely, however, is the term evoked to consider an interpretation‘s degree of adherence to specific features of a text. deconstruction and the dialectic of intersubjectivity, to name only two of many possibilities, depend heavily on the notion that an audience may depart from the text. See also interpretatio excedens, literacy.

INAUTHENTIC: In existentialism, the unreflective submission of self to circumstances; allowing an exterior, alien world to buffet oneself about without exercising any choice.

INCANTATION: A spell, formula or ritualistic chant purporting to have magical power, as in the famous witches’ chants in Macbeth. The device is occasionally used quite consciously in visual art, as in Max Ernst’s incremental repetition of the phrase “L’oeil sans yeux, la femme 100 têtes garde son secret” in La Femme 100 têtes. Quite independent of the captions, Ernst’s images have a similar incantatory effect.

INCITEMENT PREMIUM: See fore-pleasure.

INCREMENTAL REPETITION: A literary term meaning the repetition of a phrase in a poem with either minor consecutive modifications (compare elaboration) or different contexts which effect slight changes in meaning. Max Ernst used the device in La Femme 100 têtes.

INCULPATORY: See evidence.

INDETERMINACY: The opposite of determinacy: i.e., the notion that the final meaning of a text cannot be settled once and for all, undermining an audience‘s certainty about such things as closure or E. D. Hirsch’s tidy distinction between meaning and significance. The reasons for this are as various as the theories that make use of the concept, but none is so radical as deconstruction.

INDETERMINISM: The doctrine of free will: i.e., that one is able to act as one wishes, without the constraints of determinism.

INDEX: 1. Any of a number of devices which serve to point out or indicate, as in the index of a book, the index finger, an economic growth index, etc. 2. In Peircean semiotics, “index” means a signifier which alludes to an absent signified by pointing in its direction, usually by virtue of some causal connection (see causality). Uncomplicated examples include bloody footprints in Daumier’s La rue Transnonain and the shower of water in Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, both of which point to the passage of bodies through the depicted space at a time prior to the depiction. Compare icon (sense 2), symbol.

INDICTMENT: See indulgence or indictment.

INDOCTRINATION: To teach a doctrine, principle, etc., usually through repetition and adherence to authority, rather than a truly heuristic method.

INDUCTION: Reasoning in which a general principle is derived from a number of specific observations. An argument from deduction can only convey what is already implied in its premises: e.g., “All humans are mortal; Michelangelo was human; therefore, Michelangelo was mortal.” In contrast, induction states that while the available premises may not guarantee the truth of the conclusion, they may collectively suggest there is good reason to accept it: e.g., “The addition of paint to a surface in a gallery is considered art; the removal of material from a sculptural mass in a gallery is considered art; the exposition of light through a lens onto a light-sensitive paper in a gallery is considered art: therefore, Vito Acconci’s self-biting and printing of tooth-marks in a gallery should be considered art too.” See also interpolation.

INDULGENCE OR INDICTMENT: It is often difficult to determine if a representation, particularly of something a given audience finds distasteful, is shown simply for the sake of indulgence, or if it chosen to draw critical attention to some issue relating to the subject. There are no simple formulas to make this determination. Canadian censors have unwittingly drawn attention to the issue: they banned the October 1986 issue of Playboy because they interpreted an ambiguous photograph of a nude woman rolling in parachute cords as bondage. Yet feminist artists Carmen Coulombe and Persimmon Blackbridge have both made images (L’Emprise sur l’univers II and Drawing the Line, respectively) which feature much more explicit bondage. Works which blur the line between gratification on the one hand and cries of social injustice on the other should be debated rigorously.

INEXHAUSTIBILITY BY CONTRAST: In A Theory of Art: Inexhaustibility by Contrast, philosopher Stephen David Ross employs certain features of ordinal theory (number theory which concerns the position of a thing in a ordered system) to explain how the meanings of an artwork can never be fully catalogued or explained, thus achieving multivocality or polysemy. Ross argues that anything that exists is located as a constituent in many orders, which is to say that it belongs to many sets or categories of things, a phenomenon he calls “multiple locatedness.” For example, a portrait painting can belong to the hypothetical orders “surfaces covered with paint” and “objects hung on the wall,” yet it may have little in common with certain other members of that order — e.g., “highchair” (also a painted surface) or “coatrack” (also suspended on the wall). The relations that the painting has to other members of its orders may be relatively stable, as in a classification of paintings according to genre. If this is the case, Ross describes the order as having integrity in a particular location, giving rise to actualities of meaning. In another location — i.e., when it is placed in a different order — its relations may be relatively unstable, as in a set of nearly flat, rectangular objects ranging from artworks to note pads, carpets, and handkerchiefs. In this instance, Ross describes the order as deviant, giving rise to possibilities of meaning. Since any work of art can be placed in a hypothetically infinite number of deviant sets — i.e., sets of things with which it has at least one thing in common, but with which it may otherwise contrast –the possible meanings that a work can produce are said to be inexhaustible by contrast. Criticism and interpretation aimed at elucidating the ways in which a work participates in multiple locatedness is called illustrement. A simple way to demonstrate the principle is to compare William Berczy’s Joseph Brant to Paul Kane’s Mah-Min, or “the Feather”, in which case the integrity of the order would seem apparent: both are portraits of Amerindian leaders. Replacing the Kane with Paul Peel’s A Venetian Bather would create an apparently deviant order, until ones realises that both are images of figures accompanied by small animals. The Berczy painting has not changed, yet it participates in different locations in such a way that radically different possibilities of meaning are produced. Since successive audiences of necessity constitute different locations for a work, indeterminacy can never be avoided (compare reception theory).

INFLATION: See linguistic inflation.

INFLECTING: See agglutinating, inflecting, isolating.

INFLUENCE: The effect of antecedent conditions, persons, works or the like on an individual artist, as in “Michelangelo was influenced by Jacopo della Quercia’s baptismal font in Bologna.” The study of influence is at the heart of classical source analysis, but it has recently been amended substantially by the Freudian-inspired anxiety of influence. See also Louis A. Renza’s essay “Influence,” in F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study.

INFORMAL LOGIC: See ad hominem, ad ignorantium, analogy, analytic, appeal to precedent, argument, argument from analogy, categorical statements, categorical syllogisms, class logic, causal arguments, conditionals, definitional rules, extensional definitions, fallacies, generalizations, guilt by association, intensional definitions, invalidity, irrelevance, laws of thought, noise, pro homine, propositional logic, relevance, special pleading, synthetic, validity.

INFORMATION THEORY: A theory of language and, by extension, the arts, based on models of information exchange in electronic media. Simply put, the theory presents any communication as a circuit in which a sender codes a message and transmits it along a channel to a receiver, who decodes it to achieve a hypothetically complete reconstruction and, therefore, closure (see determinacy). To forestall potential misinterpretations created by interference with the encoded message (see noise), the message would ideally be sent in more than one channel in different codes (see redundancy). See also entropy.

INFORME: Georges Bataille (see Bataillean) said that “informe” (sometimes translated “formless”) is “a term that serves to bring things down in the world” and that the goal of philosophy is to give a shapeless universe a “mathematical frock coat.” Like bassesse, the informe is a tool for accessing the level of base materialism.

IN MEDIAS RES: A literary term for a narrative beginning “in the middle of things,” retracing the beginning of the story through flashbacks.

INNATENESS HYPOTHESIS: Once influential Chomskyan notion that children’s ability to learn their language rapidly indicates they are born with an innate knowledge of language’s deep structure. See generative-transformational. The idea is probably suspicious to postmodern thought since it implies an essentialist position, instead of relativism.

INNOVATION: The introduction of something new, as in the rapid stylistic changes of the period of so-called “heroic” modernism. Innovation, especially of an adversarial sort, was one of the cornerstones of the avant-garde. Postmodern artwriters tend to think that the novelty produced by innovation is more of an illusion than anything.

INSCRIPTION: 1. Originally, symbols or words engraved into a surface. By extension, a written dedication or other statement in a book or on an artwork. 2. More recently, the way one text insinuates itself into another: this can be through a kind of appropriation, homage, or imitation, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses inscribed within the outlines of Homer’s Odyssey, or a less apparent intertextuality.

INSTALLATION: A type of art in which a given space is redefined by the (usually) temporary arrangement therein of objects and/or materials in quasi-sculptural and/or quasi-theatrical constructions. Examples can range from traditional museum dioramas and similar arrangements of readymade articles to galleries filled with everything from topsoil to pennies to individually wrapped candies. See site-specific for important distinctions.

INSTINCT: See drive, personality types.

INSTINCT-ORIENTED: See personality types.

INSTITUTION, INSTITUTIONAL: See critique of institutions.

INSTRUMENTALISM: A type of pragmatism, the notion that ideas, concepts, theories and the like cannot be evaluated in terms of truth and falsehood, but only in terms of their effectiveness or ineffectiveness as instruments in a given process of inquiry. One of the more famous instrumentalist philosophers was John Dewey, who postulated that all human activities could only be understood in terms of their function in material human experience and history. Dewey’s book Art as Experience examined art as an effective instrument serving the purpose of expressing psychic wholeness and one’s sense of belonging to a larger, all-inclusive whole which is the universe. This has since been refined into the view that art must seek social change, rather than indulge itself in empty formalism. Examples of instrumentalism in art range from specific critiques of the corporate mentality (e.g., Hans Haacke’s American Cyanimid) to more broadly based social movements (e.g., General Idea’s AIDS Project).

INSUFFICIENCY: An insufficient definition is one which describes too few characteristics to differentiate the thing being defined from some other, similar thing. To define “chair” as “a piece of furniture” is clearly insufficient since “table” could also be so described. interpretations are not definitions, but they are often similarly insufficient and should be read with skepticism. Philip Monk’s discussion of Paterson Ewen, for example, says virtually nothing about the works themselves (compare autoptic evidence, epiphenomenon) and could thus apply to any number of other things.

INTEGRATED STUDIES: See combined studies.

INTEGRITY: See inexhaustibility by contrast.

INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY: Self-explanatory. It is included here because it is what urges scholars and others to continue to turn up new evidence bearing on matters which may be of little practical consequence in everyday life but which seem to have enormous impact on interpretation. Intellectual curiosity may have begun as some sort of biological drive, but its expression is distinctly cultural (and thus political). As a result, it can be subjected to the critique of institutions. In some instances, intellectual curiosity is outright careerism, particularly where one critic picks apart another’s critique principally because doing so satisfies some criterion of continuing employment in a given academic or other context. In other instances, it is outright intellectual fashion, practiced for prestige or to fit in with the in crowd. There are other possibilities as well, and they need not be negative. Whether the material thus discovered is in any way genuinely useful is a matter to be debated rigorously. For one suggestion as to how this might be done, see hermeneutic spiral equation.

INTELLECTUAL FASHION: Immoderate adherence to theoretical innovation for the sake of appearances, faddishness, sycophancy, and the like. The terrible seductiveness of intellectual fashion is clearly demonstrated every decade or so, when a notable figure publicly repudiates his or her earlier work.

INTENDED READER: A literary term meaning the conceivable type of audience(s) for whom a text was composed. This ranges from the simple, such as a competent native speaker of the language in which the text was written, to the complex, such as a reader with a similar level of education. Interestingly, when an intended viewer is substituted by analogy, that which is most simple becomes that which is most complex: a competent native speaker becomes a competent “native” observer, which opens up all the problems discussed under the heading perceptualism.

INTENDED VIEWER: See intended reader.

INTENSIONAL DEFINITIONS: Definitions which identify the essential qualities that make something a member of a class, using genus (the larger class of things to which something belongs) and differentia (what marks off a thing from the other members of a class). E.g., “a chair is a piece of furniture (genus) with legs supporting a seat and an upright back shaped to accomodate the human form (differentia). “Intensional” is not to be confused with “intentional,” as in intentional evidence, intentional fallacy, intentionalism and intentionality.

INTENTIONAL EVIDENCE: Evidence pertaining to the intentions of an author or artist in creating an artwork. Because of the intentional fallacy, however, the artwork alone cannot be considered among this evidence.

INTENTIONAL FALLACY: The fallacy of determining the meaning or evaluating the achievement of a work of art in terms of the author‘s intentions. The phrase, proposed by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in The Verbal Icon, has been used in recent writing to deny the usefulness of all intentional evidence, in line with the death of the author. However, Wimsatt and Beardsley themselves allowed the author’s own statements into the act of interpretation, provided that these statements were intelligible in ways the work itself was not. (For a critique of this oversimplification, see E. D. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation.) Put more simply, the intentional fallacy means that we cannot construe intentions from the work in the absence of corroborating evidence outside the work. Otherwise, if an artist intended to make a mark resembling “X” but managed to produce “Y” instead, we would make the fallacious assumption that his or her intentions were to make a mark resembling a “Y.”

INTENTIONALISM: Any interpretive strategy that gives priority to the intentions — whether known or inferred — of the artist. For an example, see meaning (sense 2).

INTENTIONALITY: Part of the problem with the issue of intentions in determining the meaning of a work of art is the degree to which a given artist is even conscious of those intentions. E. D. Hirsch (see intentional evidence) feels that the artist’s consciousness of intending something is a crucial factor, but others sidestep the issue by imputing to the work itself a kind of intentionality. After all, if it is possible to discern meaning in the absence of conscious intention — as is the case in Freudian and certain other critical approaches — then it should theoretically be possible to attribute intentionality to the thing itself. See David Couzens Hoy’s The Critical Circle (1982).

INTENTIONS: The real or supposed motives of an artist in making a particular work. The idea is currently is disfavour in the critical community, largely because of the death of the author and the intentional fallacy. However, the need to know or construe an artist’s intentions still seems to be strong among younger art students and the general public. See intentional evidence, intentionalism, intentionality. See also Annabel Patterson’s essay “Intention,” in F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study.

IN(TER)DETERMINACY: A neologism implying a contradictory state of affairs in which the different elements of an utterance help to determine each other’s meaning by a process of mutual inflection (see inflecting), thus constraining meanings to the possibilities offered within the present terms of the utterance (see presence). At the same time, indeterminacy is always acknowledged as a possibility, even within those constraints, so closure can still be avoided.

INTERDISCIPLINARY: A type of study which explores a general theme by adopting methods and theories from several different areas of interest and expertise, usually, though not necessarily, within an academic context. For example, university Women’s Studies programs are typically interdisciplinary, with overlapping courses in art, history, literature, psychology, sociology, etc. “Interdisciplinary” can also refer to the breaking down of the traditional boundaries between media, like drawing and sculpture. This is quite common in the twentieth century, from Archipenko’s sculpto-peinture to Rauschenberg’s “combine paintings” and beyond.

INTERGENERIC: Pertaining to an artwork which belongs to more than one genre.

INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: A literary device for the representation of the uninterrupted flow of consciousness, as in the famous Molly Bloom section of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Visual art has interior monologues of a sort as well, ranging from the turbulent narrative flow of Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de bonté to the agitated self-expression of Jackson Pollock’s all-over paintings.

INTERMEDIA: The use of a variety of media in an interdisciplinary way. This still somewhat fashionable term was first used by Dick Higgins in late 1965 in a context describing what we would now call performance art. See In the Spirit of Fluxus (1993).

INTERMEDIAL: See illustrement. Not to be confused with intermedia.

INTERMODAL: See illustrement.

INTERNALIZED OPPRESSION: The processes by which oppressed groups, particularly women in patriarchal societies, accommodate their society’s definition of them. Although the phrase is not always used, the idea operates in such things as the beauty myth. For a general discussion, see Demaris S. Wehr, Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes.

INTERPELLATION: According to Louis Althusser (see Althusserian), the process by which ideology gives the individual the notion that s/he is a fully integrated, coherent and centred self. Ideology interpellates the concrete “individual” and transforms him or her into a concrete “subject.” The explanation is a metaphor: ideology in effect calls to or hails a real person in the street, and in turning to see who or what is calling, the individual grants a reality to ideology, accepts its fiction, and thus becomes subject to it.

INTERPOLATION: The drawing of a conclusion about some missing information by a process of deduction or induction based on present information. For example, given only the fragmentary statement “Claudel made _____ versions of the work: one she placed in the Hôtel Biron and one she gave to ______,” we can interpolate that Claudel made two versions of the work, but we cannot tell to whom she gave one of them. In its simplest sense, interpolation means that we are able to reconstruct some lost portions of a damaged work, as is routinely done in archaeological reconstruction. On a more complex level, interpolation is one of the stages in the phenomenology of interpretation, since meaning is currently understood as something theoretically infinite produced by a finite number of indications within a text. Compare metaphysics of presence.

INTERPRETABILITY: The degree to which a text, work, or other thing admits of interpretation. Interpretability is an historically relative phenomenon: at one point in time, for example, it would have been taken as a matter of course that high art by definition could be interpreted with greater refinement and a greater yield in meaning than low art. In contemporary postmodern discourse, however, the interpretability of even commercial advertising, to say nothing of kitsch, is often not significantly different from that of fine art.

INTERPRETANT: C. S. Peirce (see Peircean) imagined a triadic relation between every sign, the object to which it referred, and the effect it had upon an intepreter. The latter he called the “interpretant,” which thus can be understood as the meaning or meaning-effect of the other two elements in the triad. C. W. Morris put it more succinctly in Signs, Language and Behavior: “the relationship between linguistic signs and their users.” Paul Ricoeur’s The Conflict of Interpretations develops the notion to undermine the idea that interpretation has anything to do with exegesis: instead, the interpretant is a sign or group of signs which develops the meaning of the first sign and which can be subtituted for it (as in a definition or a symbol). Ricoeur maintains that such a system remains intrasignificant (see extralinguistic). Compare unlimited semiosis.

INTERPRETATIO EXCEDENS: A legal term designating an interpretation that is only loosely related to the evidence at hand. subjective impressionism and all other types of criticism that affectedly read into works of art can be so described.

INTERPRETATION: Standard dictionaries give “interpretation” as the act of setting forth the meaning of something (as in explanation or clarification), the construal of meaning (as in confabulation or interpolation), the translation of material from one form into another (including that done for the purposes of computer programs and the convenience of members of the United Nations), and the manner of performance (as in a particular rendering of music or drama). Generally speaking, postmodern discourse insists that interpretation is a relatively free process of producing meaning in cooperation with a text, rather than simply deriving it slavishly from a work to which one is chained. However, there are exceptions. For example, Mary Ann Caws (“Ladies Shot and Painted,” in S. R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture) maintains that followers of Kristevan lines of thought reject any idea of indebtednesss to the object under investigation, and like practitioners of deconstruction, they are only illustrating their interpretive ingenuity. “Interpretare,” she argues, means “to find oneself indebted to, based on the derivation of “inter” from the Latin for “amidst, among, between, during, mutually, reciprocally, together,” and the derivation of “pretation” from the Latin “praesto” for “at hand, present, ready.” Interpretation which fails to acknowledge indebtedness to the text bears a relation to it similar to the relation between a written piece of music and an improvisation, thus implying that many contemporary modes of interpretation are closest to the last meaning, the manner of performance (see also literacy). Just as some free jazz departs rather forcibly from the tunes that inspire it, improvisatory interpretation so understood depends more heavily on the self-expression of the performer than the author (see also death of the author). This is fine, but it tends to undermine its legitimacy as a historical undertaking in the view of conventional art history. (The reasoning is: if it is true that some of what passes as free jazz, especially in the semi-professional community, is interpretively meagre self-indulgence, then the same could be said of some criticism.) In any case, Caws’s etymology differs from that of many standard dictionaries, which give “pretation” as a derivation from the Latin “pret(ium)” for “price, value, worth,” thus putting more emphasis on evaluation than indebtedness. See also illustrement, interpretant, interpretatio excedens, interpretatio predestinata, interpretatio restricta, interpretive agnosia, interpretive community, interpretive web. See also Steven Mailloux’s essay “Interpretation,” in F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study. See also self.

INTERPRETATIO PREDESTINATA: A legal term designating an overly biased interpretation (i.e., one that emphasizes only the evidence tending to prove something the interpreter has already decided about).

INTERPRETATIO RESTRICTA: A legal term designating a very strict interpretation (i.e., one that sticks very close to material evidence and objectively verifiable presumptions).

INTERPRETER: One who performs an interpretation.

