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Theory, Culture & Society
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095213
2008 25: 1Theory Culture Society
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Giacometti's Standing Woman
Iconic Experience in Art and Life : Surface/Depth Beginning with
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Iconic Experience in Art and Life
Surface/Depth Beginning with Giacometti’s
Standing Woman
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Abstract
This article examines a key question emerging from the strong program in
cultural sociology – can art provide a window into social life? An examination
of Giacometti’s Standing Woman shows that art attempts to express cultural
structures via immersion into and through the material surfaces of aesthetic
form. Through an analysis of the iconic significance of family photos, furniture
and celebrities, the article goes on to suggest that such iconic experience
remains at the basis of contemporary social life. It explains how we
feel part of our surroundings, how we experience the ties that bind us to
the people we know and how we develop a feeling for cultural hierarchy.
Key words
■ art ■ culture ■ icons ■ sociology
I
N The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche proclaims that ‘art is not an imitation
of nature but its metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it in order
to overcome it’. Explaining that ‘I am speaking of esthetic delight’, he
insists that ‘these images yield a moral delight . . . in the form of compassion
or ethical triumph’ (1956 [1872]: 141–2).1
If art is not a simple representation of the natural world, then we can
say, in the language of social science, that the aesthetic dimension has
autonomy. But Nietzsche is not an aesthete. He proclaims for art not only
a symbolic but a metaphysical status. The form of art carries a moral
message. Moralizing, abstract discourse is not the only model of ethical
communication.
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Vol. 25(5): 1–19
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Revisiting classical art, Nietzsche acknowledges that Greek sculpture
succeeds because it is ‘able to . . . force the contemplative eye to a tranquil
delight in individual forms’. But Greek art disturbs this purely aesthetic
pleasure. It forces us to look for deeper meanings that the surface simultaneously
hides and reveals. Nietzsche plays with the contrast between
surface and depth, clarity and mystery, challenging the modernist separation
of aesthetics and morality, the two domains that Kant said must never get in
one another’s way. With that rationalist position Nietzsche totally disagrees.
Classical Greek drama, he writes, ‘penetrated the tumultuous world’, so that
we ‘felt as though what was passing before us was merely a symbolic image,
whose deepest meaning we almost divined and which we longed to tear away
in order to reveal the original image behind it’. On the one hand, ‘the intense
clarity of the image failed to satisfy us, for it seemed to hide as much as it
revealed’. On the other hand, while it seemed to invite us to ‘pierce the veil
and examine the mystery behind it, its luminous concreteness nevertheless
held the eye entranced and kept it from probing deeper’.
Surface/Depth in the Icons of Giacometti
If we stand before such a piece of art as Alberto Giacometti’s Standing
Woman, we are struck by its tactile, textured, worked over, kneaded quality.
This extraordinary craftsmanship marks one of the high achievements in the
plastic arts. As Nietzsche explains, however, this arresting surface texture
plays a dual role. The luminous concreteness of its sculptural surface – the
clarity of its image – keeps our eye entranced. Indeed, it gives us such
aesthetic delight that it (almost) keeps us from probing any further. We
become contemplative before such an engrossing image, and we are (almost)
satisfied.
But not quite. When we stand before the Standing Woman, we are also
seized by an almost irresistible desire to tear this finely textured surface
away. Its sculptural form convinces us that there is actually a deeper
meaning behind it. Rather than clarifying, in other words, the luminous
image is mysterious.
This is what Giacometti intended. The tension between surface
physical form and the deeper structure of metaphysical meaning defines the
greatness of his later art. As the artist and critic Alexander Liberman once
remarked upon visiting Giacometti in his studio, the sculptor ‘is obsessed
with the unattainable. . . . How to express in art, an idea, the idea of man?’
(1960: 9).
Giacometti had given up conventional painting in the mid-1920s,
embracing surrealism and symbolism, the styles which first brought him
public acclaim. Twenty years after this first transition, in 1947, Giacometti
explained that, in those early years, he had wanted to get rid of resemblance.
It had allowed the viewer to dwell too much on surface form.
It was no longer the exterior form of people that interested me, but the
emotional things. . . . To copy a body at a certain time – and one that was not
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important to me – [now] seemed to me completely wrong and stupid, and
wasted hours of my life.
It was no longer a question of producing a figure with a superficial likeness.