INTERPRETIVE AGNOSIA: Agnosia is a mental deficiency, usually caused by serious brain injury, leading to the inability to attach appropriate meaning to sense-data. “Appropriate” here means that something is to be recognized objectively, with no role played by interpretive ingenuity. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat describes a number of clinical cases in which patients were, for example, unable to identify their own feet or recognize that a face was in fact a face. Is there a non-medical analogy to be drawn here between agnosia and acts of interpretation which refuse to be indebted to the texts they supposedly investigate? Consider, for example, the case of a well-intended group of young male students at an American ivy league school: conducting their own seminar to enlighten other young men to the rampant sexism in their community, they showed slides of explicit hard-core bondage, saying “this is exactly the same as such-and- such an image in mainstream soft-core pornography,” usually an example featuring a model adopting a similar pose. The statement, however, is patently untrue. There are differences in directly observable formal features like lighting and composition; the quality of reproductive technology; the photographic techniques involved; the training, motivations, skills, etc. of the photographers and support staff; the implied readers of the work; and the types of women who would choose to pose (or be coerced into posing) for such material. None of these justifies objectification, but it indicates that any interpretation may be seriously flawed. (In other words, the conclusion may be true even though the argument is invalid. See validity [sense 1].) The task before us, then, is to establish a workable set of criteria to determine what distinguishes a good interpretation from a bad one. See also indulgence or indictment, misreading.

INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY: Any identifiable social formation or subcomponent thereof which shares certain values or a horizon of expectations can be identified as an interpretive (or interpretative) community. An individual viewer does not merely receive an artist‘s meaning in the form of an unequivocal message carried along a channel. Instead, s/he “presuppose[s] the company of others who are also looking at it…[and] continually reconstructing it — a community of viewers,” in the words of Michael Parsons (How We Understand Art). Credit for the invention of the term usually goes to Stanley Fish.

INTERPRETIVE INGENUITY: An act of interpretation which places greater emphasis on its own cleverness, inventiveness, originality, or resourcefulness than it places on the work which it interprets. Most contemporary critical modes which share as their point of departure the death of the author have some degree of interpretive ingenuity.

INTERPRETIVE WEB: Any of several models of interpretation which attempt to be exhaustive without evoking closure, especially one which is determined to exploit all categories of content, context, and form, even when contradictory results are obtained. See hermeneutic spiral, hermeneutic spiral equation, in(ter)determinacy. Compare “webs of significance” in stratigraphic fallacy and thick description.

INTERROGATION: The act of questioning someone or something. In many postmodern contexts, the term is nearly synonymous with intervention.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY: Pertaining to the unfettered exchange of the contents of consciousness conceived not as the one-way dissemination of objective knowledge but as the mutual communication of subjects’ (sense 2) responses to experience. See dialectic of intersubjectivity, illustrement.

INTERTEXT: One of the texts modifying another text in intertextuality.

INTERTEXTUALITY: Term proposed by Julia Kristeva in La Révolution du langage poétique to describe the way a single work can actually consist of several texts and/or the transposition of one set of signs into another. Kristeva described it as a text conceived as a “mosaic of quotations…, [an] absorption and transformation of another text.” It is a specific type of coextension in which a variety of diverse meanings overlap and interrelate within a text in ways unforeseen by its author. The idea is similar to multiple locatedness (see inexhaustibility by contrast) but for the fact that it really entails only one “location.” Intertextuality has been expanded (if not misconstrued) by subsequent writers like Wendy Steiner (The Colors of Rhetoric) to mean the interrelations between a work of visual art and its title, works and their sources and influences, and/or multiple contemporary works. The very old art historical notion that an artist learns not from nature but from earlier art is a rudimentary expression of this expanded sense of intertextuality.

INTERVENTION: The refusal, subversion or re- negotiation of received meanings, usually because those doing the intervening believe such meanings to be enforced by political power or general consensus, which is of course determined by ideology. Intervention is standard practice in numerous manifestations of contemporary culture, from feminist revisionism to punk bricolage.

INTOLERANCE: Inability or unwillingness to grant or to share equal rights and privileges. Both sides of the debate on political correctness accuse the other of intolerance. For example, there have been many instances of hypocrisy in which one side literally shouts down the other, in spite of its own claims to freedom of expression. Oddly, even those who made the first politically correct agendas have sometimes been attacked by a second generation. Edward Said (see orientalism) described such an instance in “The Politics of Knowledge,” Raritan (Summer 1991).

INTRAMEDIAL: See illustrement.

INTRASIGNIFICANT: In classical linguistics, relations of mutual interpretation between signs without necessarily making reference to some external object. The idea is central to Baudrillardean thought. For a critical application, see extralinguistic.

INTRIGUE: A subcategory of genre (sense 2), meaning any representation placing emphasis on collusion, scheming, and trickery, as in Fragonard’s portrayals of the progress of courtly love.

INTRINSIC: Inherent; innate; characteristic of a thing by its very nature. Some art historians maintain a traditional distinction between instrinsic and extrinsic approaches to the work of art. W. Eugene Kleinbauer, for example, anthologized writings on form and iconography as intrinsic, separating them from writings on psychology, society and the history of ideas as extrinsic. Few of the more adventuresome critics working today maintain the distinction.

INTROVERSION: See personality types. See also http://www.geocities.com/~netsparrow/intro/intro.htm.

INTRUSIVE NARRATOR: A narrator who interrupts a narrative in order to offer commentaries of various sorts.

INVALIDITY: In informal logic, an argument is invalid if its conclusion does not follow necessarily from its premises, or if lacks relevance and/or sufficiency. See irrelevance.

INVERTED CONSCIOUSNESS: See false consciousness.

INVISIBLE HAND: Adam Smith maintained that a businessman was not a mere profiteer because he was “led by an invisible hand to promote an end that was no part of his intention” — i.e., promoting the interests of society. In Art in America (July 1988), Carter Ratcliff reworked the idea to illustrate how art dealers subtly convey the image that they too provide a cultural benefit above and beyond mere marketing.

IRRELEVANCE: Premises which do not increase the probability of the claim they are intended to support. The classic types of contextual irrelevance are the red herring and the straw man (or straw figure). The former is an inappropriate shift in the boundaries of an issue through the introduction of an irrelevant consideration, as might be the case if one alluded to Margaret Bourke-White’s bank account in a discussion of her photographic composition. The latter is the incorrect or inadequate representation of an opponent’s position to make a rebuttal more effective, as when beginning lecturers overplay the negative criticism of Impressionism to make it seem heroically above the average crowd.

IRONY: A trope in which the latent meaning is the opposite of the manifest meaning or markedly different from it. Irony is a particularly slippery trope, for an apparently bald statement of fact can be turned upside down by something as simple as a slight inflection of the voice. This is also true of imagery, although there are unequivocal instances as well. An untitled work of 1969 by Shusaku Arakawa bears the text “I have decided to leave this canvas completely blank,” invoking a certain type of irony. A more straightforward example is a photograph of the Isle of Fun, Skating Rink, Grand Island, Nebraska (1975), by Lynne Cohen (reproduced in Penny Cousineau, The Banff Purchase: An Exhibition of Photography in Canada. Toronto: Wiley and Sons, 1979, unpaginated). It shows a vast, empty skating rink, with no-one having the kind of fun depicted in the advertising on the walls. One of the more blatant examples is a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of Afro-Americans standing in a bread line directly under a billboard stating “America — Highest Standard of Living in the World.” Irony is not synonymous with “coincidence.” See aporia, apophasis, dramatic irony, litotes, tragic irony.

ISM: 1. A back formation from words with the suffix “ism,” indicating a distinctive doctrine, system, theory, etc. 2. In art history, a period designation, often but not necessarily ending in “ism,” whether that period is determined by stylistic (e.g., Impressionism), iconographical (postmodernism), chronological (Early Renaissance), or other criteria.

“IS” OF ARTISTIC IDENTIFICATION: Arthur Danto’s term (in “The Artworld,” The Journal of British Philosophy [1964]) to distinguish the “is” of identity (he is a printmaker), the “is” of predication (he is tall), and the “is” of representation (he [e.g., a mortal actor] is a god) from an “is” which identifies an object as a work of art. Saying that a particular blob of paint “is” Icarus is not the same as saying that it “represents” Icarus, he argues. The word “Icarus” is an arbitrary device which “represents” Icarus, yet we would not point to the word and say “That (word) is Icarus” in the same sense that the blob is Icarus. The idea might be rephrased inelegantly as the “is” that can constitute any object as a work of art simply by virtue of the decision to do so. The notion was clearly influential in the early years of conceptual art. Danto developed related ideas in his later transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cf artworld.

ISOGLOSS: A boundary differentiating linguistic features.

ISOLATING: See agglutinating, inflecting, isolating.

ISOMORPHISM: Literally, isomorphism means “different in ancestry but having the same shape.” Figuratively, practitioners of artwriting use it to mean “different signifiers which have the same meaning (i.e., signified).” E.g., in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding, the detail of a dog (a symbol of faith) is an isomorph to the overall theme of the picture, the faithfulness of marriage. For another application, see narrative analysis.

ISOTOPY: Following A. J. Greimas’s La Sémantique structurelle, Paul Ricoeur’s The Conflict of Interpretations grapples with how the appearance of homogeneous meaning is produced by a text. Greimas had spoken of the sifting effect of contextual variables. In “a dog barks,” for example, the second and third words have an unstated contextual variable in common, “animal,” which serves to strain out other possibilities (like the bark of a tree). A simple statement like this produces an impression of consistent meaning (which Ricoeur called the “meaning effect”) because the contextual variable works to bring the possibilities to the same place, as it were. “Iso-” is Greek for “same” or “equal,” while “topy” derives from topos, “place.” The isotopy of an utterance is thus the “location” of the contextual constraints upon meaning. In more complex systems of signs, as in a work of literature or an artwork, there are many contextual variables, making it difficult to choose between parallel (and sometimes competing) isotopies. This is the origin of polysemy. (See also “multiple locatedness” under the heading inexhaustibility by contrast).

JAMMING: See culture jamming.

JARGON: Pierre Bourdieu has argued that academic jargon, which he says imagines itself to be objective and value-free (see value-freedom), has meanings it is not aware of, and that its self-image as liberal humanism disguises its history of oppressing marginal groups. Cf illiberal education.

JEU: French term for play.

JINGLE: Dictionaries of literary terms often include “jingle,” a short, infectious verse set to music for advertising purposes, in order to distinguish it from “literature” proper. Is there a visual equivalent of the jingle?

JOUISSANCE: The usual English translation, “enjoyment,” does not carry the sexually orgasmic connotation that the French does in addition to the idea of taking pleasure in something. In Lacanian circles, jouissance is distinguished from pleasure ( plaisir) in that the latter indicates simply the search for psychic balance ( homeostasis) through the release of tension, whereas the former is supposed to be a perpetual state in violation of the pleasure principle. There is thus an implicit analogy drawn between demand and desire. See transgression. Julia Kristeva (see Kristevan) offers a slight development and a bit of wordplay: she uses plaisir for sexual pleasure and jouissance (or j’ouïs sens, “I heard meaning”) as total joy due to the presence of meaning.

JUDICIAL CRITICISM: Any of several types of criticism sharing the goal of judgement of a work, as connoisseurship is thought to judge quality. The criteria that the work is supposed to meet vary widely, however.

JUNGIAN: Pertaining to the theories of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. See Jungian criticism.

JUNGIAN CRITICISM: Criticism infleunced by Jungian ideas, principally the role of the colllective unconscious in the determination of cultural behaviour. Every individual participates in two psychic streams, one personal and one supposedly sharing psychic constants (see anima, archetype) with everyone else. The emphasis in practical Jungian writing, however, often ends up on the latter of these two streams, leading some opponents to describe Jungian approaches as essentialist (see essentialism). See also myth, presentiment.

JUVENILIA: Artworks produced during the artist‘s youth. In literary studies, “juvenilia” usually implies a degre of artistic immaturity. In art history, some juvenilia is considered prodigious (i.e., produced by a prodigy, as in the case of Gianlorenzo Bernini, Michelangelo Buonarroti, John Everett Millais, or Pablo Picasso).

JUXTAPOSITION: A placing of objects, images, etc., side by side. The term is particularly common in writings on Surrealism: there, because the practice was used with emphasis on the irrationality of the things juxtaposed, it sometimes seems to have an extra connotation of weirdness or inappropriateness. See, for example, the work of the Surrealist precursor Giorgio de Chirico or any Surrealist object by Salvador Dalí or Man Ray. The Surrealists’ fascination with the practice can be traced to their interest in the obscure nineteenth century poet Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), whose famous example of it was “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.” In non-Surrealist contexts, the term is devoid of this connotation.

KANTIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of Immanuel Kant. See autonomy, formalism, idealism, modernism, synthetic a priori.

KENOSIS: A process of draining, evacuating, lowering, relinquishing, surrendering, or yielding, as when Christ lowered Himself from divine to human form. Harold Bloom (see anxiety of influence, misreading) uses the term as a trope amalgamating the senses of bassesse and bathos.

KING RICHARD EFFECT: Occasionally an erroneous characterization of a person, thing or event is so compelling that it persists in the popular imagination long after it has been rendered implausible or even disproven. The phrase derives from the popular conception of England’s Richard III as the evil kidnapper and murderer of his nephews Edward V, true heir to the throne, and Richard, in spite of some revisionists’ descriptions of the story as anti-York propaganda produced by Tudor supporters. (Paul Delaroche made a well-known painting depicting their incarceration in Windsor Castle.) The phrase has since been applied to anything which specialists recognize as popular myth or error. There are numerous instances in art history. Some are misconceptions fostered by Hollywood distortions, as in the case of people who are convinced that Kirk Douglas’s portrayal of Van Gogh in Lust for Life is historically reliable. Others are caused by overemphasis on selective portions of the historical record, as in the case of the negative critical reception of early Impressionism. (For revision of the latter, see Paul Hayes Tucker, “Monet and the Bourgeois Dream,” in Benjamin Buchloh, et al, eds., Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers).

KITSCH: Variously translated as “artistic rubbish” or “gaudy trash,” kitsch derives from an old German word meaning “to throw together,” according to some dictionaries. The word thus means any artwork which is thrown together chiefly to satisfy popular taste, rather than to state anything of high moral value or to advance a new aesthetic. In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review (1939), Clement Greenberg wrote that “Kitsch…welcomes and cultivates…insensibility…and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations…. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.” That is, much of what popular culture preferred — plastic Madonnas, Disneyland, Muzak, hamburger stands shaped like hamburgers — is what Greenberg dismissed. Since Dada and Pop Art succeeded in making use of the imagery and materials of daily life, however, the boundary between kitsch and high art has become increasingly indistinct. Some artists, like Jeff Koons, quite consciously manipulate kitsch, although critics seem divided as to the significance of their actions.

KNOWLEDGE: See epistemology. In Lacanian contexts, “knowledge” is ambiguous: it can indicate knowledge within the Imaginary (from the original French connaissance), or it can indicate knowledge within the Symbolic (from the original French savoir), neither of which means “knowledge” in the common sense of being objectively right or wrong about a thing.

KNOWLEDGE TESTING: See translation.

KRISTEVAN: Pertaining to the ideas of French thinker Julia Kristeva, herself influenced strongly by Lacanian ideas, and her followers. See author, disruption, grammatology, intertextuality, jouissance, other, semanalysis, semiotics, signifiance, signifying practice, split subject, unary subject.

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Postmodern terms – UNARY SUBJECT to ZIGGURAT:

These Postmodern definitions are a useful gauge to see how academics construct their sentences. The list is compiled by theorists who have set their own standards to the meaning of each word and its terms. It may be wise to double check on the usage to see if the word actually exists in a precise contemporary dictionary

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UNARY SUBJECT: Julia Kristeva’s term for the erroneous notion that consciousness is some sort of unified whole. At best, she regards it as a momentary blockage of the disruptive (see disruption) drives characteristic of the real psyche, evident in the split subject.

UNBIDDEN: Un-commissioned works produced on spec, as it were.

UNCANNY: Sigmund Freud (see Freudian) discussed E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 tale “The Sandman” in terms of a state of psychic estrangement or disquieting strangeness, to which he gave the name “the Uncanny.” (The German source word, Unheimlichkeit, breaks down roughly into “un-home-like-ness.”) The first artist to consciously cultivate this type of anxiety as an aesthetic thrill is said to be Giorgio de Chirico, who felt that the silence, solitude and obscurity of deserted Italian piazze gave rise to a curious amalgam of aesthetic sentiment and psychic distress. (See Jean Clair, “Metafisica et Unheimlichkeit,” in Les Réalismes, 1919-39 [Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 17 December, 1980-20 April, 1981], pp. 26-34.) De Chirico preferred to use the word presentiment, but his confusion of animate and inanimate — he described statues in public places as particularly evocative because they seemed to have the potential to rise and enter the world of men, especially at twilight — is precisely what Freud had described as the primary criterion for the generation of the Uncanny. The supposed leader of the Surrealists, André Breton, developed the notion into his doctrine of convulsive beauty — i.e., that beauty had to have a certain shock value to qualify as genuine. More recently, with the increasing influence of Freudian and related terminology (see jargon) in contemporary artwriting, the Uncanny pops up in descriptions of many works which are marginally disturbing. Specific examples include Mark Cheetham’s comments on painter Alice Mansell in his Remembering Postmodernism and David Garneau’s “Wyn Geleynse: Images on the Tip of the Tongue,” in Wyn Geleynse (Calgary: Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta College of Art, 1994), p. 13, and the term could easily be employed when discussing the works of Fuss, Lukacs, Serrano, and many others.

UNDERPAINTING: Artlex gives this: “Underpainting: The layer or layers of color on a painting surface applied before the overpainting, or final coat. There are many types of underpainting. One type is an all-over tinting of a white ground. Another is a blocked out image in diluted oil colors that serves as a guide for the painter while developing the composition and color effects.

UNDERSTATEMENT: A statement that is restrained in ironic contrast to what might have been said

UNHEIMLICHKEIT: See Uncanny.

UNIQUE AESTHETIC EMOTION: Clive Bell’s vague conception of the rarefied sentiment experienced when examining a true work of art. The conception does not hold up well under close inspection.

UNIVERSAL HUMAN INTEREST: Many canons appear to have been constructed with the idea that certain things — works of literature or art — are of such great quality that they belong to no particular time and place or no specific ethnic group or culture. They are thus granted the status of timelessness, in which case they are supposed to be of universal human interest. The critique of institutions, multiculturalism, political correctness, and postmodernism in general all deny that such a state exists, apart from those political situations in which groups in power seek to control knowledge in order to suppress other groups. In such an instance, what appears to be timeless is actually pseudotranshistorical.

UNIVERSALISM: The theological doctrine that all people will eventually be saved

UNLIMITED SEMIOSIS: A hypothetically infinite process by which one sign or set of signs can take the place of another sign or set of signs which in turn can be replaced by yet another sign or set of signs, and so on. Without such polysemy, artists and poets would soon run out of figurative images like tropes. The inexhaustible production of new meanings that results is a key concept in the semiotics of Umberto Eco and in deconstruction.

UNPACK: Occasionally used as a synonym for “analyze” or “deconstruct” in the context of deconstruction . That is, to unpack something is to reveal its layers of hidden meaning.

UTILITARIANISM: Webster’s gives this: “A doctrine that the useful is the good and that the determining consideration of right conduct should be the usefulness of its consequences; specifically, a theory that the aim of action should be the largest possible balance of pleasure over pain or the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

UTOPIA: A perfect, remote and almost unthinkably ideal “place” (construed as a location, an era, a political state, or even a state of mind) and therefore the opposite of dystopia. Pictorial instances of utopian scenes are fairly commonplace, ranging from Arcadian vistas of the golden age (Greco-Roman wall paintings, some of the landscapes of Poussin and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, etc.) to almost bizarre visions of an afterlife (Girodet’s Ossian Receiving the Napoleonic Officers [1802] comes to mind). There are even picture cycles which show both ends of the spectrum, as in Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire (1836), which moves from prehistory through a utopian phase towards inevitable, dystopian desolation.

UTTERANCE: The use of uttered sounds for auditory communication

VALIDITY: 1. In informal logic, validity is determined by whether or not the conclusion of an argument follows necessarily from its premises. If the premises of a valid analytic argument are true, the conclusion must be true. If the premises of a synthetic argument are true, relevant, and sufficient, the conclusion is likely to be true. Note that an argument may be structurally valid even if one of the premises is untrue. In the syllogism “Picasso was a painter; painters are wild and irreverent; therefore, Picasso was wild and irreverent,” it is undemonstrable that all artists are wild and irreverent. So the argument is untrue even though it is valid. Similarly, an argument that is invalid (see invalidity) may happen to be true, as in “Roumanian artists speak Roumanian; Picasso was not a Roumanian artist; therefore, Picasso did not speak Roumanian.” The conclusion is not certified by the premises. It is conceivable that a non-Roumanian artist could speak Roumanian, although we happen to know in this instance that he did not. Obviously, the best argument is going to be both valid and true. 2. In a widely read book entitled Validity in Interpretation, E. D. Hirsch argued against what has become the standard postmodern disclosure of multiple meanings (polysemy) by asserting that certain interpretations were more valid than others, particularly those which allowed the author, rather than the work and/or its affect on the audience, to have authority in the determination of meaning. See authorial ignorance, authorial irrelevance, authorial responsibility, meaning, meaning in and meaning to, read into, significance.