(‘Letter to Pierre Matisse’, in Lamarche-Vadel, n.d.: 175)
After a decade, Giacometti gave up his adventure in surrealism. His last
effort was the cubist sculpture of a standing woman, The Invisible Object,
which provides a reflecting mirror to the Standing Woman, the later sculpture
(1956) which is our subject here. When The Invisible Object was
unveiled in 1934, André Breton had heralded it as one of the greatest
achievements of the era. Why did Giacometti turn so abruptly away? The
answer can only be that he was not yet satisfied with his movement from
surface to depth. He wanted to develop a form that would take us beneath
the surface in an even more compelling way.
From 1935, Giacometti began to work only with live models, and he
sculpted and painted face-to-face with human beings virtually every day for
the last three decades of his life. His disappointed surrealist comrades
complained that Giacometti was returning to mere representation, to more
accurately portraying the surface of life. What Giacometti wanted, in fact,
was to do away with formalist obstruction, to explore not formal types but
archetypes of the human being. This second transition was motivated by the
same desire as the earlier one; it marked a further effort to find a surface
that would wield depth.
I saw again bodies that drew me back to reality, and abstract forms that
seemed true in sculpture, but in a nutshell, I wanted to do the one without
losing the other. [So] then I wanted to make compositions with figures. For
that I had to do one or two life studies . . . and in 1935 I hired a model. These
studies took me about a fortnight [but] I worked daily with a model from 1935
to 1940. Nothing was as I had thought. A head (I soon stopped doing figures,
there was too much of them) became a completely unknown and immeasurable
object for me. (‘Letter to Pierre Matisse’, in Lamarche-Vadel, n.d.: 176)
From this point on, Giacometti employed the same few models, time
after time, for the rest of his life. At first it was his brother Diego. He ‘has
posed ten thousand times for me’, Giacometti once remarked (in Peppiatt,
2001: 12). We are not surprised at the explanation Giacometti offered for
this artistic choice: ‘When he poses I don’t recognize him. I want him to
pose so that I can see what I see.’ With Diego, Giacometti could more easily
get beyond the exterior surface of the model’s face.
When his future wife, Annette, became Giacometti’s other regular
model, in the early 1940s, his explanation was the same: ‘When my wife
poses for me, after three days she doesn’t look like herself. I simply don’t
recognize her’ (in Peppiatt, 2001: 12). Recalling an evening with the
Giacomettis in the 1950s, the poet Jacques Dupin recounted that Annette
had been posing for Giacometti all afternoon. Over dinner, she asked her
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husband why he was looking at her in such an intense manner. He replied:
‘Because I haven’t seen you all day’ (in Peppiatt, 2001: 13). If, as a recent
biographer has remarked, ‘Diego became all men to Giacometti’ (Peppiatt,
2001: 5), then Annette became for him all women. Lamarche-Vadel
remarked that Giacometti’s famous series of ‘nine busts of Annette are a
collection of idols’ (n.d.: 154). The artist had transformed his wife from
familiar woman to mysterious archetype. Before Giacometti met Annette, he
was famous for regular late night visitations to Parisian brothels. His close
friend Jean Genet later suggested that his sexual behavior could be viewed
in a metaphysical way.
It seems to me he went to them almost as a worshipper. He went there to see
himself kneeling in front of an implacable, distant goddess. Between each
naked whore and him there was perhaps the same kind of distance that his
statues always keep with us. (Genet, 1958, cited in Peppiatt, 2001: 19 n10)
‘You never copy the glass on the table’, Giacometti once told an interviewer,
‘you copy the residue of a vision. . . . One sees it disappear, then reappear.’
Employing the existentialist language of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,
Giacometti continued that ‘it is really always between being and non-being’
(interview with Parinaud, 1962, cited in Peppiatt, 2001: 19 n7). When
Giacometti first moved beyond surrealism, in 1935, he produced a series of
sculpted heads that prompted André Breton to exclaim – ‘A head! Everybody
knows what a head is’ (in Lamarche-Vadel, n.d.: 73). How little he
understood what Giacometti was searching for!
This effort to plumb the depth by immersion into and through the
surface, to sculpt and paint from models but to create anything but a model
in art, set the aesthetic challenge that defined Giacometti’s mature style,
which he achieved only after 1945, when he returned to postwar Paris
from his self-imposed exile in Switzerland. Still, while he found a plastic
form to capture the tension between surface and depth, for him it could
never be resolved. ‘I shall never succeed’, he once lamented, ‘in putting into
a portrait all the power a head contains. . . . To be able to make a head, one
head, just once’ (quoted in Lamarche-Vadel, n.d.: 7 and in Peppiatt, 2001:
162).