VANITAS: The general term applied to a category of subject matter (see content) expressing the folly of vanity and the belief in the permanence of healthy existence, beauty, and the like. Vanitas themes include such things as beautiful young women confronting death in the form of a skeletal figure (e.g., Anton Wiertz), figures meditating over skulls or skeletons (Georges De La Tour), withering flowers (a host of seventeenth century Dutch still-life artists), children blowing bubbles (Chardin, Paul Peel), and so on. The category is one of the more common in all of pre-modern Western art history.

VARIORUM: An edition containing various versions of a text or notes by various scholars or editors

VATIC: Resembling or characteristic of a prophet or prophecy

VAUDEVILLE: A variety show with songs and comic acts etc.

VAULT: Any of various types of arched ceiling (see arch). A “barrel” vault is like an arch increased in depth to create a simple tunnel. While quite effective for some purposes, the disadvantage of a barrel vault is that any penetration of it, as for windows, weakens its ability to withstand thrust. This disadvantage is alleviated when two or more barrel vaults are run into each other to create a “groin” vault (so called because of the complicated geometry of the intersections): there, the weakness of the one barrel is compensated for by the other. A “ribbed” vault articulates the edges of the intersections with stone work creating a segmental effect. A “fan” vault is an exceedingly complicated, essentially decorative ribbing that resembles a fan or, in some extremely elaborate instances, lace-work. The history of vault development determines to a great extent the evolution of innumerable other architectural details. See, for example, buttress. See also wall

VECTORS: A variable quantity that can be resolved into components.

VEHICLE: In the literary theory of I. A. Richards, the means by which a metaphor exploits something familiar (the vehicle) in order to convey poetically an adequate impression of something unfamiliar (the tenor). For an example, see vehicle shift.

VEHICLE SHIFT: By analogy with paradigm shift, a vehicle shift is the point at which certain types of vehicle become too much of a cliché to operate effectively in the production of expressive metaphor. For example, the standard vanitas vehicles had become so conventional by the early nineteenth century that those indifferent to academic thought sought new vehicles for old tenors in natural appearances. For example, Théodore Rousseau’s Under the Birches, Evening might appear at first glance to be a simple scene of a grove of trees, but it also implies a narrative about the cycle of life and the inevitability of change. The phenomenon of vehicle shift allows one to circumnavigate easily the apparent paradox of Courbet’s title The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory….

VERIFICATION: Karl Popper argued that nothing could ever be proven true once and for all, since no-one could ever be sure that there was no exception to the rule. A statement like “all swans are white” would only appear to be true to those who had never seen a black one. Popper concluded that the scientific method could not proceed by verification but only by falsification. That is, one would know the statement “all swans are white” was false as soon as one saw a black swan. See also corroboration, plausibility, testability, and validity.

VERISIMILITUDE: The degree to which something seems to be true; used of the putative accuracy of a representation. Cf naturalism, representation.

VERNACULAR: A common popular or regional variation from international, academic, or other “accepted” standard usage in language, architecture, etc.

VICTIMARCHY: Word coined by Warren Farrell in The Myth of Male Power to describe a society which conceives of its members as victims — perpetually unable to direct their own affairs or to control their own destinies. In other words, both men and women are victims of patriarchy. See new masculinity.

VIGNETTE: A photograph whose edges shade off gradually

VIRTUAL: Existing in essence or effect though not in actual fact

VISIGOTHS IN TWEED: Derogatory synonym for the cultural left coined for use in the popular media by Dinesh D’Souza.

VISIONARY MODE OF ARTISTIC CREATION: In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C. G. Jung distinguished between two modes of artistic creation, the psychological and the visionary. The former is common and unremarkable because the artist simply interprets and illuminates the contents of consciousness — rational or not — in such a manner that the result is intelligible to an audience. The visionary, in contrast, derives material from the primordial realm of the archetypes in the collective unconscious, so that the result is astonishing, confusing, frightening, or even disgusting. The presumption here is that the visionary artist is “called to a greater task than the ordinary mortal,” which many postmodernists find an objectionable idea.

VISUAL AGNOSIA: See interpretive agnosia.

VISUAL CULTURE: The body of cultural artifacts which are experienced principally through vision, without the traditional academic separation between high and low culture. Books which deal with visual culture are as comfortable discussing film stills, advertisements, political posters, graffitti and the like as they are works of fine art. More importantly, perhaps, the terminology and conceptual assumptions about the ways in which meanings are produced are the same. A notable example is W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

VITAL IMPORT: Suzanne Langer’s conception of art as presentational symbols precludes fixed, determinate content, so she replaces the notion of conclusive meaning with vital import, which is the non-objective communication of emotional significance. This is similar to Barthes’ notion of the third or obtuse meaning (see signifiance).

VITALISM: (philosophy) a doctrine that life is a vital principle distinct from physics and chemistry

VOICE: Something suggestive of speech in being a medium of expression

VULGAR: 1. See vernacular. 2. Coarse, lacking in cultivated manners or taste, as in vulgar arts (see liberal arts). 3. Facile and superficial, when applied as an adjective to certain critical methodologies, especially Marxism. There, it derives from Marx’s use of the phrase “vulgar economics” in Das Kapital, by which he meant a simple study of rather cosmetic phenomena, often veiling an implicit defense of the bourgeois status quo. The antonym would be “authentic Marxism.”

WAINSCOTTING: Decorative panelling on interior walls, usually confined to the lower half.

WALL: In architecture, any of a variety of upright structures whose length is many times greater than its thickness and the purpose of which is either support or enclosure. The former, typical in most eras except the High Gothic and the Modern, carries the weight of whatever rests upon it, like the upper stories of a building or a vault. Such a structure is said to be a “bearing” wall, because it bears a load. Examples of the latter include free-standing barriers (like the Great Wall of China) and enclosures which bear loads by other mechanisms (as in the High Gothic and Modern periods of architectural history, when the load tended to be taken up by columns, or slender vertical elements functioning like them, in stone, iron or steel, rather than by the wall itself). In such a case, the wall is little more than a skin of glass serving principally to separate one space from another and so is called a “screen” or “curtain wall.” Examples of curtain walls range, then, from Cologne Cathedral to the shop block of the Bauhaus.

WAMPUM: Beads, usually of shell, strung together and used as a decorative means of exchange in some aboriginal North American cultures.

WANT-TO-BE: See lack, manque-à-être.

WARBURG: See iconology, Pathosformel, topos.

WARM COLOUR: Reds and yellows and their intermediaries (i.e., oranges) are conventionally referred to as warm colours, ostensibly by virtue of their resemblance to the natural hue of fire and other hot things. Warm colours are said to advance — i.e., to draw towards the foreground of an image — and so are said to be generally opposed to the temperature and movement of cool colour. The effect can be both visual and emotional — see, for example, Leighton’s Flaming June — but it is strongly dependent upon any number of other formal features.

WASH: A layer of thinned colour applied by brush, often rapidly, to roughly block in and/or model forms in paintings, watercolours, and some drawings. Famous applications range from colourful watercolour notes, as in the Moroccan sketchbooks of Delacroix, to the colourless but equally adept modelling in Tiepolo drawings.

WATERCOLOUR: Pigment in a water soluble medium, handled as a wash. Most watercolours are quite translucent and exploit effects peculiar to the medium, like reserve highlights and the appearance of spontaneous and rapid execution (see, for example, Turner’s deft sketches of the British Parliament in flames). See also body colour.

WEBS OF SIGNIFICANCE: See interpretive web, stratigraphic fallacy, thick description.

WELTANSCHAUUNG: The mind-set , outlook, or “world-view” of a particular group, whether aesthetic, ethnic, political, social, etc. Weltanschauungen are usually limited in scope to readily identifiable historical, geographical, ethnic and other entities. See Geistesgeschichte .

WESTERN: 1. Pertaining to the culture, history and values of the Occidental world, especially Europe and North America. The western mind-set, for example, has been characterized as patriarchal, racist and rationalistic. (Such a viewpoint, of course, oversimplifies egregiously.) 2. In literature, film and theatre, works dealing with the western United States of the nineteenth-century, along with its trademark themes of “cowboys and Indians,” pioneering and expansionism, etc. One of the more notable Western artists is Frederick Remington.

WHORF HYPOTHESIS: In Language, Thought and Reality, part-time linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf formulated the notion that language was a function of the mind existing prior to our experience of reality, in a sense, thus shaping the external world in a fundamental way. Accordingly, speakers of a given language are parties to a binding agreement about reality, whereas speakers of a different language exist in a different reality, as it were. While the theory, also called linguistic relativity, was quite popular in the 1950s, it was discredited in 1969. One of the examples used to point out Whorf’s misconception was a discussion of the famous idea that Inuit peoples have a large number of terms for snow: since English has only one, the Inuit supposedly thus experienced the world as much richer and more variegated. This, of course, is wrong, for English distinguishes sleet, hail, slush, etc., not to mention the complex meteorological vocabulary that accompanies such terms. Interestingly, another of the debunking examples was a discussion of colour terminology in various languages, which apparently followed nearly identical structural patterns. By 1991, however, the idea was being reinvestigated (Scientific American [February 1992]), perhaps under the influence of generalized postmodern notions of cultural difference. However, many new theories seem to take it for granted that language is formative of experience. See, e.g., Lacanian.

WOMAN AS THE NOT-YET: Luce Irigaray challenges gender essentialism by arguing that woman is not biologically determined but is caught up in ceaselessly changing cultural productions of gendered meanings. It is possible to negate these productions as they arise, but it is not possible to fix the feminine, so woman is “woman as the not-yet.”

XENOPHILIA: Love of the foreign or unfamiliar.

XENOPHOBIA: Irrational fear or hatred of anything foreign or unfamiliar, especially other social or ethnic groups.

ZEITGEIST: In Geistesgeschichte, the Zeitgeist is the spirit of the times Zeit meaning time and Geist (akin to “ghost”) meaning spirit, intellect and other ephemeral aspects of the psyche. As such, the term is usually taken to mean the general trend of thought or sentiment which supposedly circulates through all the cultural productions of an identifiable era. For example, the Zeitgeist of the Neoclassical period has been characterized as rationalism, whereas that of the Romantic period is sentiment. The Zeitgeist of the early modern period may have been faith in salvation through technological advancement, whereas that of the postmodern period would be disdain for such expressions of certainty in general. Because the identification of a Zeitgeist tends to obliterate difference and imply a degree of essentialism, it is safe to say that postmodern thought in general distrusts it.

ZEUGMA: Use of a word to govern two or more words though appropriate to only one

ZIGGURAT: A pyramid with stepped, rather than sloped, sides.

ZOOMORPHIC: An object having the attributes of an animal.

Go to listings: A-C  D-G H-K L-N O-R S-T U-Z

Postmodern terms – SACCADE to TYPOLOGICAL STUDY

These Postmodern definitions are a useful gauge to show how academics construct their sentences in Artspeak. The list is compiled by theorists who have set their own standards to the meaning of each word and its terms. It may be wise to double check on the usage to see if the word actually exists in a precise contemporary dictionary.

Postmodern Terminology: A-C D-G H-K L-N O-R S-T U-Z

SACCADE: The movement of the eye from one fixation point to another. For an application peculiar to visual semiotics, see coloreme.

SACRED: Much art has been preoccupied in varying degrees throughout its history with the sacred — conceived as the quintessential identifying characteristic of all divinity, holiness, saintliness, sanctity, and the like — but there has recently been a very sharp turn towards a conception of the sacred deriving from the writings of Emil Durkheim and, more aggressively, Georges Bataille (see Bataillean). Describing the sacred as the “wholly other” (see ganz Andere) — i.e., that which is of so fundamentally different an order from common existence that we cannot even describe it — Bataille argued that the sacred therefore springs from the same sources as those things we conventionally find vile, like ritual sacrifice, bodily mutilation, all manner of transgressive activities, and even excrement. (He also notes in passing that this dual nature of the sacred explains why we fear spirits and death: logically, if the sacred were only positive, we would welcome such things.) Among other things, Bataille wrote about art and artists, and he had a particular fascination for sacredness revealed in the grotesque. For example, he reproduced Precolumbian images showing sacrifical rituals, and his discussion about Vincent van Gogh was more about about self-mutilation than painting. For Bataille’s methodological spin, see especially heterology.

SALVAGE PARADIGM: A general mode of operation in which a dominant culture, usually Eurocentric, perceives a subordinate culture as dead or dying and attempts to save or salvage it from oblivion. In so doing, the dominant culture usually distorts, mystifies, mythologizes or destroys the other culture. The paradigm figures in much discussion of the treatment of native art by Western trained artist like Emily Carr. See Marcia Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art. Ed. Stan Douglas. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991. See also James Clifford, “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the Salvage Paradigm,” in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay, 1987: 122.

SAMPLING: Technology now permits musicians to make digital recordings of any sound and play them back, thus emulating (see emulation) any combination of instruments or noises, with or without further electronic manipulation. The technique is interesting relative to the history of art for several reasons. Futurist painter Luigi Russolo once wrote a manifesto of music as a new “art of noise,” and he even designed technologically primitive forerunners of today’s digital samplers. (”Art of Noise” was also the name of a popular music group of the 1980s relying heavily on sampling.) Sampling also raises the question of copyright or intellectual property and has given rise to several legal cases. Similar issues could be discussed re Jeff Koons’ or Sherri Levine’s appropriation.

SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS: See Whorf Hypothesis.

SAUSSUREAN: Pertaining to the influential notions of French linguist Fernand de Saussure. See langue and parole, linguistics, reference, semiotics, sign, signified, signifier.

SAVOIR: Lacanian term for knowledge within the symbolic.

SAYING: A word or phrase that particular people use in particular situations

SCHEMA: In Art and Illusion, E. H. Gombrich coined the word “schema” to refer to a diagrammatic depiction of an object or arrangement in space — something along the lines of what we would now call a wireframe drawing — but he also used the word generically to refer to any formulas or standardized devices which could quickly solve pictorial problems. The latter sense is now the most widespread. Although viewers are typically able to identify these devices when asked, they conventionally suppress their awareness of them in order to experience a coherent illusion. A classic example is the shot/reverse shot formula used to depict a conversation in a narrative film. If we think of each view as hypothetically placing the viewer in a particular space, as does illusionistic painting in perspective, then this schema rips viewers from place to place, as it were, yet no one objects.

SCIENTIFICITY: A synonym for disinterestedness .

SCOPIC PULSION: An irresistible urge to look.

SCOPOPHILIA: The love of looking which underlies and colours much putatively disinterested critical inquiry into visual culture. See desire, erotic-for-women , gaze and glance, libidinally driven , scopophobia.

SCOPOPHOBIA: The fear of looking, as in castration.

SCOTOMA: An isolated area of diminished vision within the visual field

SCREEN WALL: See wall.

SCRIPTION: See écriture .

SCRIPTO-VISUAL: Imagery which has characteristics of both visual art and writing. It could refer to everything from calligraphy (which means “beautiful writing” and would include Islamic illuminations, Irish bibles, and homilies of the sort you see in gift shops) to “calligraphy-like” imagery (itself ranging from pseudo-writing in visual art, as in Cy Twombly, to actual, legible writing, as in much contemporary feminist autobiographical art, like Mary Kelly, Mary Scott). Frankly, I wonder if the reliance on the written word isn’t largely due to a failure of the visual imagination, but I’d be happy to be wrong about that.

SCULPTURE IN THE ROUND:

The opportunities for free spatial design that such freestanding sculpture presents are not always fully exploited. The work may be designed, like many Archaic sculptures, to be viewed from only one or two fixed positions, or it may in effect be little more than a four-sided relief that hardly changes the three-dimensional form of the block at all. Sixteenth-century.

SECTION: Drawing of the interior of a building as if vertically sliced midway.

SELF: The self is the subjective sense of being a personal owner of and witness to what neuroscientists call “mind,” to distinguish it from “brain.” The brain is a physical organ, and although its structures and functions are enormously complex, it is an objective entity: that is, multiple observers can independently draw the same conclusions about it, whether simple (for example, its size) or complex (which parts are active at a given moment according to a PET scan or a fMR scan) In contrast, the mind is nothing more than a series of electrochemical events taking place within the brain, and while it currently seems utterly subjective and immeasurable, I expect that this barrier will eventually fall, and mind will be measurable. Self is another matter. Although we are far from having a clear answer, most recent research suggests that “self” is little more than an illusion of personal homogeneity which emerges from within the activity of mind. (See, for example, Antonio Damaso’s The Feeling of What Happens.) Self, then, will probably remain internal, inscrutable, private. While the components giving rise to it will be determinable, the illusion these components produce is not likely to be susceptible to objective measures in the same way. Somehow in this I see an analogy for art: the object is objective. Like the brain, it can be described as having objective characteristics by multiple observers. Interpretation is like the mind: it now seems utterly subjective because we lack mechanisms of sufficient sophistication to map all of its strategies, manoeuvres and ruses. This will eventually not be the case. What remains is self. Obviously the object-maker’s sense of self is irretrievably lost upon his or her death, but the object remains as a record of the activities of the mind (not just the hand). That lost self is simply replaced by the sense of self of the interpreter, which accounts for a good deal of the illusory (and therefore irreproducible) results of interpretation. If these selves are fictions, should they even matter in interpretation?

SEMANALYSIS: The disruption of “normal” semiotic procedure (see semiotics) by intentionally producing new areas of signification. See Kristevan.

SEMBLABLE: See counterpart.

SEME: When one encounters a word like “bark” without a context, one cannot be sure whether it refers to a dog noise, a commander shouting orders, the sheath of a woody stem, the rubbing off of skin, or various kinds of boats, etc. As soon as some context is supplied, however, we are able to suspend one or more of the multiple meanings. Like “bark,” most signifiers have clusters of possibilities circulating about them like moths about a flame, but when they come together with other signifiers, elements within one cluster will reinforce similar elements in another. The effect is to foreground a possibility which is more likely than any of the others by virtue of having been activated, as it were, by more than one signifier in the construction. For example, unless we are facetiously imagining a fleet of sailing vessels owned and operated by canines, a phrase like “the dog barks” obviously makes use of both words’ capacity to signify something having to do with an animal. The foregrounded meaning stands out as a kind of path between the other possibilities, which led A. J. Greimas, Roland Barthes, and others, to characterize the structure as a “semic axis.” Semes, then, are basic “units of meaning constructed from their relational structures alone” due to a “sorting among contextual variables” (after Paul Ricoeur’s Conflict of Interpretations). The filtering of semes is one of the ways language creates a meaning effect (see isotopy).

SEMEME: The meaning of a morpheme.

SEMIC AXIS: See seme.

SEMIOLOGY: Term preferred by the French for semiotics.

SEMIOSIS: The mechanism by which figurative meaning is produced. See mimetic theory, unlimited semiosis.

SEMIOTICS: Deriving from linguistics, semiotics is the study of signs and signifying practices which has, along with deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and a few other critical tendencies, dominated much of the artwriting of the 1980s and 1990s. Modern semiotics began early in the century with the work of two farsighted individuals who were curious as to how structures could produce meaning, as opposed to the resultant meaning itself. Ferdinand de Saussure (see Saussurean) has become the more celebrated of these two men because his core insight lies at the heart of deconstruction and a host of related intellectual fashions: he discerned that the signifier (that which carries meaning) and the signified (the meaning which is carried) have no essential relationship — for example, the signifier “red” is not itself red — thus exposing the arbitrary nature of all language and language- like systems. (This is important because it has become a necessary condition of many of the concerns of postmodernism, especially polysemy.) The system of the second individual, Charles Sanders Peirce (see Peircean), is actually a little more practical for visual art, for his distinctions between icon (meaning based on similarity in appearance), index (meaning based on cause and effect relationships), and symbol (meaning based on convention) allow resemblance to play a greater role than in Saussure’s system (see also reference). Neither of these men, however, did much themselves to apply their insights to visual culture. The first notable attempts to do so took place in the 1960s in Europe, especially France, with writers like Roland Barthes (see Barthesian) attempting to analyze at length the mechanisms allowing the production of meaning in all sorts of visual images, from advertisements for Italian food products to photography and motion pictures. Meyer Schapiro was one of the earlier North Americans to assess on these ideas in his “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art,” S emiotica 1 (1969): 240. By and large, however, the methods and the jargon did not catch on until well into the 1970s and early 1980s. The proliferation of semiotics since then has made a simple glossary entry like this one almost impossible. Winfried Nöth’s massive Handbook of Semiotics provides a very thorough overview of a number of positions. See also Baudrillardean, coloreme, Derridean, intertextuality, Kristevan, Lacanian, langue and parole, semiotics of the natural world, semiology, semiosis, sign, sign proper, signifiance, signifying economy, signifying practice.

SEMIOTICS OF THE NATURAL WORLD: In their Sémiotique, Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, A. J. Greimas and P. Courtès used this phrase in lieu of “visual semiotics” because of the differences between verbal and visual languages.

SENSATION-ORIENTED: See personality types.

SENSE: The faculty through which the external world is apprehended.

SENSITIVITY: An imprecise word with various connotations all relating to a state of high responsiveness or susceptibility to something. The most important implications are “the capacity of being hurt” (as in the sensitivity of an ethnic group to a racial slur), “an awareness of the needs and emotions of others” and “a tolerance towards the marginal” (in questions of political correctness), and “a particular susceptibility to aesthetic affect” (as in connoisseurship).

SEXISM: Discrimination based on gender, although sexism is most often understood as discrimination specifically against women. See bi-sexism, feminism.

SFUMATO: See chiaroscuro.

SHADE: See colour. .

SHOW TOWEL: Embroidered Mennonite hand-towels intended primarily for display.

SHUTTERING: Formwork for moulding unset concrete into the desired shape.

SHOCKART: An artist’s intention to shock its audience or at the very least to invent a radical form of art. Such works are authenticated, only if accepted by peers of the art community.

SIGN: In Saussurean semiotics, an element of language composed of the relationship between a signifier (a sound-image) and a signified (the idea which is thus expressed). Although the Saussurean model has become the more fashionable, Peircean semiotics is actually better suited to the visual because it accounts more successfully for resemblance. For Peirce, a sign is an element of language composed of the relationship between a the sign itself, a referent (the object to which the sign refers), the “ground” (the nature of the relationship to the referent, which in turn determines whether the sign is an icon, index, or symbol), and the interpretant (the relationship between the interpreter and the meaning). It is important to note that in virtually all current critical practices, the sign never innocently indicates reality; instead, it refers to other signs in what one writer calls “webs of significance” (see stratigraphic fallacy, thick description). In this respect, current practice is counter-intuitive. In critical practice influenced by Marxism, these webs of significance usually involve some form of hegemony and the concomitant suppression of alternative ways of understanding signs. Sign, for Marxists like V. N. Volosinov, is thus “the arena of the class struggle” (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [1973]).

SIGN PROPER: Phrase sometimes used in place of symbol, as understood in Peircean semiotics.

SIGNIFIANCE: Not to be confused with significance, Julia Kristeva used this term to mean the mechanisms within language which permit it to deliver more than the simple communication of verifiable facts. Roland Barthes’ Image, Music, Text (1977) associated it with the so-called “third” or “obtuse meaning,” which stands outside the merely “informational” and “symbolic” meanings of conventional communication. Barthes’ most well-known example is a reading of a still from the film Battleship Potemkin which was supposed to have a certain dignity but which somehow struck him as stupid. This response was a meaning in excess of the still’s intentionality, which he characterized as a kind of floating (see also metonymic skid). Signifiance is a process and is thus a matter of the signifier. In contrast, significance is a product and is thus more a matter of the signified.

SIGNIFICANCE: Not to be confused with signifiance, “significance” has a chain of denotations running from “importance” to “purpose” to “meaning.” In the latter instance, however, a few writers like E. D. Hirsch maintain a strict theoretical distinction between (unintended) “significance” and (intended) meaning (sense 2).

SIGNIFICANT FORM: Clive Bell’s vaguely defined term indicating what he saw as the essential characteristic of all art — relations and combinations of aesthetically moving formal elements (see form) — regardless of the circumstances of its production or the era in which it was made (see context). See begging the question, unique aesthetic emotion.

SIGNIFICATION: The message that is intended or expressed or signified

SIGNIFIED: In Saussurean semiotics, the idea (or “meaning,” in the simplest sense of the word) expressed by a particular signifier. The two together constitute a sign.

SIGNIFIER: In Saussurean semiotics, the sound-image (or other form of vehicle) which conveys a signified. According to Saussure, although the two together constitute a sign, they have only an arbitrary relationship. That is, while the letters “r,” “e,” and “d,” when presented in a particular order, are taken to denote a certain colour, neither the letters themselves nor their formal combination have anything to do with redness. This insight has had a profound effect on generic postmodern thought: since all meaning is supposedly founded upon convention, it is subject to critique on the basis of guilt by association. For example, the most widely accepted meaning of a disputed term could be dependent upon the suppression of its use amongst a marginal group (see hegemony, power).

SIGNIFYING ECONOMY: An economy is the organization, structure or mode of operation of a group. A signifying economy is the system of exchange within an identifiable group that pertains to meanings. It thus has much to do with how meaning is a function of a horizon of expectations. For example, the signifying economy of the seventeenth-century Netherlands was different from that of today, so their still-life paintings of flowers had different sorts of meanings for them than they do for us. One of the goals of traditional art history has always been to reconstruct the original values of the signifying economy so that we can understand what works meant when they were made. However, postmodernism has characterized such endeavours as pseudo- scientific (see disinterestedness), and there appears to be little agreement that such a reconstruction is even possible.

SIGNIFYING PRACTICE: A common phrase in current artwriting and cultural analysis. For example, in La Traversée des signes and elsewhere, Julia Kristeva uses this phrase to mean the simultaneous creation and interrogation of any system of signs. The creation of the system evokes a subject within a particular social formation, and the disruption of the system challenges that social formation (cf. intervention). Her emphasis on process clearly gives greater weight to the signifier than to the signified.

SIMULACRUM: Term laid out in Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulations,” available online at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html. The key piece is that where images used to refer to something outside themselves, we have now moved into an era in which images seem to refer to things outside themselves but are in fact devoid of any reference — that is, they are simulacra, things which bear no relation to reality, so that there is no “re-presentation” because there is nothing which is “present” in the first place to be presented again (”re-”) in the second. “Simulacra” (plural of simulacrum) seems to refer to individual instances of the phenomenon, whereas “simulation” seems to refer to the whole system.

SIMULATION: The self-aware creation, manipulation, and exchange of simulacra (see simulacrum).

SITE SPECIFIC: Some maintain that “site-specific” is virtually synonymous with installation, because an installation involves art made for a specific space, exploiting certain qualities of that space, more often indoors than out. However, for some writers there are subtle differences, not the least of which is that site-specific work exploits outdoor sites as well. Oddly, when outdoor works are called installations they tend to be works that are actually less site-specific in character. I presume that this is because the main focus of interest in installation is what it is composed of rather than how it relates to its surroundings. There are, of course, exceptions. In any case, the root of “install” is actually to place something in a stall that signifies elevation to a special status, as in installing a political figure by giving him or her an official seat, like a throne. The specialized nature of the space in this example is such that associating installation with outdoor sites somehow seems inadequate. In contrast, site-specific can refer to something other than an installation altogether, as in the frequent use of the phrase to refer to how architecture adapts itself to its surroundings. This takes at least two forms, (1) building designs that adjust or respond to the site and (2) building materials that are natural to the area. For example, (1) Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Falling Water is a notable example of a building that relates to its specific site through affinities in design and execution. More generally, (2) mud brick is a site-specific building material. Site-specific and installation are both notoriously vague, so readers would be well advised to read critically in order to tease out what connotations a writer is employing.

SITUATION: Name of an exhibition in London, England, in 1960 of paintings created according to very restrictive rules, like complete abstraction and large scale. The more monochromatic the works were, the better, for the viewer’s whole field of vision was supposed to be completely occupied by the “situation” of the work. As a result, the Situation exhibition wsas a precursor to minimalism, not Situationism. The better known painters of this group were probably Gillian Ayres and William Turnbull.

SITUATIONISM: Not to be confused with Situation, Situationism was a proto-punk manifestation of extreme irreverence, contempt for boredom and bourgeois domesticity, and artistic freedom of expression very much influenced by Dada and Surrealism’s spirit of poetically expressive revolt. Although the so-called Situationist International began in 1957, it only became a subject of widespread discussion in the 1990s with the English translation of guiding light Guy Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. See The Situationist International for links.

SKEPTICISM: Often mistaken for cynicism and mere naysaying, skepticism is more productively the attitude, philosophy and practice of critical thinking — i.e., informal logic — in everyday life. The editors of Skeptic magazine define it as “a provisional approach to claims…, the application of reason to any and all ideas…, [requiring] compelling evidence before we believe.” The opposite of the skeptical attitude is called everything from credulity, a relatively kind term, to outright foolishness and self-delusion. In his The Killing of History, skeptic Keith Windschuttle maintains that many components of what we now call postmodernism are compromised by fundamentally uncritical thinking.

SLICE-OF-LIFE: A type of synecdoche — that is, an arbitrary cropping of a scene, especially common in Impressionism and in snapshot photography, where figures or important motifs might be interrupted by the edge of the image or by something interposed between them and the camera. The device suggests a momentary glimpse of reality, rather than a carefully composed, formal imitation of it. Among others, Edgar Degas used the device in countless paintings of ballet dancers, carriages at the races, and fashionable people strolling in Parisian streets. (Note, however, that the true amateur snapshot did not exist as such until after Degas’ accomplishments were made.)

SNAPSHOT: An informal photograph displaying ostensibly amateur characteristics, like accidental compositions, momentary glimpses of quotidian events, and sometimes even technical problems. Certain professional photographers (e.g., Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand) have mimicked the effects for a variety of purposes, and the term is sometimes used more or less synonymously with slice-of-life.

SOCIAL FORMATION: The social context (embracing the economic, moral, political and other expectations of a given group) in which a language produces a shared meaning specific to the time and place. The term is close in meaning to horizon of expectations.

SOCIAL PRACTICE: The notion that art of whatever sort is produced in and for a given social formation, rather than as an indulgence in pure self- expression or self-exorcism. Perhaps the most frequently quoted application of the phrase is from Allen Sekula’s “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary,” in Photography Against the Grain.

SOCIOLINGUISTICS: The study of linguisitics as lived experience — i.e., of language as it is actually used in identifiable social contexts. See genderlects, rapport-talk, report-talk.

SOCIOLOGICAL CRITICISM: Umbrella term for a variety of interpretive approaches foregrounding environmental or secondary context — i.e., the circumstances of production outside the artist’s control — but not necessarily applied to material considered historical. See correlational social histories, cultural analysis, cultural anthropology, feminism, Geistesgeschichte, historical methodologies, and Marxism.

SOFFITT: 1. The underside of a projected eave. 2. A synonym for intrados.

SOPHISTICATED: An antonym for vulgar (sense 3). Where a vulgar Marxist (see Marxism) is concerned principally with a superficial description of, say, market forces and their impact on class consciousness, a sophisticated Marxist interweaves these ideas with a more complex consideration of such things as ideology, psychology, and even deconstruction . It has been said that it is only their understanding of “vulgar” as disdainful that prevents respectful sophisticated Marxists from applying the term to Marx himself.

SOURCE ANALYSIS: Classical source analysis, one of the more long-standing and widespread approaches in traditional art history, is the study of artists’ allusions to and appropriations of the work of earlier artists. The analyst hopes to discover if the later artist’s sources indicate admiration, citation, emulation, or simply a learning experience. As such, the artist’s practice is not to be confused with forgery. Famous examples of source analysis include such things as Manet’s Olympia as a reworking of Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Rauschenberg’s Retroactive I as a reworking of Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve. Cf aegis, anxiety of influence.

SPACE: Under construction. Foucault uses the word as a metaphor of episteme when he speaks of “the space of knowledge” in the preface to The Order of Things.

SPACE-TIME: An imprecise term indicating the prevalent conditions of time and place in a work. See also chronotope.

SPACING: See différance. Place at intervals or Place at intervals

SPATIALITY: See plane of content, plane of expression, semiotics.

SPATTER: A decorative motif achieved by random distribution of accidental driblets, usually described with more pretentious terms when applied to high art.

SPECIAL PLEADING: In informal logic, an undesirable one-sidedness, bias, or lack of objectivity in argument. This has to be carefully examined in any published work — artwriting included — for the merit of the argument to shine through. Publications which are forever congratulating the artist for being a genius who transcends time (see specificity, timelessness) lean precipitously towards special pleading. Coffee-table books are rather prone to this, but there are exceptions.

SPECIALNESS: The quality of being particular and pertaining to a specific case or instance

SPECIFICITY: Distinctiveness in time and place; the particular nature of any phenomenon; the uniqueness of a response to a particular set of circumstances. Most postmodern thought emphasizes historical specificity, which challenges those outdated concepts like genius, masterpiece, and timelessness which share the opposed idea that some things can be universal or transhistorical.

SPECTACLE: An elaborate and remarkable display on a lavish scale

SPECTACULAR: Conventionally, something which is especially dramatic or impressive. In some writing, in contrast, it means simply any public display (as in punk clothing) which has features distinguishing it from other public displays (as in business suits), although all might be quite unspectacular in the conventional sense. See Dick Hebdige’s Subculture.

SPECULAR: Having the properties of a mirror. See mirror stage.

SPEECH: The mental faculty or power of vocal communication.

SPIN: Colloquial term indicating paralinguistic inflection or connotations accruing to an image, word, etc.

SPIN DOCTOR: Colloquial term indicating a public relations person hired to shape public perception, particularly of political persons, parties, and situations. There has never been a shortage of art critics willing to serve in this capacity for artists. A careful reader will distinguish between such a critic and a less subservient voice.

SPLIT: See split subject.

SPLIT SUBJECT: Since Freud, consciousness has been divided into more than one level. “Split subject” is simply the heterogeneous nature of the real psyche, as described by such writers as Julia Kristeva (see Kristevan), as opposed to the illusion of wholeness signified by unary subject.

SPONTANEITY: Once a watchword of advanced art interested in unpremeditated self-expression (see expression theory), spontaneity is now regarded with suspicion. Theodor Adorno was one of the earliest to say why, although his example is actually jazz music: since mass culture in the era of capitalism works by offering ever-increasing sensual happiness in the here and now, spontaneity in the arts is really just an expression of the desire created in the populace by ideology. The result is an example of a social antinomy. For a general discussion, see S. Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), 110. The result is that the long-vaunted spontaneity of art movements like abstract expressionism has recently been viewed with a certain doubt, and the attention is turned to something else, like the social formation. See, for example, Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.

STATEMENT: Sometimes used as a translation for énoncé. See enunciation.

STIPULATIVE DEFINITION: Non-standard, personal or other specific connotations of a term in a given context — usually overtly laid out as diverging from dictionary standards. E.g., see Bullough’s use of the word presentment.

STOCHASTIC: Being or having a random variable

STOICISM: Under construction.STONE: Under construction.

STORY: In current semiotics, “story” is a near synonym of diegesis, the apparent narrative as it is produced in the mind of the reader, rather than literally on the page.

STRATEGY: See tactics. Cf perruque.

STRATIFICATION: The condition of being arranged in social strata or classes within a group

STRATIGRAPHIC FALLACY: In The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz argued against the establishment of an anthropological hierarchy of human behaviour, with biology as its base and successive psychological, social, and finally cultural strata. The image such a scheme gave of culture was that of an afterthought, not an integral part of the human condition. To oppose this stratigraphic fallacy he proposed the notion of “webs of significance” which spun their way throughout various levels without prioritizing them. Anthropology was thus in his mind not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive science in search of meaning. See also thick description.

STRAW MAN: Or straw figure. See irrelevance.

STRUCTURALISM: Linguistics defined as the analysis of formal structures in a text or discourse

STRUCTURALIST MARXISM: Term sometimes applied to Althusser’s method of describing human individuals not as having some essential characteristics (see essentialism) but as the product of social determinants taking the form of some sort of social structure, as in class consciousness, for example. See Althusserian.

STRUCTURAL SEMANTICS: Under construction.

STRUCTURE: The complex composition of knowledge as elements and their combinations

STURM UND DRANG: A state of violent disturbance and disorder (as in politics or social conditions generally)

STYLE: UA way of expressing something (in language or art or music etc.) that is characteristic of a particular person or group of people or period

STYLIZATION: Any manner of representation putting greater emphasis on the method of expression than on the appearance of nature (see naturalism). See conceptual, conventional. This includes the Egyptian canon of proportions, the conventional drapery patterns in Byzantine icons, Cubist fragmentation of figures into interpenetrating planes, and so on.

SUB: Under, lower, below, secondary, inferior

SUBCONSCIOUS: Psychic activity just below the level of awareness

SUBCULTURE: Conventionally, any group sharing characteristics which are distinctive enough to differentiate them from other groups within a larger or “parent” culture. These characteristics may be economic, ethnic, political, or any matter of lifestyle. More particularly, “subculture” is used to designate those smaller groups which function in opposition to the larger culture, as in the punk subculture discussed in Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). Stuart Hall (et al., Resistance Through Rituals [1976]) distinguishes subculture, which he sees as informally and intuitively organized, from “counter-culture,” which he sees as more formally arranged and more expressly political and consciously ideological. In this scheme, punks were subcultural and hippies were counter-cultural.

SUBJECT: 1. Older writings will use this word to indicate an issue, theme, or topic, as in subject matter, or to indicate a body of knowledge, as in the subjects one studies at school. 2. Recent ones, particularly those influenced by psychoanalytical criticism, are more likely to use it exclusively as “agent,” an entity that acts, thinks and feels. See, for example, split subject, unary subject.

SUBJECT IN PROCESS: A near synonym of split subject.

SUBJECTIVE: Characteristic of reality as perceived rather than as objectively true outside of the mind. This would include such things as objects and events experienced in a manner peculiar to a particular individual (and therefore not reproducible, in the manner of an objective scientific inquiry). This is what most speakers mean when they say that interpretation, for example, is purely subjective. But is it? See self.

SUBJECTIVISM: (philosophy) the doctrine that knowledge and value are dependent on and limited by your subjective experience

SUBJECTIVITY: Judgment based on individual personal impressions and feelings and opinions rather than external facts

SUBJECT MATTER: The old definition of this as “the topics or themes in a work as distinct from the style in which they are presented” is no longer tenable since the form of an artwork is one of the factors constitutive of its content. A simple distinction between subject matter and content is not detailed enough to transcribe the mechanisms of signification. Compare plane of content, plane of expression, semiotics.

SUBJECT PRESUMED TO KNOW: A phrase that appears in Jacques Lacan’s écrits, sometimes translated “subject who is presumed (or supposed) to know.” Generally, it indicates that a subject can only presume to have achieved objective knowledge. Specifically, it warns psychoanalysts not to be seduced by the illusion that they fully understand everything about a patient — an effect brought about by the patient’s growing self- awareness but attributed to the analyst through transference. The idea should be kept in mind when psychoanalytic criticism is applied to art. Jane Gallop has written on the issue in Art in America (November 1984).

SUBLATION: Out/up-lifting Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.

SUBLIMATION: In Freudian and Lacanian thought, the process of diverting the energy of a drive, such as a sexual urge, to some other, ostensibly more elevated or socially acceptable realm, such as aesthetic activity. For example, Nietzsche felt that Raphael’s Madonnas could only be the result of the sublimation of his passions. See also desublimation.

SUBLIME: Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) identified the Sublime (usually capitalized today) as something so vast, grand, or dangerous that it could only inspire awe, fear or veneration. Accordingly, artists immediately supplied a demand for windswept landscapes and storms at sea (Ruisdael, Turner), enormous cityscapes (Cole, Martin), struggles between man and beast (Delacroix, Rubens), and all manner of variation — most with the tacit assumption that the forces of the Divine were immanent in Nature (Bierstadt, Friedrich). Traditionally, sublimity was best evoked by irregular and dark forms, so it was long taken as essentially Romantic and antithetical to classical forms. In modern times, however, the Sublime is as likely to be evoked by non-objective art, but less in the form of the terrifying than in the notion of complete abstraction as a trope to represent the unrepresentable (i.e., the Divine). The works of Malevich and Mondrian have been so described, as have been the paintings of Canadian Otto Rogers.

SUBLIMINAL: Below normal thresholds, as in a sound vibrating at a frequency below the normal range of human hearing. In the 1970s there was a great deal of discussion of subliminal messages in advertising, particularly in the books of Brian Wilson Keye (Subliminal Seduction). Ostensibly, all sorts of hidden communications — usually about sex — offered enticements to buy a given product, but they were themselves below the level of conscious reception. Some critics may also be taking something of this sort for granted in their artwriting, for they occasionally discover meanings which seem to have little to do with objectively describable features of a given work.

SUBSTITUTION: Permutation, Placing one thing for another

SUBTITLE: Translation of a foreign dialogue

SUBTRACTIVE: Constituting or involving subtraction

SUBVERSION: Any act intended to overthrow or undermine something, usually in situations where the thing overthrown is seen as oppressive, as in intervention

SUFFICIENCY: In informal logic, the notion that premises must be complete enough to account for a given conclusion. For example, an extensional definition that identifies a sculpture only as “something one can walk around” is insufficient because one can walk around a house, a shopping mall, or the block. Similarly, in the syllogism “The photographer hates models who are late; I am not late; therefore, the photographer will not hate me” is insufficient because the photographer might hate the model for some other, unstated reason.

SUPER: A colloquial expression for superimposed titles and/or credits in television production. Some contemporary painting makes use of a similar idea, with words placed directly over other imagery in the manner seen in television and print advertisements. Examples include David Salle, Annette Lemieux, Barbara Kruger, and innumerable others.