What were the depths that Giacometti wanted to explore? Certainly,
his philosophical interpreters are right that his shockingly dark, gaunt,
distant, and intensely worrying figures communicated, in the first place, the
social and existential anxiety of European society after the most destructive
and anti-human conflict in history (e.g. Sartre, 1948; Peppiatt, 2001: 5). But
for Giacometti, just as for his close friend Samuel Becket, such an historical
and generic understanding was not enough. Their art reveals the dark
and uncertain fate of humanity in an archetypical way. As Lamarche-Vadel
wrote about the later busts, ‘the iconography of Giacometti’s face is an
endless catalogue of the unfolding of anxiety and care, of grief and of the
stamp of age upon character’ (n.d.: 7).
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The new form that Giacometti created when he returned to Paris was
triggered by an extraordinary epiphany, which Peppiatt calls Giacometti’s
‘Pauline experience’ and Freud would likely have described as derealization.
One evening, while the sculptor sat at the cinema immersed in a film,
he felt himself descending below the surface of the screen into iconography
itself.
Instead of seeing a person on the screen, I saw vague black blobs moving. I
looked at the people around me and as a result I saw them as I had never
seen them before. . . . I remember very clearly coming out on the Boulevard
du Montparnasse and seeing the Boulevard as I had never seen it before.
Everything was different: depth, objects, colours and the silence. . . . That
day reality was completely revalued for me; it became the unknown. (interview
in Charbonnier, 1959, quoted in Peppiatt, 2001: 7)
In an autobiographical essay published one year later, Giacometti suggested
that the aesthetic framework within which he was experiencing the outside
world had become transformed. It had become iconic, giving him access to
the mystical but more realistic underside of social objects.2 In his description,
we can find the origins of his later art.
During that period I had begun to see heads in the void, in the space that
surrounded them. The first time I saw a head I was looking at freeze, become
fixed in that single instance forever, I trembled with terror as never before in
my life, and a cold sweat ran down my back. This was no longer a living head,
but an object which I looked at as I would at any other thing that was dead
and alive at the same time. I let out a cry of terror as if I had just crossed
over a threshold, as if I had gone into a world that nobody had seen before. . . .
This vision came back often, in the metro, in the street, in restaurants or with
friends. That waiter at the Brasserie Lipp who stood motionless, bending over
me, his mouth open, with no connection with the previous moment or with
the following moment, his mouth open, his eyes fixed and unwavering. . . .
There was no connection any more between these objects separated by
immeasurable chasms of emptiness. (quoted in Peppiatt, 2001: 31–2)3
The formal innovation that marked Giacometti’s later work turned on
creating and closing distance. In its solitude and emptiness, the human
being is distant from our feelings, from our touch, from our love, cut off from
the solidarity of others. Giacometti sculpts this distance by keeping his
famous figures, like the Standing Woman, far away, naked but desexualized,
in full figure but disembodied, sometimes looking or walking toward us but
seeming always to be looking and walking away. Yet, at the same time,
Giacometti also draws us into this separate space. He allows us to cross the
distance he has created, via the soft, worked-over, kneaded texture of his
form. His heads seem to be looking inward and outward at the same time,
beckoning us inside while keeping us out. His figures, as Lamarche-Vadel
remarked, can be seen as ‘de-materializing and un-making the figure’ (n.d.:
130), even while they communicate materiality in a powerful way.4
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Giacometti wrote that, after the war, he had wanted to make ‘larger
figures’, in contrast to the tiny, compressed, and obsessive miniatures he
had created during the war years in Switzerland, all of which fitted into the
shoebox he carried with him to Paris when he returned in 1945. ‘But to my
surprise’, he testified, ‘they only seemed likenesses if they were long and
thin’. Only immensely long and thin forms could seem likenesses of the
powerful, anxious, and iconic associations that Giacometti had more deeply
in mind. Genet beautifully captured the manner in which the formal
structure of the sculptor’s later work allowed him to communicate being and
nothingness.
Not only do his statues come upon us from very far away, from a remote
horizon, but wherever you are in regard to them, they make it seem that you
are looking up at them, are below. They are on a remote horizon, elevated,
and you are at the bottom of the hill. They come hurrying to meet you and to
pass beyond you. (Genet, 1958, quoted in Lamarche-Vadel, n.d.: 148)
Surface/Depth in the Icons of Society
The artist tells the truth about an object by using surface form as a device
to draw us deeper, into what might be called iconic meaning. If this is
successful, the specifics of the object and its production fall away.5 We are
unconcerned with who the model was, with what the artist felt like on that
day, where she did her work, or the political events of the time. As the artist
draws us into this deeper level, the aesthetic object becomes a symbol, not
a specific referent for some specific thing but a signifier that points to all
‘such things’. It becomes a collective representation, an ideal-type of object,
person, or situation. By its very uniqueness, it triggers a process of typification.