SUPERCOLOREME: See coloreme.

SUPEREGO: (psychoanalysis) that part of the unconscious mind that acts as a conscienc

UPERSTRUCTURE: See base and superstructure.

SUPPLEMENT: In Derridean thought, the “extra” clusters of meaning normally screened out by the action of semic axes (see seme) but retrieved by deconstruction.

SURFACE MEANING: Under construction.

SURFACE STRUCTURE: See deep structure and surface structure.

SURFICTION: Another word for metafiction and title of a Raymond Federman study of same.

SURREAL: Phantasmagorical, characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions

SURREALISM: A 20th century movement of artists and writers (developing out of dadaism) who used fantastic images and incongruous juxtapositions in order to represent unconscious thoughts and dreams

SURROGATE: Someone who takes the place of another person

SUSPENSE: Apprehension about what is going to happen

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: Under construction.

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT: a mild reasonableness

SYLLEPSIS: Use of a word to govern two or more words though agreeing in number or case etc. with only one

SYLLOGISM: An elementary structure in informal logic, along the classic Aristotelian lines of “All humans are mortal; all artists are human; therefore, all artists are mortal.” See also categorical syllogisms.

SYMBOL: 1. Conventionally, something used for or conceived of as representing something else, as an “x” symbolizes a variable in an equation, or a dog symbolizes fidelity, etc. 2. In Peircean semiotics, a symbol is one of three basic types of signs, the other two being the icon and the index. The ground of the relationship between an icon and its referent is resemblance, and the ground of the relationship between an index and its referent is causal or existential. For those signs with a relationship to a referent that is purely arbitrary and conventional, Peirce reserved the term “symbol,” as a flag symbolizes “patriotism” or a red octagon symbolizes “stop.”

SYMBOLIC: Lacanian term to designate the most basic psychological processes, in which the sense of self is forever under construction in the midst of a network of signifying structures (see semiotics) initiated during the mirror stage and inevitably involving the realm of the social. In other words, there is no self without an other. Compare imaginary, real. For an application, see name-of-the-father.

SYNCHRONIC: See diachronic, linguistics.

SYNECDOCHE: One of the four major tropes, synecdoche is the poetic use of a part to signify the whole and, somewhat less frequently, the use of a whole to signify a part. Even in common speech we encounter phrases like “all hands on deck” or “there were forty head grazing in the pasture.” In art, far from being a mere visual accident, the device is chiefly used for dramatic effect or for controlling the viewer’s degree of awareness of details, as in the barrels of guns anonymously poking in from the right side of one of Goya’s Disasters of War prints. (This practice has become something of a cliche in mystery and suspense movies, where directors almost invariably delay the audience’s awareness by showing only the villain’s feet or gloved hands.) In later nineteenth-century art, synecdoche serves to signify the much less dramatic Impressionist slice-of-life.

SYNTACTICS: See pragmatics, semantics, syntactics.

SYNTAGM: The polar opposite of paradigm (sense 3). Where “paradigm” indicates the relationship of a word to other words outside of a given utterance, “syntagm” indicates the relationship of a word to other words within a given utterance. The “syntagmatic axis” is thus basically grammar. In film studies, the syntagmatic axis is the succession of images, so that a metaphor, for example, in a syntagmatic axis means one which emerges across a sequence of views.

TABLEAU VIVANT: A group of people attractively arranged (as if in a painting)

TABOO: A prejudice (especially in Polynesia and other South Pacific islands) that prohibits the use or mention of something because of its sacred nature

TABULA RASA: Tabula rasaa smoothed tablet; hence, figuratively, the mind in its earliest state, before receiving impressions from without; – a term used by Hobbes, Locke, and others, in maintaining a theory opposed to the doctrine of innate ideas.

TACHISME: See action painting.

TACTICS: Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life outlines the basic conditions within which cultural activity can be produced by those who are considered non-producers by traditional analysts. One must first distinguish between strategy — where subjects can be isolated from the environment to achieve apparent objectivity, as in scientific rationality — and tactics — where subjects have no “proper,” objective place, but insinuate themselves into the object’s place in a piecemeal manner, without taking it over entirely. Although de Certeau is speaking of the specific practices of powerless people (e.g., perruque), one of the general postmodern repercussions of the idea for art criticism and art theory is that a writer cannot occupy an objective position from which a work’s meaning can be seen in full determinacy. A writer, in short, cannot have a strategy, but only fragmentary tactics which depend on time and the constant seizing of opportunities. In many respects, the notion provides an alternative theoretical justification for illustrement.

TALBOTYPE: See photography.

TAXONOMY: See also formalism. A classification of organisms into groups based on similarities of structure or origin etc

TEACH THE CONFLICT: At the heart of the political correctness debate centres is the question of how to deal with a Eurocentric canon without simply caving in to the demands of pressure groups (which would merely set a precedent entailing caving in again in a few years, when new groups succeed them). Gerald Graff’s solution is simply to teach the conflict itself. If nothing else, it will show that it possible to live with difference and to do so without xenophobia or closed-mindedness.

TECTONIC: Pertaining to building; having an obvious structure; a work in another medium (e.g., a painting) characterized by horizontal and vertical emphases, as in a building. Mondrian’s mature works are obviously tectonic.

TELEOLOGY: The doctrine that things develop purposively towards an end (from the Greek telos) determined by the thing under development, as a being might move towards individual self-fulfillment or a species towards its ostensible perfection. This would be in contrast to a mechanistic evolution without purpose. The idea lurks behind the theory of formalism, as if art will emerge at some end point of complete and perfect “artness.” This kind of thinking is behind the complaint of the 1960s that Miminalism represented the death of art.

TENEBRISM: See chiaroscuro.

TENOR: 1. The general line of thought, as in the tenor of an argument or the drift of a conversation. Any generalization of the character of an artwork — e.g., its theme or general flavour — might be so described. 2. In the literary writings of I. A. Richards, a tenor is the idea being expressed in a metaphor, as opposed to the vehicle which expresses it.

TENSION: In architecture, the forces tending to stretch certain members, as in the thrust on the centre portion of a wide lintel; in other arts, a precarious balance established between opposing formal features or other elements, usually for some aesthetic effect.

TESTABILITY: In “The Testability of an Interpretation” (in J. Margolis’s Philosophy Looks at the Arts), Monroe C. Beardsley argues that some interpretations are by nature better than others. The best intepretation is therefore the “right” one. The criteria for testing interpretations are analogous to those under the heading validity. See also translation.

TEXT: Originally referring simply to a body of writing, its use in postmodernist contexts is closer to its origins in the Latin texere, to weave. Roland Barthes (see Barthesian) distinguished between a “work,” which he characterized as a finite body with a determinate meaning, and a “text,” which was indeterminate, open-ended, and endlessly subject to reinterpretation as audiences changed. (Cf reception-theory). As such, “text” can refer to any expression, consciously artistic or otherwise, which can be read — i.e., which is “lisible” (see also reader-response, reading), whether it is written or visual. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has even described social formations as texts which can be interpeted in ways analogous to the interpretation of literature. See also scriptible.

TEXTBOOK: The textbook is a troublesome thing in the postmodern era because it is a single object which purports to be a body of essential knowledge as well as implicitly the principal methodology for dealing with its subject. That is, it is both “what to know” and “how to know it.” As a result, it can serve as a good example of one institution’s type of power. See also art history, critique of institutions, cultural selection, politics of the textbook.

TEXTUALITY: See intertextuality.

TEXTURE: 1. The surface characteristics of an object. These can be tactile, in the sense of a physical texture in actuality, or visual, in the sense of an illusionistic rendering of a texture in a virtually flat painting or photograph. 2. More loosely, the identifying character of a work — its flavour, mode, mood, tone, or voice. Both senses can have strong affective properties.

THICK DESCRIPTION: Term used by Clifford Geertz to describe his method of detailed analysis of an anthropological context by immersing himself in it, to some extent, instead of assuming he can achieve a standpoint of objectivity. (See also ideology, text). By extension, any attempt to transcribe in exhaustive detail all the “webs of significance” — i.e., potentially influential circumstances that obtained during, say, an artist’s career, whether or not s/he was conscious of them — could be so described. The art history of Albert Boime (essays on Friedrich, Manet, Van Gogh; books on Couture, the French Academy, a typological study on the representation of African-Americans, etc.) approaches this level of complexity. Robert Belton’s The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art attempts it in a very different way. Because thick description includes contradictory characteristics which traditional historical or sociological writing leaves out, it is a fundamental alternative to metahistory. Geertz, however, maintained that social relations can be observed objectively without being distorted by the values of the observer (see mediation), so some postmodern opponents claim the method is just another metanarrative. See also stratigraphic fallacy.

THINKING AS YET NOT THINKABLE: Hélène Cixous’s feminism indicts Eurocentric, patriarchal logocentrism and calls for a rebellious écriture féminine that bypasses Western rationalism. Since it is not clear what form of thought could replace it, Cixous simply designates it “thinking as yet not thinkable.” The clearest example of this sort of approach in current artwriting is probably the work of Joanna Frueh.

THIRD MEANING: See signifiance.

THIRD WORLD OTHER: Gayatri Spivak’s term to describe any non-European people with an intact material culture which can be recovered and exploited, either interpretively or in terms of commodity fetishism by Eurocentric interests. See “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24 (1985): 247.

THOUGHT POLICE: Popular media term of disdain for those in favour of some variation of political correctness.

THRUST: The downward pressure of architectural weight.

TIMELESSNESS: The notion that certain works of art are so filled with genius that they rise above the specifics of time and place to occupy a transcendental, superhuman plane of existence that does not belong to history. This idea, sometimes also called “transhistorical” (e.g., in Herbert Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension) and apparently still fashionable among the general populace, is rejected by postmodernism in general as pseudotranshistorical. Hans-Georg Gadamer (see Gadamerian) argues in Truth and Method that this notion can only be a sort of “sacred time,” which requires a theological justification having little to do with genuine, lived human experience. See also cultural selection.

TINT: See colour.

TITLE: A heading that names a statute or legislative bill; may give a brief summary of the matters it deals with

TOPOI: A traditional theme or motif or literary convention

TOPOS: From the Greek koinos topos, “common place,” meaning a standard rhetorical theme or topic. In current artwriting, the term typically concerns a work’s content. Older writings sometimes include parallels to culturally determined patterns of configuration (i.e., impulses to use set forms in the expression of stock themes), as in W. Eugene Kleinbauer’s characterization of Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel in Modern Perspectives in Art History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 64. The plural is “topoi.”

TORSION: Twisting or bending, especially in buildings of great height.

TOTALIZE: To combine into a whole or aggregate, oversimplifying difference in the process. “Totalize” has been used in different contexts by different writers: Marx used it with reference to the over-all process of world history; Lenin re the reciprocal relations of phenomena; Lukács and Mannheim re the sense of wholeness of individual consciousness; and Sartre re individuality as a process of interiorizing experience.

TOTEM: A clan or tribe identified by their kinship to a common totemic object

TOUCHSTONE: A basis for comparison; a reference point against which other things can be evaluated

TOUR DE FORCE: A feat requiring great virtuosity or strength, often deliberately undertaken for its difficulty

TOXIC: Poisonous. By extension, the principal characteristic of anything deleterious to the health or well-being. Although its most frequent use is in “toxic waste,” the word is now tossed about as a basic synonym for dysfunctional in numerous contexts, like “toxic relationships,” “toxic shame,” and so on. Toxic art would presumably be art with a negative affect.

TRACE: Discussing différance, Jacques Derrida (see Derridean) states that each element (for example, a signifier) “is related to something other than itself [i.e., a signified] but retains the mark of a past element…” (Speech and Phenomena, [1973]). The various kinds of marks which thus cast doubt on our certainty about the relation between an element and its meaning (see indeterminacy) he calls traces.

TRACING: The copying of any form of illustration, drawing, diagram, etc., by covering it with a sheet of transparent or translucent paper or other material and registering its principle (and usually linear) elements thereon.

TRACT: A system of body parts that together serve some particular purpose

TRADITION: An inherited pattern of thought or action

TRAGEDY: Drama in which the protagonist is overcome by some superior force or circumstance; excites terror or pity

TRAGIC FLAW: the character flaw or error of a tragic hero that leads to his downfall

TRAGIC IRONY: Dramatic irony in a tragedy.

TRANCHE-DE-VIE: French for slice-of-life.

TRANSCENDENTAL: Characteristic of things which go beyond material existence. The term has two distinct senses in postmodernism, both of which are taken to be fundamental errors. The first is a near synonym for timelessness, and it is treated with skepticism (see also universal human interest, pseudotranshistorical). The second describes the traditional logocentric attitude in which the meaning of an utterance is guaranteed in some magical way by a kind of transcendental presence hovering behind the words themselves (see also metaphysics of presence).

TRANSCENDENTALISM: A literary and philosophical movement, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition.

TRANSCRIPTION: The representation of speech sounds by means of phonetic symbols. There have been several attempts to devise related practices for visual images. A recent example is included in Fernande Saint-Martin’s Semiotics of Visual Language. Cf translation.

TRANSCULTURAL: extending through all human cultures; “a transcultural ideal of freedom embracing all the peoples of the world

TRANSFERENCE: In psychoanalysis, the process by which emotions and desires originally associated with one person, such as a parent or sibling, are unconsciously shifted to another person, especially to the analyst.

TRANSGRESSION: The act of transgressing; the violation of a law or a duty or moral principle

TRANSHISTORICAL: See timelessness.

TRANSLATION: It is a perennial matter of undergraduate debate whether or not any act of criticism can adequately “translate” visual images into verbal ones. One of the hidden premises of most arguments opposing the possibility is that translation is simply a matter of converting an utterance in one language into its exact equivalent in another. Professional translators know that such situations are exceedingly rare, so much of the substance of the argument evaporates. Idiomatic translations are universally preferred to literal ones, in any case. (Cf metalanguage, object language). The etymology of the word itself is “to carry across,” which explains why most dictionaries give as the first definition something along the lines of “to remove or change from one appearance, form, place, or state to another.” Even with this slight but significant change of emphasis, one should still adopt a critical attitude towards translation and be aware that standard tests for the reliability of a translation might be of some use. The most common is “back translation:” here a document is translated from language X to language Y, given to another translator and retranslated back to language X. The two X’s are then compared, but less for literal accuracy than for preservation of sense. Imagining such a test for artwriting would require an extremely adroit argument from analogy. At the very least, it would demand an exceptionally precise type of description. Tests defined for more specific kinds of document include “knowledge testing,” where recipients of document X would be able to answer the same questions of fact as recipients of translated document Y; and “performance testing,” where imperative statement X and its translation as statement Y are given to two people to see if they behave the same way. Given that one sense of interpretation is “performance,” this option may offer more possibilities for artwriting than any other. See also transcription, transliteration.

TRANSLITERATION: The representation of a word in the characters of another alphabet, as in transliterations from Cyrillic to English. For food for thought, see translation.

TRANSLUCENCY: Transmitting light but causing sufficient diffusion to prevent perception of distinct images.

TRANSPARENCY: A transparent object, especially a photographic slide that is viewed by light shining through it from behind or by projection.

TRANSVERSAL: Extending or lying across; in a crosswise direction; at right angles to the long axis

TRAVESTY: A comedy characterized by broad satire and improbable situations

TRIBUTARY: Tending to bring about; being partly responsible for

TRIPTYCH: A work consisting of three painted or carved panels that are hinged together. A hinged writing tablet consisting of three leaves, used in ancient Rome.

TROMPE L’OEIL: Illusionism, most commonly in painting, but also in some sculpture, etc., intended to “fool the eye.” See gaze and glance.

TROPE: Any of several types of diversion from the literal to the figurative. The so-called “four master tropes” are irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche (see Kenneth Burke’s Grammar of Motives), but one would have to add parody to this list. A few new ones have recently been invented: see aegis, catachresis, kenosis, perruque. Cf figures of speech.

TRIVIUM: The lower division of the seven liberal arts in medieval schools, consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric

TRUSS: Extremely strong, usually triangular arrangements of struts.

TYPOLOGICAL STUDY: Any of various types of study which approach a given category of content as a thematic block. The practice has its roots in studies of medieval art for the simple reason that analogies between Old and New Testament characters and stories had for centuries been treated as typological parallels. For example, the story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale for three days was interesting to medieval and Renaissance artists principally because it was a prophecy of Christ’s entombment and resurrection. A recent example is Adrian and Joyce Wilson’s A Medieval Mirror : Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 1324-1500 (1984). The term has spread to include all sorts of monographs on a single subject, as in Robert Rosenblum’s The Dog in Art from Rococo to Postmodernism (1988), Jean Vercoutter’s The Image of the Black in Western Art, and Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983).

Go to listings: A-C D-G H-K L-N O-R S-T U-Z

Postmodern terms – Oedipus Complex to Romanticism

These Postmodern definitions are a useful gauge to show how academics construct their sentences in Artspeak. The list is compiled by theorists who have set their own standards to the meaning of each word and its terms. It may be wise to double check on the usage to see if the word actually exists in a precise contemporary dictionary.

Postmodern Terminology: A-C D-G H-K L-N O-R S-T U-Z

Oedipus Complex or Oedipal Complex – a sequence of development experiences that Freud argued all human boys went through. It involves the boys romantic feelings for his mother. However, in Freud’s theory, if the Oedipal Complex is “properly” resolved, the boy gives up his quest for his mother’s romantic affections. Supposedly this happens because he believes, unconsciously and symbolically, that he will otherwise be castrated

Ontology – the philosophy of Being, that is, the study of the metaphysical foundations of the universe, foundations that exist beyond science and can only be discovered through reasoning.

Operational definition – a concrete and procedural definition of something that is otherwise difficult to agree about. For example, people can disagree about how creative a particular person is. After all, people are creative in different ways and what one person would consider “creative” another person might consider “off the wall.” But an operational definition removes the challenge of differing opinions and ties the definition to a procedure that is precise and, for those using the operational definition, not contestable. A set of questions might be used to “operationally define” creativity, for example so that every time someone answered a question “yes” they were given a point. Their operationally defined creativity might be the sum of all their points — even if the questions have nothing to do with what you and I ordinarily think of “creativity.” Questions about whether the operational definition measures what it says it measures are questions about the “validity” of an operational definition.

Ostensive definition – To define something by pointing to it as it is named. For example, if someone were to say, “What’s a baboon?” one might point to one (or to a picture of one), and say “That’s a baboon.” Ludwig Wittgenstein organizes much of his thinking around the concept of an “ostensive definition”. The first section of his book, Philosophical Investigations:, begins with a passage from St. Augustine that argued that humans learned language by having adults point to things and name them. Then, Wittgenstein shows how such ostensive training would not be enough because in an actual case thed with no language at all would not know what aspect of the object was being pointed to. When the parent pointed and said “ball”, that is, the child would not know if it was the red color of the ball being named, the roundness of the ball, and so forth. This lays the foundation for Wittgenstein explaining his own philosophy of language.

Other – The term “Other” with a capital “O” is used throughout the postmodern literature. It means something quite different from the word “other” with a small “o”. Whereas the “other” is just someone else, an other with a capital “O” is a more important figure. For some authors, the Other is an imaginary person whom wants talks with, or debates, perhaps a deposit of authority figures. For other authors, and particularly for Emmanuel Levinas in works such as
Time and the Other, the Other is a living person of profound importance in one’s life. return

Pagan – Lyotard’s term. It means to judge without criteria. Lyotard says, “I am not using a concept. It is a name, neither better nor worse than others, for the denomination of a situation in which one judges without criteria.” Just Gaming (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 20) (p.16) Pagans for Lyotard are “ones who judge for themselves” The Lyotard Reader (Blackwell Readers) (p.125) without relying on the authority’s rules as to what is good or bad. Be careful to distinguish this postmodern meaning of the term from both the historical one which means ‘non-Christian’, as well as the contemporary meaning of western (neo)Paganism, especially Wicca.

PAEAN: A joyous song (or hymn, or analogous thing) for praising, giving thanks or tribute, or celebrating triumph.

Pagan voice – The pagan voice is the heartfelt voice that expressesan opinion that goes beyond the evidence, beyond the rules, beyond the criteria.

PAGEANT: Any of various sorts of temporary exhibitions with processions, perfomances, music and dance, colourful costumes, and the like. Pageants and pageantry are fairly frequently represented in visual art of earlier centuries, and some artsists were also well-known for creating them (e.g., Gianlorenzo Bernini). For a narrower connotation, see carnivalesque.

PAINTERLY: Heinrich Wölfflin’s term for any formal element or compositional principle which draws attention to the characteristic sensuous traits of paint, like fluidity, looseness, impasto, scumbling, texture, and so on. By analogy, even a drawing or a photograph can be painterly. Painterly works are often conventionally understood to be more impassioned than linear ones, which are associated with reason and deliberation. See linear, periodicity. Cf deictic.