Esoteric aesthetic objects become iconic by drawing us into the heart
of the world.
It is here that I come to a simple but significant sociological point.
Materiality is, I would argue, just as critical for establishing ‘types’ in social
as in artistic life. So is the same deceptive relation between surface and
depth. In the course of everyday life, we are drawn into the experience of
meaning and emotionality by surface forms. We experience these forms in
a tactile way. They have an expressive texture that we ‘feel’ in our unconscious
minds and associate with other ideas and things. These ideas and
things are simultaneously personal and social.
In contrast to the quintessential modern conditions of impersonality
and withdrawal, this movement from surface to depth represents immersion
in the materiality of social life. It is immersion into an aesthetic object that
makes it into an icon. In this same manner, non-aesthetic social things
become iconic too.
Immersion is a dual process, a dialectic between ‘subjectification’ and
‘materialization’. By subjectification I mean the drawing of the object, seemingly
external, into oneself. In this movement from object to subject, a thing
becomes alive, or seems to take on life. Becoming us, it loses its objectness.
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One no longer sees the object, but oneself, one’s projections, one’s own
convictions and beliefs. By materialization, I mean to suggest the opposite
experience, the process by which the subject falls into the object and loses
oneself. One becomes the thing, existing inside it. One lives and breathes
the object, looking outside to the world from inside of it. Its texture is your
texture. Thus Flaubert’s remark: ‘I am Madame Bovary.’6
If immersion creates icons, icons allow immersion. This is a ‘mystical’
experience in that the distinction between subject and object dissolves.
There is oneness, not duality. As the Beatles sang in I Am the Walrus: ‘I am
you and you are me and we are all together.’
Iconicism is not entirely mystical, for there is also referentiality. The
subject loses itself in the experience of immersion, but the icon points
outside of itself, and outside of the subject, to something else, something in
the world. We have seen how, for Giacometti, the sculptural icon points to
the dark side of the human condition. Any powerful artistic symbol points
outside itself in a similarly iconic way. It can remind us of the stillness of
a moment of domestic life, as in Cezanne or Vermeer, or of erotic excess and
pleasure, as in Rubens’ women. It can clutch tightly to moral significance,
as in Picasso’s doves, which also suggest vulnerability and loneliness. Mary
Cassatt’s woman sitting in an opera box, with her exposed shoulders and
still fan, represents allure, and elegance, but also the privacy, even isolation,
of women in the privileged class. Artistic icons have denoted men hunting,
fishing, posing and dressing; medieval children ice-skating; our forebears
eating, partying, marrying and dying; peasants bundling hay and raking ripe
grain; burghers bursting with pride; workers sweating under their burdens;
aristocrats primping, students celebrating, actors sweating; coldly angular
machines, bustling and fetching cityscapes, warm seascapes and the darkly
lit snowscapes of wintry days.7
Can such iconographic experience be at the basis of social life, even
in the modern, deracinated, secularized, technological and materialistic
world in which we live today? I think so. Iconographic experience explains
how we feel part of our social and physical surroundings, how we experience
the reality of the ties that bind us to people we know and people we
don’t know, and how we develop a sense of place, gender, sexuality, class,
nationality, our vocation, indeed our very selves.
Following are some mundane examples of iconography in its everyday
forms.
Family photos. They embody those whom we have experienced and loved.
The tactile representations bring them into us, and we into them. As we
proceed through the life cycle, and separate from what sometimes seems an
infinite series of groups and individuals, we keep these loved ones with us, not
only through memories but through such icons. Home and office spaces are
filled with such material representations, and so are the wallets and purses we
carry everywhere near our bodies. They recall, through their material
surfaces, those with whom we have been most solidary in our social lives.
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What is the difference between such humble family photos and the
magnificent portraits and busts that fill art museums? They are looked at
just as reverently; they are remarked upon and embraced, and they circulate,
generating intense feelings, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.
Household and domestic objects. What does it mean to have furniture? To
‘decorate’ a living room or a bedroom, or to remodel the kitchen? To choose
towels, carpets, covers, paint? It is not just a utilitarian matter of covering
the floor to keep it warm or of providing places to work and to sit. It is a matter
also of surrounding ourselves with material objects that represent our values,
standards and beliefs. In doing so, these domestic icons provide continuous
if relatively subdued and routinized experiences of subjectification (see e.g.
Csikzentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981; Miller, 1998; Woodward,
2003).
Advertisements and branding. Advertisements are designed to sell things,
but they do so by presenting and facilitating the dialectic of subjectification
and materialization. They connect newly produced or marketed objects with
earlier iconic ones. If automobiles and their advertisements are vigorously
and effectively shaped, consumers immerse themselves inside their images,
identifying themselves with the emotions that seethe just beneath their
surface and with the objects to which they refer. As we immerse ourselves in
their materiality, their materiality disappears (see Belk and Tumbat, 2005;
Holt, 2004). Does this process represent the commodification of persons or,
better perhaps, the subjectification of commodities? Think of the mysteries
and sexualities of the Corvette, the BMW, the Jaguar; how the Volkswagen
Beetle came to embody and signify asceticism and nonconformity, and even
anti-materialism. There are, of course, direct parallels for these iconic social
experiences in the history of art, which is filled with representations of
household objects. One might think of Ed Keinholz’s automobile sculptural
installations, linking car icons with the sex, drinking and gang cultures of the
1950s, or Andy Warhol’s cans of Campbell soup.
Movie stars and celebrity heroes. We make icons out of human beings in
everyday social life. They are collective representations of people whom we
don’t know, whom we will never know, but whom we adore and sometimes
even worship. Whether bathed in darkness and sidling right up beside our
fellow anonymous human beings in a movie theater, or watching television
alone in our living or bedrooms, we enter into mass mediated entertainment
in order to come into contact with these iconic figures, to have the experience
of immersion vis-à-vis figures who are literally and figuratively larger than
life. Many of us cut out their pictures from magazines or buy posters and
attach their images to the walls of our offices and homes. Do we watch TV
only to be informed or entertained, to laugh or cry? We watch also so that we
can become one with our celebrity heroes, to become them and for them to
become us, and to be connected with the things-ideas-beliefs-feelings to
which their images refer.8
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Clothing. The function of fashion and style is to drape ourselves in an
image, to immerse ourselves in material forms that transform us into the
‘types’ that we have seen and would like to be. ‘Clothes make the man’ (see
Rubinstein, 1995).
Make-up. Combing hair, getting a sun tan, applying lipstick, adjusting our
faces in every conceivable conventionalized way – what better example could
there be of this dialectic of subjectification and materialization that makes
up iconic life (see Constable, 2000; Lury, 1996)?
What are the feelings that social icons generate? They are aesthetic
forms, but they draw us beneath the surface into the languages and feelings
of social things. Social icons are full of feeling, knowledge and evaluation.
We ‘worship’ them, ‘yearn’ for them, feel as if we would ‘die’ for them. More
than mere material things, they are collective representations of the social
sacred, and sometimes also the profane. They are ‘divas’, queens, sex
symbols and he-men. The mistress of song, the chairman of the board, the
king of swing. We want to touch them, swallow them, run our fingers along
them, feast visually inside of them. We want to ‘be’ them.9
In recent decades, after the cultural turn that has transformed the
human sciences, sociologists have learned that a society’s normative standards
are not established primarily by formal rules or even by such general
and diffuse things as social values. Rather, they are established through
collective discourses built from codes, narratives and metaphors. We need
to extend this new understanding one step further still. Collective discourses
also assume an iconic form. Their meanings are learned through subjective
immersion and projected through materiality.
How do we know what we should strive for in our chosen roles, in our
occupations, as husband, wife and partner, as player, scholar and artist, as
a member of the elite or the proletariat? Might it not be through iconic
experience that social standards of work, behavior, self and meaning are
created, communicated and maintained?10
Not only artistic objects but social icons can be hierarchically
arranged by proximity to some archetype, some ideal of the sublime, defined
not intellectually but by reference to some actual material object, to its
shape, its feel. We judge authenticity by such proximity, when an iconic rerepresentation
captures something of the archetype that lies beneath. What
seem merely to be imitations are called kitsch; they are icons that do not
stimulate or facilitate immersion and identification.