PALILOGY: The repetition of a word, or part of a sentence, for the sake of greater emphasis; as, ‘The living, the living, he shall praise thee.'”

PALIMPSEST: A manuscript illumination or similar inscribed surface which has been erased and repainted or otherwise used more than once, so that occasionally layers of what is beneath will show through and blend or interfere with the most recent image on the surface. “Palimpsest” refers to an objective phenomenon, like certain medieval works of art, and it also sometimes used metaphorically to indicate metaphoricity, polysemy, or even simple figurative language (sense 1). See also palimpsestablishment. See also this essay on palimpsest in the context of film studies.

PALIMPSESTABLISHMENT: Because it can have multiple meanings, the word “palimpsest” is sometimes used to signify indeterminacy. But a real palimpsest is limited to those images that actually appear there. That is, a palimpsest might have commingled images of, say, a good shepherd, a pastoral scene, and a classical myth, but that does not give us license to say that it is also represents an experience I had at my grandmother’s house because it reminds me of that. What is actually in the image establishes certain boundaries of interpretation. Within these restrictions one can still produce a bewildering variety of interpretation, depending upon the quantity and kinds of contextual information adduced.

PALINODE: A retraction of something previously said, often in poetic form.

PAINTING: Any of a variety of works of art made by applying paint on a surface. There is a wide variety of types of paint media, surfaces, application tools and techniques, and aesthetic preoccupations. Paint media, for example, include acrylic, bodycolour, casein, enamel, encaustic, fresco, gouache, ink, lacquer, oil, pastel, tempera, watercolour, and any number of natural alternatives from blood to elephant dung. Surfaces include animal hides, architectural features, canvas, cardboard, cotton, felt, paper, silk, wood panels, various types of natural surfaces like rock faces and cave walls, and various types of three-dimensional surfaces, as in combine painting, sculpto-peinture, and other forms of installation and multimedia work. Application tools and techniques include airbrush, brush, drybrush, palette knife, pen, etc. The sky’s the limit for aesthetic preoccupations, since even a brief list here would consitute a summary of much of the entire history of art. Dedicated readers would be well advised to visit a site like Chris Witcombe’s Gateway to Art History.

PANEGYRIC: Formal praise in an elaborate or grave manner, as in a eulogy. One wonders if the word could be applied to a painting like David’s Death of Socrates.

PANEL: Sheet that forms a distinct (usually flat and rectangular) section or component of something

PANOPTIC: Something which provides a comprehensive or panoramic view is said to be panoptic. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon was a model for an ideal prison in which a minimum number of guards could observe a maximum number of prisoners by virtue of having a panoptic view of the goings-on. Michel Foucault appropriated the idea as a metaphor for the scientific point of view, which can supposedly survey everything objectively. Here is more on Foucault’s take on the Panopticon.

PANORAMIC: Pertaining to a panorama — i.e., an unobstructed view in every direction. Figuratively, then, “panoramic” indicates comprehensiveness or thoroughness in a presentation of a subject. By entension it can mean any of several types of visual presentations that endeavour to represent an unobstructed view, as in a panoramic photograph (now commercially available in an impoverished variation) or an enormous painting in which a seemingly endless vista is literally unrolled before an audience, as in certain pre-twentieth-century entertainments. The closest relative to the latter, which is now outdated, is perhaps the IMAX film projection system.

PANTOMIME: A performance using gestures and body movements without words

PARABLE: A short moral story (often with animal characters)

PARADIGM: 1. An example, pattern or standard. In grammar, a paradigm is the set of inflected forms of a word — e.g., “artist, artist’s, artists, artists'” — or the standard pattern followed in the conjugation of a verb — first person singular, second person singular, third person singular, first person plural, second person plural, third person plural. 2. By extension, the term also refers to the basic structure of given mind-sets or models of knowledge, as in paradigm shift. 3. Saussurean semiotics has developed the notion that every sign is part of a system of relationships with other signs structured through similarity and difference. These systems are called paradigms. A word thus has a paradigmatic relationship with its own inflections, new words established through prefixes and suffixes, synonyms and antonyms, etc. The “paradigmatic axis” is a field of possible substitutions of one word for another, developed by Roman Jakobson into what he called a selection relation. In film studies, a paradigmatic axis refers more simply to a single shot or view of something (see mise-en-scène) rather than to a succession of images, so that a metaphor, for example, in a paradigmatic axis is one which emerges in an individual shot, rather than in a sequence of shots (which would be its syntagmatic axis).

PARADIGM SHIFT: Established, largely unconscious habits of mind, like faith in scientific progress in the modern era or the divine right of kings in the mediaeval era, can be considered paradigms. When one era shifts into another, the old habits are disrupted by new ones which eventually settle into a familiar routine. The phrase derives from Thomas Kuhn, who wrote about changes in the history and philosophy of science (see realism), but it is now a commonplace used to describe any sort of major shift of mind-set or perspective. For example, the change from pre-modern to modern art was effectively a change from the so-called “window paradigm” — the idea of a painting as a hole in the wall through which one saw beyond the room, as in Renaissance and Baroque illusionism — to a new paradigm of abstraction. Similarly, the change from modernism to postmodernism is now commonly called a paradigm shift.

PARADIGMATIC AXIS: See paradigm, sense 3.

PARADOX: (logic) a statement that contradicts itself

PARAESTHETICS: A state of being essentially equal or equivalent; equally balanced with beauty

PARAGONE: The state of being in the pass

PARALEPSIS: Suggesting by deliberately concise treatment that much of significance is omitted

PARALINGUISTIC: A paralinguistic shift is a matter of the way form affects meaning: If one changes the delivery of a word or image (that is, the signifier), one can produce a corresponding change in the meaning of the word or image (that is, the signified). Like tropes, these shifts can be conventional, evoking an immediate, intuitive response: For example, everyone spontaneously recognizes the difference between the look, sound, and meaning of “fire” and “FIIIRRRRE!!!” Like tropes, these shifts can also be invented for expressive, aesthetic purposes, as in expressionism. (Similarly, design decisions affect content in architecture: The primary content of a building might be “church,” whereas the secondary content might be “a truely awe-inspiring church for the glory of God” versus “a simple church of humble piety,” or some such thing.)

PARAPHRASE: Rewording for the purpose of clarification

PARATAXIS: See hypotaxis.

PARENT CULTURE: A euphemism for the dominant portion of a culture. See subculture.

PARENTHESES: A postmodern tactic to reveal the hidden agenda of putatively neutral words. Common examples include “(cult)ure” (indicating that culture is in some respects an expression of the symbolic fetishism of cult-worship), “imag(in)ing” (to conflate something akin to aimless day-dreaming with the deliberate construction of ideology), and so on. Some examples seem decidedly sophomoric, and some publications — like the newsletter of the College Art Association — occasionally poke fun at the practice by recording particularly laboured examples from recent conferences, etc. The singular is “parenthesis.”

PARODY: An imitation of the form or content of a prior artwork, either for comic effect or to ridicule it or its author. Originally, parody could be quickly recognized because of a marked tendency towards caricature. The famous cartoons poking fun at Courbet, Manet and others in magazines like Charivari are obvious examples. (Less obvious is whether or not Courbet’s Bathers and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe are themselves parodies, as was alleged in the television series “Art of the Western World.”) In contemporary discourse, parody is a more serious affair, usually aimed at critiquing (see critique) or undermining the tacit assumptions of, say, patriarchy or late capitalism. Straightforward examples are Hans Haacke’s poster works about American Cyanamid; General Idea’s reworking of Robert Indiana’s Love series as part of an AIDS project; and pieces by any number of appropriation artists. For example, David Buchan redid Jacques-Louis David’s famous À Marat (1793) as an ad for Halo shampoo. It is often very difficult to determine just exactly what signals parody, leading Linda Hutcheon to offer this working definition: “repetition with critical distance [cf aesthetic distance] which allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity…. [This] allows an artist to speak to a discourse from within it, but without being totally recuperated by it [see co-opt]” (A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction). Unfortunately, there is still no unequivocal flag that pops up to indicate “this is parody,” leading to all sorts of instances in which, for example, Native art like Bill Powless’ Indian Summer — showing a fat Native in a Speedo suit and umbrella beany, eating a popsicle — is criticized for simply indulging in stereotype, instead of critiquing it (see indulgence or indictment).

PAROUSIA: (Christian theology) the reappearance of Jesus as judge for the Last Judgment

PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE: Immersion of the individual self in the mystical participation in the collective identity of a culture, usually one that is non-European in origin and practices. The idea crops up in anthropology, ethology, sociology, etc., and it plays a role in Jung’s collective unconscious and visionary mode of artistic creation.

PARTICULARISM: In “Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures” (in The American Scholar [summer 1990]), Dianne Ravitch divides multiculturalism into two camps, the pluralists and the particularists. The former seek a richer common culture by including marginal groups in the existing historical narrative, with appropriate modifications (as in add women and stir). The particularists’s goal is separate self-fulfillment through the raising of self-esteem, ethnic pride, and the like. Among other things, Ravitch sees particularism as a wrong-headed assertion that blacks or women can only achieve if taught by blacks or women. Accordingly, she concludes that it is both deterministic (see determinism) and filiopietistic.

PASQUINADE: A composition that imitates or misrepresents somebody’s style, usually in a humorous way

PASSE-PARTOUT: A matte. Used metaphorically in Derrida’s Truth in Painting. See frame.

PASTICHE: A work of art that imitates the style of some previous work. A composition that is a mosaic of other pieces, or fragments or modifications of other pieces.

PATHETIC FALLACY: is the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human feelings, thoughts and sensations. It is when the author expresses the character’s feelings through his/her surroundings.

PATHOGRAPHY: Freud used this term to characterize his investigation of the unconscious motivations of Leonardo da Vinci’s art. E. H. Spitz (in Art and Psyche) has suggested that the term implies that psychoanalytic criticism is necessarily preoccupied with works of art as symptoms of suffering, if not overt mental illness.

PATHOS: The quality that arouses emotions (especially pity or sorrow)

PATHOSFORMEL: Aby Warburg thought that specific historical periods were characterized by coherent clusters of perceptions and feelings, as in, for example, Renaissance classicism. The expression of these perceptions and feelings demanded a certain consistency of formal approach. Warburg thought he could identify principles of configuration which he called pathosformel — which might be translated loosely as “forms or formulas of emotional style” — running through many different arts and giving expression to a wide variety of cultural preoccupations, ranging from folklore to religion. See also iconology, topos.

PATRIARCHY: Literally, the rule of the father. A social organization in which men are the heads of their families and descent and inheritance are reckoned in the male line. Feminism, in characterizing patriarchy more generally as officially sanctioned male dominance, sees it as the root of all evil. For example, Lisa Tuttle’s Encyclopedia of Feminism (1986) defines it as “the universal political structure which privileges men at the expense of women.” Proponents of the new masculinity argue that feminism is right in seeing patriarchy as oppressive but that it is wrong in defining it as the universal privileging of men. A simple example is that men, historically, were drafted into the army and women were not. A more balanced view is probably that industrialized society suffers from epidemic bi-sexism.

PEDANTRY: An ostentatious and inappropriate display of learning

PEDIMENT: The uppermost portion of a principal architectural facade, usually triangular, but sometimes semicircular, broken, and/or curved, or the imitation of same as a decorative motif over windows, doors, and some furniture components.

PEIRCEAN: Pertaining to the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. See icon, index, interpretant, reference, sign, symbol.

PEN: Produce a literary work

PERCEPTION: The neurological processes by which sensory stimuli are recognized and assigned simple meanings.

PERCEPTUAL: Concerning the faculty of perception. See mind-set for a specific instance.

PERCEPTUALISM: A notion appearing in the writings of Norman Bryson describing the uncritical reception of realism as optical (i.e., perceptual) truth, instead of as a meaning-bearing construction which is therefore subject to the inflections of social values. That is, when confronted with a realist image unreflective viewers think of what is depicted only that “it is,” rather than “it means.” (Bryson does not seem to take into account that what appears to be perceptualism might be a visual instance of a self-effacing or unreliable narrator.) For a related thought, see hypotaxis.

PERIODICITY: The state of being organized and categorized according to periods, as in Renaissance versus Baroque, Byzantine versus Modern, and so on. Since any such scheme streamlines, homogenizes, and ignores or downplays difference, much interesting material is lost. This is one of the fundamental complaints against the canon.

PERIODS: An amount of time

PERIPETY: A sudden and unexpected change of fortune or reverse of circumstances (especially in a literary work)

PERIPHRASIS: A style that involves indirect ways of expressing things

PERRUQUE: A French idiomatic expression meaning work one does for oneself in the guise of work done for an employer, as when one photocopies personal material on the office account, or the like. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau construes the idea as a socio-cultural trope of sorts, in which the socially weak (e.g., those who must work for others) make use of the socially strong (e.g., the bosses) by carving out an independent domain within the circumstances imposed upon them from above. See tactics.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION: See retinal lag.

PERSONA: (Jungian psychology) a personal facade that one presents to the world

PERSONIFICATION: The conventional representation of an abstract quality by a concrete thing, usually a person with identifiable attributes. Familiar examples are Justice (a blindfolded woman holding scales) and Liberty (a woman wearing a diadem and holding a torch aloft). In visual art, such representations have been codified for centuries. At one time, an artist who needed to know how to represent something abstract like “knowledge” or “charity” could turn to visual dictionaries, so to speak, like Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, which would give straightforward guidelines to follow.

PERSPECTIVE: The appearance of things relative to one another as determined by their distance from the viewer

PETRACHAN CONCEIT: conceit is a figure of speech which makes an unusual and sometimes elaborately sustained comparison between two dissimilar things. Related to wit, there are two main types:

1. The Petrarchan conceit, used in love poetry, exploits a particular set of images for comparisons with the despairing lover and his unpitying but idolized mistress. For instance, the lover is a ship on a stormy sea, and his mistress “a cloud of dark disdain”; or else the lady is a sun whose beauty and virtue shine on her lover from a distance.

The paradoxical pain and pleasure of lovesickness is often described using oxymoron, for instance uniting peace and war, burning and freezing, and so forth. But images which were novel in the sonnets of Petrarch became clich�s in the poetry of later imitators. Romeo uses hackneyed Petrarchan conceits in describing his love for Rosaline as “bright smoke, cold fire, sick health”; and Shakespeare parodies such conceits in Sonnet 130: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

2. The metaphysical conceit is characteristic of seventeenth-century writers influenced by John Donne, and became popular again in this century after the revival of the metaphysical poets. This type of conceit draws upon a wide range of knowledge, from the commonplace to the esoteric, and its comparisons are elaborately rationalized.

For instance, Donne’s “The Flea” (1633), partially quoted above, compares a flea bite to the act of love; and in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1633) separated lovers are likened to the legs of a compass, the leg drawing the circle eventually returning home to “the fixed foot.”

PHALLOCENTRIC: Any of several self-indulgent tendencies which describe male characteristics as central and female ones as marginal. Anything which foregrounds a putatively essential masculine or patriarchal (see patriarchy) principle can be considered phallocentric. See also phallogocentric. Cf gynocentric.

PHALLOGENERIC: The sexist use of gender-specific nouns and pronouns to refer to generic humanity. For example, Montréal’s Expo ’67 had as its theme “Man and His World,” even though it was supposed to mean men and women collectively.

PHALLOGOCENTRIC: We traditionally tend to think that words have a necessary relation to the things they describe or designate. Such relations imply a certain presence hovering just behind the word itself. Deconstruction argues that there can be no such presence (see metaphysics of presence) and that words function only on the basis of their differences from other words in given contexts. This replaces presence with absence. Jacques Lacan (see Lacanian) argued that the phallus was the privileged signifier — i.e., the principal presence hovering just behind meaning as a general phenomenon. For Lacan, this was partly a metaphor and partly a psychological account of the way the mind is constituted (see constitutive) by language. Accordingly, any discussion of language which maintains presence as an essential condition is, particularly to some feminist writers, metaphorically an assertion of the primacy of the phallus. In other words, traditional conceptions of language are both word-centered ( logocentric) and phallocentric, hence “phallogocentric.” Paul Berman’s Debating P.C. puts it more bluntly: “the regrettable tradition of imposed masculine logic.”

PHALLUS: The male erect organ of copulation

PHENOMENOLOGY: A philosophical doctrine proposed by Edmund Husserl based on the study of human experience in which considerations of objective reality are not taken into account
Under construction.

PHONEME: In linguistics, the smallest sound, meaningless in itself, capable of indicating a difference in meaning between two morphemes. The word “dog” differs from “cog” by virtue of a change of the phoneme “d” to “c.” One of the problems of early visual semiotics was to determine what constituted a visual counterpart to a phoneme (e.g., Louis Marin, “élements pour une sémiologie,” in Les Sciences humaines et l’histoire de l’art). See also coloreme, phonology.

PHONOCENTRIC: Giving priority to the principles underlying verbal language when attempting to theorize about the very different nature of visual language. See semiotics.

PHONOLOGY: The study of language in terms of the relationships between phonemes. Phonology can be directed at segmental features (the segments of phonemes, like consonants, vowels, syllables) or suprasegmental features (see paralinguistic). See coloreme.

PHOTOCOLLAGE: A collage made chiefly of photographic materials. The Berlin Dada group (from c. 1919) were especially renowned for this technique, with notable examples in the works of Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, George Grosz, and many others.

PHOTOGRAPHY: The underlying principle of photography — that light could pass through a pinhole and be projected upon the other side of a darkened box — predates the mechanical means of modern photography by thousands of years. The first practical instrument to resemble a modern camera was the camera obscura (literally, an “obscure” or “darkened chamber”) , a contraption which allowed an image to be transferred by means of a lens fitted over the hole to a sheet of paper suspended on the other side of the chamber, where the image could be then be traced (see tracing) with some precision. These were available in the seventeenth century, and some scholars believe Jan Vermeer may have been familiar with their use. The first photomechanical means of transferring the image was developed by J.-N. Niépce in 1826, when he discovered that an asphalt coating on pewter, treated with solvent, would be bleached by the sun in proportion to the light reflected through a lens from nearby objects. Because it was a mechanical means of “sun-writing,” as it were, he called the process “heliography” (sun=helios). It was never a practical method because the exposure time ran to many hours. In 1839, the painter L.-J.-M. Daguerre announced an improved process called the daguerrotype, which substituted a silver-coated copper plate sensitized with potassium iodide fumes. The exposure time dropped to a half an hour or so, at which point the plate had to be developed by exposure to mercury fumes and then stopped or “fixed” with a hyposulfite of soda. (The process so effectively foreshadowed subsequent developments that we still use some of this terminology in spite of many significant advancements.) Within ten years or so the process was speeded up again with the application of bromine fumes to the plate. With the exposure time now down to a minute or so, photography began its history as the fashionable medium of portraiture. Popular and prized possessions, daguerrotypes were unlike today’s photographs in that they were fragile, single, non-reproduceable images of high quality and lustre, typically protected by little decorative boxes lined with velvet. Both the heliograph and the daguerrotype were positive processes: that is, both required that the light-sensitive plate be directly changed by light exposure, so that bright light created a bright spot on the plate. The next step in the evolution of modern photography was the discovery of a negative process, in which a bright light created a dark spot on an interim surface from which multiple prints could be made. That invention is attributed to W. F. Talbot, whose calotype (sometimes called “Talbotype”) of 1841 replaced the copper plate with a paper sheet sensitized with silver iodide. Prints made from these negatives would of course reverse the process and become positive images again. However, they were generally poorer in quality, so the method died entirely with F. S. Archer’s 1851 publication of the wet-plate or collodion process, which reduced exposure times to mere seconds and produced a glass negative from which multiple prints of better quality could be produced. Collodion’s disadvantage was that exposure, development and fixing had to be done in a sort of portable darkroom while the plate was still wet. Both processes produced albumen prints, so-called for the paper, which was coated with egg white and ammonium chloride and which produced a rich and lustrous surface. The gelatin-silver print gradually replaced this technique in the late 1870s and 1880s with a so-called dry-plate process involving papers coated with silver halide suspended in a gelatin emulsion. Roll film came along about the same time, enabling George Eastman to create an entirely new consumer phenomenon by marketing the Kodak camera in 1888. (Roll film, incidentally, also made the discovery of practical motion pictures possible.) Until the inventions of Edwin Land’s Polaroid instant camera and the digital camera, subsequent developments were mostly a matter of camera size, shutter speeds, and the like. There is a large repository of useful supplementary information, including technical definitions, at Robert Leggat’s History of Photography site.

PHOTOMONTAGE: A mixing of imagery through means peculiar to photography to achieve collage-like effects, not always precisely distinguished from photocollage.

PLAISIR: French for pleasure. See jouissance, pleasure of the text.