Artistic icons are arranged in vertical hierarchies. It is the desire to
replicate iconic sublimity that motivates achievement from those would-be
artists newly arrived on the scene. Is everyday life all that different? An
apprentice admires a great carpenter: ‘If I could only learn to turn a joint
like Smithie.’ A young athlete fixates on an older, much more accomplished
one, who in turn has ‘fallen in love’ with a great professional. A young
scholar has her personal icons in her chosen discipline. So does a young
chef. We all ‘know’, we feel in our bones, the standard of goodness or
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greatness in whatever we try to do, whether it is combing our hair, knotting
our tie, moving into the passing lane, baling hay, playing the guitar, swinging
a tennis racket, making an incision or making love. We also feel, for we have
also seen and touched, the standards of deviation and degradation from the
ideal that we fervently wish to avoid. We know what an honest man looks
like. We have icons of honesty as well as deceit, and popular culture reproduces
new and old versions of them all the time. We demand that society
create icons when we wish to remember some particularly outstanding individual,
event or thing, or to memorialize our recovery from some tortuous
social trauma. For such situations, private photos and personal icons are not
sufficient. We need something more formally constructed, more public, more
compelling (see Schwartz, 2000: esp. 29–142).
Radical and reactionary thinking alike have tended toward a nostalgic
conviction that iconographic experiences are only available in earlier
societies, in traditional life. We are supposed not to have time for such
experiences today, because we are modernists, affected by the usual
suspects of materialism, reification and objectification. Has not modernity
eliminated contact with the sacred ‘aura’ of traditional art, which, according
to Walter Benjamin (1969), is available only through contact with the
real thing?
What I have wished to suggest here is that the expressive/aesthetic
dimension is also fundamental in modern societies, that it communicates
through material forms whose surface draws an actor inward to experience
deeper moral and emotional depths. If this is so, then our experience of
art is not marginal but central to our experience of modern and even postmodern
life.
Bibliographic/Theoretical Note
The form of this article is not scholarly. First presented at the Yale Art
Gallery to a lay audience, its ideas are developed from the thing-in-itself
rather than from the thing suspended within webs of theoretical reference.
That it is so suspended, however, is not something I have any wish to deny.
While I have mentioned various classical and contemporary references
in the notes and references, I would like to be more expansive in my
theoretical framing here (see also Alexander, forthcoming).
‘Iconic Experience’ adds its voice to the growing attention to the
aesthetic in social theory, an attention that revives, in a sublimated manner
and without utopian metaphysics, the old romantic dream of reintegrating
art and life, of reinserting form and feeling into object and utility. For the
background and ambiguities of this new direction in aesthetic theory, see
Matthews and McWhirter (2003). For a recent plaidoyer for the reintegration
of art and life, and its intellectual archeology, see Gombrecht (2006a)
and also Gombrecht’s instructive illustration, In Praise of Athletic Beauty
(2006b).
For the ideal-typical postmodernist argument relating such aesthetic
reinsertion to an underlying historical transformation, see Featherstone
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(1992); for an argument about the broader macro-economic background of
such postmodern necessity, see Lash and Urry (1994, esp. pp. 60–144) and,
e.g., Welsch (1996) and Lash and Lury (2007).
As the approach in ‘Iconic Experience’ suggests, however, I have
doubts about such historicist approaches to aestheticization. Material
meanings have not surfaced in economic life only with the decommodification
processes that mark post-industrial, post-Fordist economies.
Certainly ‘production is [today] not so much material as
information’ and profit depends on ‘how information is materially
embodied’ (Lash and Lury, 2007: 94); design and advertising considerations
are more central to the production process than ever before; and
branding has displaced any lingering sense of actual physical need as the
source of value-added in production and distribution (2007: 111–44). But
when Marx wrote 150 years ago he vastly overestimated the distinction
between commodities produced for exchange and pre-marked objects that
retained their use value. The aesthetic-cum-moral dimensions of design
have, in fact, always been central to the creation of material objects, from
totems to tools (e.g. John Heskett, 2002); use-value has never been purely
pragmatic, and the equivalence of exchange never purely abstract
(Sahlins, 1976: 166–204).
The theoretical webs in which ‘Iconic Experience’ is suspended, then,
turn more on theoretical than historical logic. They complement the
emphases on singularity and subjectification over abstraction and commodification
that emerged in the anthropology and sociology of material
consumption some 20 years ago, in such remarkable works as Daniel
Miller’s Material Consumption and Mass Consumption (1987), Igor
Kopytoff’s ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’
(1986) and Colin Campbell’s The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern
Consumerism (1987).
To suggest the reintegration of art and life returns, in some manner, to
Simmel’s vitalist vision, with its omnivorous, boundary-crossing aestheticism.