PLAN AMERICAIN: In film studies, compositions which close in on figures so they are framed only from the midthigh or waist up. It is sometimes also called the “American foreground.”

PLAN FRANCAIS: In film studies, compositions which close in on figures so they are framed only from the ankles up.

PLAN SEQUENCE: In film studies, compositions which obscure and disclose details of the scene sequentially in order to manipulate the viewer’s attention.

PLANE OF CONTENT, PLANE OF EXPRESSION: In Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, Louis Hjelmslev distinguished between the actual content of an utterance and the manner in which that content is expressed. (“Content” here is conceived of as only the primary and secondary types described under the heading content.) While early visual semiotics (e.g., Umberto Eco, “Sémiologie des messages visuels,” Communications 15 [1970]: 11-51; and René Lindekens, élements pour une sémiotique de la photographie [1971]) saw simple enough parallels between verbal content and visual iconography, it noted that the visual plane of expression differs markedly from the verbal one. This necessitated a revised description of the plane of expression, one which differed from verbal syntactics. Although this led Eco to conclude that the icon could not serve as the true basis for a visual semiotics (A Theory of Semiotics), he offered no compelling solution. In Semiotics of Visual Language, Fernande Saint-Martin offered a solution with her conception of “spatiality,” which she defined as “the apprehension of a simultaneous coexistence of multiple elements in an autonomous form of organization, which is considerably different from that of the temporal order of these elements.” Spatiality, she argued, was peculiar to the visual in a way that did not occur in the verbal and was therefore more appropriate in describing a truly visual syntax. Spatiality in turn led her to her conception of the coloreme.

PLANE OF EXPRESSION: See plane of content, plane of expression.

PLANIMETRIC: Heinrich Wölfflin’s term for a clothesline type of composition which arranges figures on a plane parallel to the surface of the object, rather than on diagonals receding into depth.

PLASTIC: “Plastic” does not mean polymer, in an artwriting context. It simply means that which can be molded or modeled. Typically it refers to sculptural works, especially in the German tradition, but in some contexts it means any type of visual art, before the era of photographic and electronic imagery, especially if it has 3D properties. Nothing more obscure than that.

PLAUSIBILITY: In Philosophy Looks at the Arts, Joseph Margolis replaces the closure and determinacy of right and wrong interpretations with the more flexible notion of plausibility. The criteria include such things as whether a conclusion is reasonable or unreasonable, appropriate or inappropriate, and the like. The process of rendering interpretation more flexible consists in part of exposure to a wide variety of modes. See also falsification, misprision, validity, verification.

PLEASURE: See jouissance.

PLEIN AIR: En plein air simply means that the artist painted outside, literally “in empty (or open) air,” instead of in the studio. Occasionally one also sees the derivative term pleinairisme, which is nothing more than a grammatical inflection of the same idea. For example, Monet (or whomever) painted en plein air during the period in which pleinairisme was in fashion.

PLURALISM: 1. A near synonym of multiculturalism, which entails a lack of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, creed, class and the like. For an antonym, see particularism. 2. In artwriting, the term is also used simply to describe the late 1960s to the 1980s, when no one style predominated and a variety of options was seen as a sign of cultural health and diversity. See, for example, Corinne Robins’ The Pluralist Era, which offers relatively little multiculturalism per se.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: Originally used by the political left to describe approvingly those who subscribed unswervingly to party policy. Since the early 1990s, however, the phrase is taken to be an ironic condemnation of anyone — particularly one educated in the highly politicized 1960s (although even this is a matter of debate) — who seeks to effect a social transformation through various practices in post-secondary education. The practices range from challenges to the traditional curriculum (i.e., the canon of so-called DWMs) to the censure of public language that might be offensive to ethnic minorities. It is important to note that the transformation of the sense of the phrase was undertaken almost entirely in the popular press, leading to many misunderstandings on both sides. In fact, it may not be correct to say that there are “sides,” since many of the participants seem to disagree on things that evaporate under close scrutiny. For example, some people are called “politically correct” simply because they abjure social ills like ethnic discrimination, imperialism, violence against women, and other things which nobody in their right mind would condone. Other kinds of political correctness have a less visible agenda, like the replacement of absolutism in interpretation with relativism, or critical theory’s rejection of scientific disinterestedness and value-freedom. Whether or not such partisans are as demagogic (see demagogue) as they are often described is a matter to be discussed carefully on an individual basis. Paul Berman’s anthology Debating P.C. would make a useful starting point.

Michael L. Hoover (McGill) adds the following: “As leftie grad students in New York in the late 70s early 80s, we used the term ‘political correctness’ often and never approvingly — it was used to refer to a slavish and unthinking adherence to some political line (Maoist in the beginning, then any line), with the sense that the ‘politically correct’ person was mouthing some correct phrase as though that was the answer to whatever issue was at hand. Using the phrase originally had the clear implication of rejecting Mao’s cultural revolution (where ‘correct thought’ figured highly). The phrase was used throughout the eighties by leftists to refer DISAPPROVINGLY to — especially — undergraduate proto-leftists who thought that by using the right words and phrases, they were actually making political change. Just thought I’d let you know — love the web page by the way “

POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS: Along with many other postmodern (see postmodernism) writers, Fredric Jameson feels that an audience never encounters a text innocently, as a unique, unmediated thing (see mediation). Texts appear instead as the always-already-read, something composed by a writer in response to previous texts, something discovered by a reader only through layers of previous interpretations or through inherited habits and traditions of reading. Any interpretation thus constructed is inherently ideological (see ideology), but since readers are usually unaware of the operations of ideology in their habits of mind, the term “political unconscious” is apt. The subtitle of Jameson’s most famous book is telling: The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

POLITICALLY CORRECT: See political correctness.

POLITICS OF IDENTITY: An umbrella term for political and/or critical agitation by specific social groups, including black nationalism (see afrocenticity), women’s rights (see feminism), gay and lesbian liberation, diverse ethnic revivals, and so on.

POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION: An umbrella term for a variety of types of critique of the act of interpretation as a thinly-veiled ideological activity (see ideology).

POLITICS OF THE TEXTBOOK: An umbrella term for a variety of types of critique of the textbook writing and publishing as thinly-veiled ideological activities (see ideology).

POLYPTYCH: See polyptych.

POLYSEMY: From the Greek for “many signs,” the hypothetically infinite range of meanings which results when determinacy is replaced by indeterminacy. The term has become so commonplace that it is impossible to attribute to a particular writer. For other applications, see illustrement, linguistic inflation.

PORTRAIT HISTORIE: See genres.

PORTRAITURE: A word picture of a person’s appearance and character

POSSIBILITY (OF MEANING): See inexhaustibility by contrast, meaning.

POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC: Latin for “after this, therefore on account of it.” It is a common error in argument similar to the genetic fallacy. That one thing habitually follows another thing does not ensure that the latter caused the former. A specific application of the principle is Hume’s constant conjunction.

POSTCOLONIAL: Characterizing a society moving away from cultural, economic, psychological, social and other dependence on the subordination of another social group. Cf imperialism.

POSTINDUSTRIAL: Characterizing a society moving from economic dependence on heavy manufacturing (and its concomitant problems, like waste and pollution) to one more interested in information exchange, recycling, cultural democracy, and a number of related things.

POSTMODERNISM: It is something of a gross oversimplification, considering that modernism and postmodernism are difficult concepts circulating in disputed territory, but it is safe to say at least that modernism tended to have faith in the perfectibility of mankind through technology and rationalistic planning. It is now felt that these were instruments of white European males interested only in maintaining their own hegemony, so the result was a certain homogeneity which disallowed cultural differences. Art which seemed to illustrate, foster or otherwise exemplify values like faith in perfectibility and rationalism was modernist art. In contrast, today’s emphasis on the cultures of women, peoples of colour, and gays and lesbians might be seen as postmodernist by default. Examples of modernism include such things as Le Corbusier’s house designs and Piet Mondrian’s geometric abstraction, both of which were supposed not only to be aesthetic but, more importantly, to affect viewers in salutary ways. That the world could always supposedly be improved upon also led to two other characteristics of modernism in the arts: that art could progress, suggesting that the worst thing one could do would be to repeat something which had been done before, and that the way to progress in art was to focus on its only essential characteristic — i.e., that painting would only be about painting, sculpture would only be about sculpture, etc., as in formalism. In contrast, postmodernism seems gleefully to assert that there is nothing new under the sun and that works which speak only about their essential characteristics really say nothing at all about the human condition. Colloquially, what is often simply described as “modern art” included types of work which actively critiqued modernist values, so while it might have been chronologically modern it was not modernist. In fact, what might be called anti-modernist art bears many of the characteristics of what we now call postmodernism. For example, neither Dada nor Surrealism had any faith in reason, preferred uncertainty, adapted imagery from other cultures and eras, and exploited irony, mockery and humour. (Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and those letters applied summarily, is a prime example.) All of these traits appear in postmodernism. For example, in postmodern architecture we find allusions to illogical mixtures of historical building styles, many of the references turning the source on its ear in the same way as historical mannerism. See, for example, the use of the unexpected in James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart or Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans. Because of its critical stance towards the certainty and homogeneity of modernist tradition, postmodernism is far too complex to characterize with one simple set of stylistic criteria. In any case, it is more a matter of any attitude which invokes an unconventional fusion or overt diversity of historical and/or cultural styles (e.g., David Salle), with particular emphasis on critique, irony or mockery (e.g., Guerilla Girls). Charles Jencks, for example, describes it as “characteristically double-coded and ironic…, [emphasizing] conflict and discontinuity of traditions, because this heterogeneity most clearly captures our pluralism.” Linda Hutcheon asserts that postmodernism and parody are nearly synonymous. Warren Montag argues that “We act within a specific conjecture only to see that conjecture transformed beneath our feet, perhaps by our intervention itself, but always in ways that ultimately escape our intention or control, thereby requiring new interventions ad infinitum” (see Postmodernism and Its Critics, ed. E. A. Kaplan, for these and many other explanations). One of the better known proponents of postmodernism is Jean-François Lyotard, whose Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge offers lengthy meditations on the subject. In the introduction, for example, he defines it simply as “incredulity towards metanarratives,” where “metanarrative” means the set of values and expectations underlying faith in reason and science. Elsewhere he argues that a postmodern work is not made according to preestablished rules and cannot therefore be judged by applying familiar categories of analysis; in fact, the very purpose of the work is to search for and create new sets of rules and categories. See also culture jamming, death of the author, Derridean, prolepsis, skepticism.

POTBOILER: Formulaic works of art produced cheaply and quickly produced to satisfy a market demand — usually for genre paintings — and to make a modest income (i.e., to keep soup boiling in the pot). By extension, the term has come to mean any work considered to lack distinctive quality or originality. Almost every continent has a maker of potboilers, although many of them are also well-known for more important works: in Canada, Cornelius Krieghoff; in Europe, Carl Spitzweg; in the United Kingdom, David Wilke, and so on.

POWER: One of the more crucial conceptions of much postmodern is that things we used to take for granted as given — things like nature and truth — do not have objectively verifiable existence because they are nothing more than paradigms created, unwittingly or not, by broad, impersonal forces in society. For Foucauldians, these forces are determined by epistemes, habits of knowing peculiar to given social groups who have managed to suppress rival groups in practice and who continue to maintain power by instituting (see critique of institutions) symbolic mechanisms which masquerade as disinterested knowledge, but which are really systems intended to keep subjugated those peoples who are uninitiated or excluded. A British lecturer on photography from the University of Derby, John Roberts, defines power more succinctly as the viewer’s right of reply, which thus invites comparison with Susanne Kappeler’s critique of pornography. All sorts of things have been challenged as instances of this kind of power: academic standards like the traditional canon, certificates/diplomas/degrees, the “King’s English,” logic, and standards of pronunciation; and the general cultural attitudes described under the headings ageism, classism, homophobia, lookism, racism, sexism and so on. See also hegemony.

PRAGMATICS, SEMANTICS, SYNTACTICS: Charles W. Morris developed a three-part structure to clarify the nature of language. “Pragmatics” he defined as the study of the circumstances in which a communication takes place, ranging from purely material conditions like the presence or absence of noise to more intangible conditions like personal motivations or the relations between speaker and audience. Pragmatics is thus very close to context. “Semantics” he defined as the study of meaning in signs prior to their use in a particular statement. While this might suggest that a parallel can be drawn between semantics and iconography, Morris’s term is more abstract and closer in meaning to interpretant and paradigm (sense 3), both of which can be embraced within the term content. “Syntactics” Morris defined as the study of rules of syntax or grammar (see also code [sense 2]), which to some extent is embraced within the term form.

PREJUDICE: In common speech, bias or unfair treatment. In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory — most notably in Truth and Method – – one cannot achieve an objective understanding of the meaning of a work produced under culturally, geographically, historically and/or socially alien circumstances. One can, however, achieve a balanced understanding (and a sort of dialogue between past and present that goes beyond superficial perspectivism) by making oneself fully aware (via a hermeneutic circle) of the conditions and assumptions underlying one’s own point of view, as well as those of the author. These conditions he called prejudices or prejudgements.

PRESENCE: The fact or condition of being present — i.e., of being at hand or before one, of actually existing. In postmodern contexts, presence is caught up in the discussion of determinacy in the sense that there must be something lurking behind a sign in order to guarantee that it will signify. In that sense, a determinist would believe in some sort of presence (if only metaphorically). In contrast, deconstruction would argue that there is no such metaphysical guarantee. See, for example, metaphysics of presence.

PRESENTATIONAL SYMBOL: Professor Dale Cannon gives this: “A religious symbol that serves not only to represent some aspect of what is taken to be ultimate reality but which in the appropriate circumstances serves for participants to render it present and enable direct participation in it. In that respect they are sometimes called sacramental symbols. All presentational symbols are in the first place representational symbols, but the reverse is not true.” Professor Cannon’s site is the (R204: Glossary for his Western Religions course at Western Oregon University.

PRESENTIMENT: Foreboding. Giorgio de Chirico said that an ominous feeling of something about to happen was a characteristic of good metaphysical art. It has been argued that he was directly influenced in this by Freud’s uncanny. The idea appears frequently in aesthetic theory, albeit in slightly different forms. Another example is in Jung’s notion of the visionary mode of artistic creation.

PRESENTMENT: Not a common word, but Edward Bullough (see aesthetic distance) used it to denote the manner of presenting something, as distinct from “presentation,” which he understood to mean that which is presented. The word is not to be confused with presentiment either.

PRESTATION VALUE: The conventional prestige value of a sign in an otherwise valueless Baudrillardian world of simulacra. See Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in Arts (September 1986).

PRIMARY COLOURS: The basic hues of the spectrum from which all of the other hues can be mixed. The primary colours actually differ from context to context, but in the classic formal language of much artwriting, there are only the three: red, blue and yellow. Classic colour theory asserts that admixtures of any two of these in the proper proportions will result in the creation of “secondary” colours which will be the “complementary” of the third primary colour. For example, mixing the primary red and blue gives the secondary violet, which is the complementary of yellow; mixing red and yellow gives orange, the complementary of blue; and mixing yellow and blue gives green, the complementary of red. One of the curious optical phenomena attending this observation is that a hue will always seem its most vibrant when accompanied by its complementary. This is very easy to test with combinations of squares of the sort often reproduced in pyschology survey texts: several small squares of an identical red will appear quite different when sent into larger squares of different hues, and the apparently most vibrant red will be the one surrounded by the hue closest to its complementary green. Painterly artists from Titian to Matisse have long known and exploited this effect, although it was not theorized coherently until the nineteenth century publication of the works of Eugène Chevreul and other colour theorists. There are, of course, further admixtures of hue one could call tertiary and quaternary colours, and so on down the line, but there are diminishing returns in terms of usefulness. Correspondent Zachary Stadel offers an interesting corrective under the heading colour theory.

PRIMARY DRIVE: See drive.

PRIMORDIAL IMAGE: The term was coined by Jakob Burckhardt, but it is now most closely associated with C. G. Jung’s notion of the archetype. See visionary mode of artistic creation.

PROBLEMATIC: Some writers use this conventionally as an adjective meaning “ambiguous, capable of creating a problem, doubtful, questionable.” Writers of Marxist inclination tend to use it more specifically as a noun meaning the ideological framework within which a particular issue is discussed (see ideology). For example, the Marxist critique of the art of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s is driven by the problematic of class struggle. For “problematic,” see Louis Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (1968). For Courbet, see T. J. Clark, The Image of the People (1973).

PROCESS: In some current writing there is a greater emphasis on the mechanisms of creating meaning (the “process”) than on meaning (the “product”) itself, especially when the writer is particularly concerned with ideology. See, for example, signifying practice.

PRODUCT: See process.

PRODUCT SEMANTICS: Phrase coined by Reinhart Butter to indicate loosely the semiotics of advertising, for the producers of such products. It was used as the title of a conference at the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki in 1989.

PROFONDEUR DE CHAMP:In film studies, compositions which emphasize deep space, rather than so-called planimetric compositions. The phrase is often translated as “depth of field.”

PRO HOMINE: A tactic in informal logic where conclusion X should be accepted because it is held to be true by person Y, who is ostensibly knowledgeable, trustworthy, and free of bias. Rarely identified as such, the tactic appears with alarming frequency in some writing about art — alarming because the alleged authority is frequently not above suspicion. An instance which casts connoisseurship in a poor light is a story in which the famed connoisseur Bernard Berenson gave a painting a highly desirable attribution — or, to be more charitable, he did not deny it the attribution — because he was pressured to do so by the works’ owners. To challenge such an attribution principally on the grounds that Berenson was allegedly untrustworthy, rather than some material evidence about the work itself, is an ad hominem argument, the opposite of pro homine.

PROLEPSIS: An anticipation, as in foreseeing possible objections to an argument in order to answer them in advance. In a different form, this concept is fairly common in current thought, but it is rarely addressed as such. For example, we see in Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition the statement that artists work “without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done” (author’s stress). See also always-already-read, woman as the not-yet.

PROTAGONIST: In narrative analysis, the principal character, hero(ine) or leading role. In Angelica Kauffmann’s Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, the protagonist is Cornelia. In David’s Le Sacre, it is Napoleon.

PSEUDO-STORY: See narrative analysis.

PSEUDOTRANSHISTORICAL: It is a commonplace in popular culture for people to assume that certain great works of the past do not really belong to the past but to a perpetual present. Accordingly, for example, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling or Leonardo’s Mona Lisa appear to be timeless (see timelessness), giving the viewer the opportunity to read into them any meaning they choose. While one component of this enterprise — the undermining of exclusive authorial responsibility for the production of meaning — is generally applauded in postmodernism, it also creates the illusion that the artist intended the work to exist outside of his or her particular historical moment, which is, according to postmodern thought in general, quite impossible. Mieke Bal (Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word/Image Opposition) has added “pseudo” to show that the impression of timelessness is false. See also greatness, masterpiece, transcendental.

PSYCHIC EMBED: Mary Daly’s term (in Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy) for basic structures of or practices within the female psyche which usually function without the subject’s being aware of them. One such is what Demaris S. Wehr called internalized oppression.

PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM: Practitioners have included writers from both artwriting and professional psychoanalytical fields. Examples of the former include Jack Spector, Adrian Stokes, Mary Mathews Gedo, and Donald Kuspit. Examples of the latter include Milton Viederman.

PSYCHOLOGICAL MODE OF ARTISTIC CREATION: See visionary mode of artistic creation.

PSYCHOPHYSICAL PARALLELISM: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s response to the mind-body problem was similar to occasionalism in that both denied the direct interaction of mind and body. Leibniz, however, did not conclude that the only will was divine intervention, preferring to believe that the mind and the body were ordained to be separate but parallel to one another.

PUN: The opposite of double entendre. Where a double entendre is a play on a single word with two or more meanings, a pun is a play on different words with the same sound. When the doctor told the patient who dreamt on alternate nights that he was a wigwam and a teepee that he was “too tense,” the doctor used a pun (one sound, two words). If the doctor had said the patient would feel a prick as soon as he bent over, he would have used a double entendre (one word, two meanings).

PURITANISM: Beginning in sixteenth century England as a programme of religious reform, but now associated with any particularly zealous austerity, discipline, frugality, industry, and the like. One can discern a Puritan sensibility in most art which favours austerity, and it is particularly common in Dutch art, from Baroque-era paintings of plain church interiors to Mondrian’s mature works. Most recently, the term has been applied to both sides of the debate on political correctness to explain fairly high degrees of intolerance.