It also points to the need not only for connecting the beautiful with
the sublime, which Kant did not resist, but for relating both these aesthetic
dimensions with the sociological production of moral good, which Kant did
resist. As ‘Iconic Experience’ implies, the beautiful and sublime can be seen
as homologous with the Durkheimian sacred, though not, of course, as identical
with it. If the profane is marked by its mundaneity and the sacred by
transcendence, then the beautiful/sublime is an aesthetic version of sacrality
and ugliness, the latter being the aesthetic equivalent of the unmarked
and routine or of the profane in the sense of disgusting and offensive. (For
disgusting and offensive as aesthetic categories, see Danto, 2003:
esp. 49–60.) It is remarkable how Simmel’s observations about the construction
of the aesthetic are homologous with Durkheim’s argument about the
necessity for separating the constructed categories of sacred and profane.
Writing about beauty, Simmel asserts that ‘our sensations are tied to
differences’.
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One of the highest aesthetic stimuli and values of this world is based on the
division of the world into light and darkness, so that its elements do not flow
into one another formlessly, but instead each individual has its place in a
hierarchy of values between a higher and lower one, and the raw and lower
forms derive their existential meaning from their being the support and background
for the refined, bright, and exalted. (1968: 70)
In its discussion of surface/depth in art and life, ‘Iconic Experience’
gestures to recent discussions in aesthetic theory that have returned to the
importance of ‘material’ surface (e.g. Martin Seel, 2005) and, more generally,
to the burgeoning field of visual studies (e.g., Emmison and Smith,
2000). But if it complements this emerging focus on object-ness, it also
insists, contra such arguments as Bill Brown’s (e.g. 2001), on materialityin-signification.
Materiality should be conceived of not as a substitute for
signs but rather as an alternative, non-verbal medium for symbolic
communication. As Rom Harré puts it, ‘an object is transformed from a
piece of stuff definable independently of any story-line into a social object
by its embedment in a narrative’ (2002). In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology
(1986), W.J.T. Mitchell develops a powerful polemic against such simplistic
binaries as image/text, nature/form, icon/sign. In a recent issue of Res:
Anthropology and Aesthetics devoted to ‘Polemical Objects’ (2004), Whitney
Davis complains that ‘these days, visual-culture studies often reify a pure
visuality’:
Indeed, visuality often seems to be taken to be a historical object – namely,
‘visual culture’ as such. But this approach violates the underlying theory of
an original phenomenal succession to cultural meaning. . . . When visualculture
studies take visuality to be the very ground rather than one moment
of the history of image making, it has no coherent way to relate the effects of
the image itself – its supposedly constitutive ordering of vision – to the causes
of its pictorial vehicle in vision. (2004: 9–10, emphasis in original)
The result is ‘a reified pure visuality’, a ‘question-begging dogma’ that
obscures the ‘disruptions that provoke visual imagination and pictorial
configuration – constituting the very mechanism of the cycle of form to
symbol, of image to “discourse,” of the sensible to the intelligible, and round
again’ (2004: 9–10).
All of this has implications for long-standing debates in semiotic and
symbol theory. It casts doubt, most significantly, on Peirce’s argument for
the purely pragmatic, non-conventionalist materiality of the icon and index.
Peirce contends that a clearly visible physical similarity allows an icon to
communicate more directly and purely than the symbol, whose meaning, by
contrast, must be mediated by convention (see, e.g. Peirce, 1955 [1940]).
But such pragmatic come-uppance to Saussure’s putatively pure, or mere,
discursivity – with its thoroughgoing structuralist insistence on the arbitrary
relation of signifier and signified – is misleading. Materiality is non-verbal
but still conventional. We must not, indeed we cannot, consider material
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shapes literally, even if it is the textural qualities of their surfaces that give
them distinctive communicative power. This is Barthes’ argument in
‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (1977), and it is developed in Christopher Tilly’s
exploration of non-discursive signification in Material Culture and Text: The
Art of Ambiguity (1991). Umberto Eco makes a parallel critique of Peirce’s
claims for the icon in ‘Producing Signs’ (1985).
Mitchell challenges theoretical claims for the allegedly natural status
of iconic signs from a more analytic philosophic tradition. He connects
attacks on ‘fetishism’ with the modernist insistence on transparency and
rationality and, more polemically, with an orientalizing rejection of the
‘primitive’ qualities of symbolic, nonverbal, pictorial communication.