Paralogue – a term invented by Lynn Hoffman. A paralogue is a written format that maintains the voices of the individual authors but connects them in such a way that they read each other’s contribution and influence each other so as to yield a sense of paralogical progress. return

Paralogy– Lyotard introduced the term “paralogy” in the last chapter of his influential book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Theory and History of Literature) (p.60) Paralogy is a kind of conversation in which the speakers talk to each other in inventive ways, making conversational moves in an ongoing process. Such paralogical conversation evokes new ideas and stimulates social bonding. In this last chapter of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , Lyotard also argues that paralogy can provide a way for conversationalists to evaluate the legitimacy of their ideas and beliefs..
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Pathologize – to take a particular way of reacting, feeling, or being and treat it as a disease, or the manifestation of a disease. For example, homosexuality was for centuries thought to be an “unethical” action in the western world and then in the early part of the twentieth century it was “pathologized” and treated as a form of mental illness. return

Performative utterance – a statement that, in being made, produces a change in the way things are no matter what the response to it. For example, when someone says, “I promise you that I will do X” then results in a changed obligation regardless of whether that person actually does X. This concept was introduced in philosophy by J. L. Austin. See chapter 10 of his book, Philosophical Papers (Clarendon Paperbacks).
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phenomenology – The study of conscious experience.

Picture theory of language – a theory of early Wittgenstein (as written about in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.) The theory says that all objects are either simple (without parts) or made up of simples. Language represents the relationship of these simples to each other as a kind of picture, and the atoms of the picture correspond to elements in the world that are pictured. (See the Philosophical Investigations) Click here here to look into the relationship between the picture theory of language and artificial intelligence research. return

Play– “play” is the infinite substitute of meanings. Every term, every phrase,has a certain range of meanings and these substitute for each other indifferent contexts. That is the “play” of language. return

Posit – (as in “de-posit) A common term in modern philosophy. To posit is to treat a situation as being true for the purpose of studying such a situation or reasoning about it

Positivism – the form of positivism that is most relevant to postmodernism is the positivism of the early twentieth century which is often called “logical positivism” but also includes other branches of positivism. A positivist theory is one that defines its terms precisely and tries to invent ways to talk and think that don’t get lost in obscurities in the hopes of discovering a more powerful and accurate language calculus. Traditional social science research, with random samples, operationally defined variables, and statistical analysis, is positivist. Early Wittgenstein was a positivist. Later Wittgenstein was a postpositivist.

Positive connotation – for a term to suggest that the situation it names is a positive state of affairs. In the statement “Jack is easy-going,” the term “easy-going” has a positive connotation, suggesting that this attribute of Jack’s is a positive state of affairs. The same quality might be described with a term that has negative connotation, as in “Jack is lazy.” Milan family therapy, at one time, used a technique of “positive connotation” using language to suggest that everything about the family was positive, and somehow beneficial to the family. Even the symptoms were described as positive. See Milan Systemic Family Therapy: Conversations in Theory and Practice .

Postpositivism – is a philosophy that rejects the project of positivism (that is, rejects the project of trying to clean up language to make it more logically tight). Postpositivism remains powerfully influenced by positivism, however, in that it sees langauge as critically important in all philosophical projects. Neverthless, it studies language as it is and does not engage in the project of making it more logically tight. return

Postmodern – Perhaps the most prominant definition of postmodernism comes from Jean-Francois Lyotard. According to Lyotard, the “postmodern” (see his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p.xxv) is an incredulity towards meta-narratives. This means the postmodern is one who is skeptical of theories that speak in grand generalities and that universalize their conclusions by pretending there are no exceptions. Translated into therapy theory this often means that the postmodern therapist works to avoid dogmatic posturing and claiming to state the “Truth” of the client’s situation. In postmodern discussion forums this means that the common quest is not for consensus to emerge around some grand statement but for paralogical conversation to emerge. For many people, especially in postmodern therapy, “postmodern” means disillusionment with the standard way of understanding things. In this case, the therapist tries to offer a less “pathologizing” way of thinking about the client’s issuesSome disillusioned postmoderns, however, are nostalgic, and see no path forwards, whereas other postmodern therapists are visionary . Even the most visionary, however, are likely to be tolerant of alternative and multiple points of view on an issue, all a consequence of learning to live without faith in metanarratives, to live with uncertainty and not-knowing.

Postmodern imagination – Numerous authors have sketched out a philosophy of postmodern imagination including Richard Kearny in The Wake of Imagination, and also Walter Brueggeman. Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination. If postmodernity deconstructs the modern understandings than what is needed is imaginative innovation to replace and improve on past traditions. How we spark postmodern imagination is a topic worthy of consideration. In the Postmodern Condition, Lyotard also talks about paralogy as a source of postmodern imagination.

Post-foundationalism – philosophers who reject foundationalism. return

Poststructruralism – a school of thought that critiques structuralist thinking, generally such as Deconstructionism.Derrida, the father of deconstrucitonism, is a key poststructuralist thinker. return

Praxis – the practical or customary application of a branch of learning. return

Premodern – The premodern is what came before modernism. The premodern is one who has unquestioning faith in a revealed truth, a religious truth, a superstitious truth or a truth passed along by word of mouth. return

Punctuation – In postmodern therapies, to punctuate is to treat a certain element in a causal sequence as the originating cause even though it may have, itself, have been caused by something else.

QUADRIVIUM: (Middle Ages) a higher division of the curriculum in a medieval university involving arithmetic and music and geometry and astronomy

QUALITY: A degree of excellence or superiority, whether of form or content. Quality in a work of art has become a highly problematic concept from a postmodern point of view, since any notion of what constitutes quality by definition excludes other possibilities, leading some to charge that it is little more than an instrument of imperialism, racism and other forms of oppression. And yet, however vaguely it is defined, some types of criticism — especially connoisseurship and formalism — have relied on it very heavily. (For a complaint in this regard, see Hilton Kramer’s “The Prospect Before Us,” in New Criterion [September 1990]). See also cultural selection, genius, masterpiece.

QUANTOHISTORY: The historical study of patterns of cultural change with the tools and methods of statistical analysis. The approach has made very few inroads into artwriting.

QUOIN: Corner stones in architecture lending strength or other emphasis, distinguished from the rest of the surface by greater size, different colour, and/or rustication, or the imitation of same in brick or paint.

QUOTATION: The presentation, within one’s own work, of a selection or brief passage from another’s work and the acknowledgment thereof. This is usually restricted to verbal excerpts from another’s work, but it is easily extendable to visual culture, especially in instances of allusion, appropriation, and citation. See also source analysis.

Queer – in the nineteen-fifties the term “queer” was a slur, a term of condemnation for people identified as homosexual. Today, the term usually represents stance towards homosexuality that does not fix it within a particular gender identity. A “queer” is a person who, at least in theory, is willing to be lovers with either men or women. return

Queer theory – theorizes that gender and sexual identities are not fixed. See Butler in ( Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity) return

QUADRIVIUM: (Middle Ages) a higher division of the curriculum in a medieval university involving arithmetic and music and geometry and astronomy

QUALITY: A degree of excellence or superiority, whether of form or content. Quality in a work of artpostmodern point of view, since any notion of what constitutes quality by definition excludes other possibilities, leading some to charge that it is little more than an instrument of imperialism, racism and other forms of oppression. And yet, however vaguely it is defined, some types of criticism — especially connoisseurship and formalism — have relied on it very heavily. (For a complaint in this regard, see Hilton Kramer’s “The Prospect Before Us,” in New Criterion [September 1990]). See also cultural selection, genius, masterpiece.

QUANTOHISTORY: The historical study of patterns of cultural change with the tools and methods of statistical analysis. The approach has made very few inroads into artwriting.

QUOIN: Corner stones in architecture lending strength or other emphasis, distinguished from the rest of the surface by greater size, different colour, and/or rustication, or the imitation of same in brick or paint.

QUOTATION: The presentation, within one’s own work, of a selection or brief passage from another’s work and the acknowledgment thereof. This is usually restricted to verbal excerpts from another’s work, but it is easily extendable to visual culture, especially in instances of allusion, appropriation, and citation. See also source analysis. has become a highly problematic concept from a

RACISM: Systematic discrimination and other forms of oppression directed at members of other races. The problem has appeared in art and artwriting in a variety of forms, ranging from descriptions of simple illustrations of the problem, both pro and con, to thorough investigations of whether the canon of mostly DWMs is part of a larger conspiracy to exclude non-whites.

RADIAL BALANCE: A “pinwheel” balance achieved by contriving parts of an image to spin more or less from a central point. The classic example is Rubens’ Rape of the Dauighters of Leucippus.

READ INTO: Colloquial expression referring to the practice of producing meanings in the reverse of what had been thought to be the normal pattern, prior to postmodernism, from artist to work to audience. That is, the viewer tends less to extract what is thought to be “genuine” meaning from the work in favour of pushing meanings of his or her own back into it. While this phrase has most often been used rather dismissively (as in “you’re just reading into it what you want it to be”), the practice has become commonplace — even valorized — in postmodernism, albeit on a more complex level.

REAL: Lacanian term, originally for what might be expected, the actual and verifiable, as opposed to the imaginary and the symbolic. In later writings, the term has taken on a slightly more developed sense: since everyone operates psychologically within the realm of the symbolic, no-one can ever truely gain access to the real, meaning that it is forever just out of reach. In that sense, then, it is not “verifiable.” Since art can only deal with the imaginary and the symbolic, then, the real in this sense has little utility in artwriting.

REALISM: A highly problematic word with different connotations in different contexts. 1. In popular parlance it means a generic species of representation that looks real, in the sense that some art historynaturalism. In this sense, realism is the representation of a putatively unmediated world, by whatever means (see mediation). One of the common themes of postmodernism is a challenge of this still-popular notion. See, for example, discursive activity, énonciation, perceptualism. 2. In traditional art history, Realism (with an upper case “R”) denotes the type of realism practiced in the nineteenth century by Gustave Courbet and his successors, often involving some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, if only by virtue of context. 3. Philosophy provides the third and fourth senses: in scholastic philosophy, realism means what most people understand as “idealism,” i.e., that (more or less Platonic) universals have a genuine, tangible existence; 4. in more modern philosophy, realism is very nearly the exact opposite, the “common sense” attitude that real objects exist independently of their being observed. Sometimes called “metaphysical realism,” this latter position is cast in doubt by much postmodernism as well. Notable examples are Thomas Kuhn’s uses the word Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Both assert that claims to have discovered objective truth, in science and philosophy respectively, cannot be substantiated and must be replaced by conceptions akin to paradigm shift.

REALITY ART : Art based on images copied from newspapers, television or any form of media without any alliterations.

RECEIVED OPINION: A relative consensus about something. Received opinion varies widely, depending upon which group is being investigated. For example, the received opinion about Vincent Van Gogh in the popular imagination is that his art looks the way it does entirely because of (what is thought to be known of) his state of mind. In such instances, received opinion usually arises without debate or reflection. This is less true of special interest groups. For example, within the art history community, the received opinion about Van Gogh would be more likely to take into account his artistic influences, current art theory, his religious upbringing, etc. Unless qualified in some way, “received opinion” usually connotes more of the former than the latter, and thus says something about the attitudes developed by posterity.

RECEIVER: In information theory, the audience or target towards which a communication is intended.

RED HERRING: Any diversion intended to distract attention from the main issue

REDUNDANCY: In information theory, the desirable repetition of the same message in different codes, so that the receiver can still get the message in spite of noise. (The same principle is behind the use of oversampling in compact disc players). In art, one might argue that form and content should harmonize in some way so that, say, expressive brushwork could convey the sense of unease as effectively as a particular choice of subject matter — especially important in an era when audiences seem increasingly unlikely to have had the education or inclination to recognize something specific about the latter. (For example, how many viewers of Anselm Kiefer’s paintings have really read any epic poetry about Shulamith and Margarethe? And how many readers of current art magazines have actually read all of Derrida’s Truth in Painting?) However, it is important not to lose sight of the idea that a lack of redundancy — that is, a supposed failure-contexts, the word simply means an undesirable repetition.

REFERENCE: Words are thought to take on meaning in a variety of ways. A common sense approach is that words have some sort of direct relation to the thing they signify, their referent, but only onomatopoeiaSaussurean semiotics, all words are thought to have meaning strictly because of the paradigms in which they find themselves and not because of some imagined reference to the world outside language. Genuine reference, in fact, is denied altogether, which is what makes it possible for deconstruction to exist. Peircean semiotics, in contrast, argues that an icon and an index have meanings determined by their relation to their referents: i.e., if the sign resembles the referent, it is an icon; if the sign has some existential relationship with the referent, it is an index. For Peirce, only the symbol has as purely arbitrary a relationship as that imagined by Saussure.

REFERENT: The thing (event, object, person, etc.) to which an icon, index, symbol or other signifierreference.

REFUSAL: Occasionally used as a near synonym of subversion. See, for example, Dick Hebdige’s of form and content to harmonize — could have a very desirable effect as well. In many other actually has anything like a direct relation. In refers. See Subculture: the Meaning of Style (1979).

REGIONALISM: Loyalty to the interests of a particular region

REIFICATION: The act of making something abstract into something concrete. In Marxist terminology, reification usually means treating human actions, characteristics and relations as if they were objective things with an independent existence. Religion, for example, is treated as something given to humankind, rather than created by it. In some Marxist writings, reification also means treating humans more or less as things without independent will, responding passively to the dictates of a world of objects. See false consciousness.

REINFORCEMENT: (psychology) a stimulus that strengthens or weakens the behaviour that produced it

RELATIVE: The opposite of absolute; that which has a connection to, dependence upon, or relation with something other than itself. In formal terminology, e.g., “relative scale” means the apparent size of a thing in a given context. An awareness of relative scale is especially important in slide lectures, which show students works of art as if they were all about the same size as the screen.

RELATIVISM: The philosophical doctrine that perceptions of things vary with circumstances, especially the social formation and its hypothetically infinite diversity, but also embracing most conceptions of subjectivity. The upshot of the idea is that there are no universal standards of such things as human nature, for the nature of the humans of one era or region have differed so fundamentally from that of another era or region that any attempt to prove human nature “A” more essential than human nature “B” will be little more than a statement of preference (see boo-hooray theory). There are various relativist approaches: Marxism, for example, would argue that meaning is dependent upon the class system at a particular point in time, whereas feminism might argue that meaning is dependent upon one’s gender. Postmodernism in general is relativistic in its denial of the existence of any standards of objective truth (see objectivity). Accordingly, some traditional artwriters see relativism as a threat to the very idea of humanistic education (see humanism). One such is E. H. Gombrich, who uses the phrase “cultural relativism” in Topics of Our Timeanalogyartwriting and the hypothetical objectivity of science. See also absolutism.

RELATIVITY: The quality of being relative and having significance only in relation to something else

RELAY: See anchorage and relay.

RELEVANCE: 1. Generally used to indicate practical usefulness and social applicability or responsibility, as in so-called politically correct demands for university courses that are “relevant” to marginal groups in society. 2. A more specific sense pertaining to informal logic, that in an argument a premise must increase the probability of the claim it is intended to support. For example, if the goal were only to demonstrate that Georgia O’Keeffe is internationally famous, it would be irrelevant to point out that she taught in Texas and Virginia. The latter point is true, but it contributes nothing to the claim. A multilingual, multinational bibliography would be considerably more relevant. See irrelevance.

RELIEF: Sculpture consisting of shapes carved on a surface so as to stand out from the surrounding background

REMINDS: A useful metaphor when considering meaning and validity of interpretation. Anyone can say “that person to describe the danger inherent in, for example, the assumption that a German physics will differ inherently from a Jewish physics. His objection, however, simply indicates that he believes there is still a valid to be drawn between reminds me of so and so,” and the statement cannot be logically evaluated because reminding is often quite irrational. Moreover, that the statement is made at all is evidence that it is true, unless the speaker is deliberately misleading the listener. In contrast, the statement “this person looks like so and so” can be evaluated according to relatively objective criteria, like actual measurements of the features, body types, bone structure, etc. One measure of an interpretation’s validity might be the degree to which the object “reminds” or “looks like” something for the artwriter. See interpretatio excedens, meaning in and meaning to, read into.RENAISSANCE: The period of European history at the close of the Middle Ages and the rise of the modern world; a cultural rebirth from the 14th through the middle of the 17th centuries

REPETITION: The repeated use of the same word or word pattern as a rhetorical device

REPORT-TALK: Deborah Tannen characterized male speech patterns as delivering information in the manner of a report, whereas female speech patterns are less so, aimed more at personal intimacy in the manner of establishing a rapport. Her conclusion is that language is inevitably caught up in what she calls genderlect (i.e., gender-based, socialized language characteristics). A useful slide show about these ideas is available at Genderlect Styles of Deborah Tannen

REPOUSSOIR: “Repoussoir” is based on the French verb répousser, which means “to push back.” A repoussoir, whether it is a person or an object, is placed usually in the margins of the foreground and often shadowed so as not to draw too much attention to itself. Sitting at the margin, it implies the viewer’s position outside the space of the painting. In the other direction, the scene of the painting, usually in brighter light, is “pushed back,” in effect. The repoussoir is therefore first and foremost a formal device for creating an impression of space. Occasionally repoussoirs have a narrative or symbolic function too, but it isn’t their defining role. The figures standing at the lower left of Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda and those at the lower right of David’s Coronation of Napoléon function in part as repoussoirs.

REPRESENTATION: An activity that stands as an equivalent of something or results in an equivalent

REREDOS: An altarpiece. A painted or carved screen placed above and behind an altar or communion table

RESERVE HIGHLIGHT: Sometimess also called “reserve light,” in watercolour painting, an area of untouched paper, usually white, which functions as a highlight relative to the colour areas around it.

RESIST: Elude, especially in a baffling way

RESOLUTION: A statement that solves a problem or explains how to solve the problem

RETARDATAIRE: The perpetuation of styles and motifs after they have passed out of fashion, often used pejoratively.

RETINAL: Visual; pertaining to the sensory membrane in the eye that receives imagery focused by the lens, communicating with the brain via the optic nerve. Marcel Duchamp’s famous turn to a more conceptual type of art was precipitated by his resentment of the popular conception of artists as merely retinal beings (that is, that they were interested only in vision and not in ideas).

RETINAL LAG: The amount of time required by receptors in the retina to recover from a stimulation. If recovery were instantaneous, motion pictures and the phi phenomenon could not be experienced as continuous movement. See also afterimage, persistence of vision.

RE-VISION: Hyphenated word intended to put a postmodern spin on the conventional word “revision.” Unlike some hyphenated neologisms which successfully draw attention to radically suppressed word origins, this one adds little, raising the question of whether or not hyphenation is a useful critical tool or a superficial fashion. (It is probably both.) Adrienne Rich appears to have invented the term, but it is now used everywhere. See, for example, Howard Smagula’s anthology of theory and criticism entitled Re-Visions.

REWRITE RULES: See generative-transformational.

RHIZOME: A root-like plant stem that usually travels horizontally, producing buds above ground and roots below. In the writings of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, the term is used as a metaphor for an epistemology (and/or simple intellectual curiosity) that spreads in any number of directions, without the usual academic or disciplinary straightjackets requiring it to travel in a pre-ordained direction. Any truly democratic type of multiculturalism must involve something along this line.

RIGHT AND WRONG INTERPRETATIONS: See plausibility, testability, and validity.

RISING ACTION: See complication.

RITUALISTIC: Of or characterized by or adhering to ritualism

ROCOCO: A term of disapprobation when first coined, “rococo” describes the last gasp of the baroque, especially in the eighteenth century in France. In choice of subjects, it emphasized what seem now to have been the unreflective and indulgent lifestyles of the aristocracy rather than piety, morality, self-discipline, reason, and heroism (all of which can be found in the baroque). Rococo form is characterized by delicacy of colour, dynamic compositions, and atmospheric effects. Because there is a tendency to preciosity and frivolousness (although this reputation over-simplifies what was going on), one might think of the rococo as “baroque-lite.”

ROLE-PLAYING: Increasingly popular approach to parody, in which the artist acts out the part of some cultural stereotype by mimicking it ironically. Cindy Sherman’s work involves a good deal of this in a generic form. It is much more specific in Canada, with Vincent Trasov running for mayor of Vancouver as Mr. Peanut, Tanya Mars portraying Mae West in the performance video Pure Sin, etc.

ROMANTICISM: ArtLex gives the following, along with numerous thumbnailed examples. “Romanticism, and the Romantic school – A style of art that flourished in the early nineteenth century. It emphasized the emotions painted in a bold, dramatic manner. Romantic artists rejected the cool reasoning of classicism — the established art of the times — to paint pictures of nature in its untamed state, or other exotic settings filled with dramatic action, often with an emphasis on the past. Classicism was nostalgic too, but Romantics were more emotional, usually melancholic, even melodramatically tragic. Paintings by members of the French Romantic school include those by Théodore Géricault (French, 1791-1824) and Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863), filled with rich color, energetic brushwork, and dramatic and emotive subject matter. In England the Romantic tradition began with Henry Fuseli (Swiss-English, 1741-1825) and William Blake (1757-1827), and culminated with Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). The German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) produced images of solitary figures placed in lonely settings amidst ruins, cemeteries, frozen, watery, or rocky wastes. And in Spain, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) depicted the horrors of war along with aristocratic portraits.”