The notion of the image as a ‘natural’ sign is . . . the fetish or idol of Western
culture. As idol, it must be constituted as an embodiment of the real presence
it signifies, and it must certify its own efficacy by contrasting itself with the
false idols of other tribes – the totems, fetishes, and ritual objects of pagan,
primitive cultures, the ‘stylized’ or ‘conventional’ modes of non-Western art.
Most ingenious of all, the Western idolatry of the natural sign disguises its
own nature under the cover of a ritual iconoclasm, a claim that our images,
unlike ‘theirs’, are constituted by a critical principle of skepticism and selfcorrection,
a demystified rationalism that does not worship its own projected
images but subjects them to correction, verification, and empirical testing
against the ‘facts’ about ‘what we see’, ‘how things appear’, or ‘what they
naturally are’. (1986: 90–91, emphasis in original)
Such inhibitions about enlarging the aesthetic domain have, of course,
deeply marked neo-Marxist critical theory, which has tended to associate
the symbolic with the amoral and even with the totalizing, anti-critical
thinking of fascism, e.g. Jay (2003: 3–27).
It is precisely by criticizing such a Kantian insistence on radically
separating the aesthetic from the moral that I began ‘Iconic Experience’.
This separation should be seen not as the condition for reflexivity, but rather
as a deeply ingrained reflex of Western culture – beginning with first Jewish
and then Protestant iconoclastic responses to archaic and, later, Catholic
forms of idolatry, or iconology. These responses, and their later Enlightenment
manifestations, should not be confused with critical rationality as such.
Rational and critical social practices, to the contrary, are deeply embedded
in the dialectic of subjectification and materialization.
When Thomas Kuhn insisted, in his ‘Introduction’ to the second
edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), on the role of influential
‘exemplars’ in scientific training, he was emphasizing the significance
of iconic experience in the paradigmatic field of Western rationality – as
compared with such stand-alone modular rationalities as methodological
discourse, skepticism and falsifying observation.
A similar demonstration of how creativity and criticism are embedded
inside iconographic experience is provided by the innumerable autobiographical
accounts of artistic innovation as being inspired by searing,
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life-changing encounters with avant-garde works in the artistic field. For
example, Brenda Richardson investigated why, in the early 1980s, the
American painter Brice Marden broke away from his monochrome panel
style, which had established his reputation as a second-generation minimalist,
and moved to his Cold Mountain series, which initiated an entirely
different, configurational style that made Marden a major figure in the
contemporary avant-garde. Richardson discovered that ‘Pollock is a very
real presence in Marden’s Cold Mountain work’, that ‘Marden keeps in close
view on his drawing table four postcards of Pollock paintings [and] books
on Pollock are at hand for quick reference to reproductions of [other]
paintings and drawings’, and that ‘Marden repeatedly visits the Pollock
paintings in New York, where he probes and ponders the work for deeper
understanding’ (Richardson, 1992: 45–6).
Reflecting on her interviews with Marden, Richardson describes an
‘unconcealed awe and anger in Marden’s voice when he speaks of Pollock:
awe at Pollock’s achievement and anger at the critical posture which consistently
finds excuses to diminish that achievement’ (1992: 39). In Marden’s
own account, his iconic experience with Pollock comes out loud and clear.
In subjectifying Pollock’s painted objects, he achieved a new level of artistic
freedom and autonomy, experiencing his own later style as materializations
of his transformed artistic identity.
A heroic legend surrounds Pollock. Even in his lifetime, he had become a
symbol. Either you believed in Pollock – who stood for the new art, the
continuing modern quest – or you believed in ‘the other,’ the old-fashioned
academic approach to art. . . . There’s a very American reluctance to accept
genius. With Pollock, there is always somehow the notion that he was doing
something ‘wrong’: ‘he dripped, he was a little crazy, he drank too much, he
had an automobile accident.’ Look at [his late painting] Blue Poles, for
instance. This is a complete painting; there is nothing more Pollock could
have done to that painting. . . . Yet many people chose not to accept Pollock
as capable of doing that painting. It became a very problematic work. ‘Why
does a Jackson Pollock painting suddenly have these things in it?’ . . . Change
in an artist’s work is the most difficult thing to accept. It’s my belief that the
culture is constantly striving to suppress the artist precisely because the
whole point of making art is to maintain freedom[,] and as one manifestation
of that freedom, Jackson Pollock paints Blue Poles. . . . When I think of
powerful objects in the world, I think about this Pollock drawing in Stuttgart
[‘Untitled’, from 1950, another ‘late’ painting] . . . It is one of the most
compelling works in the history of art. (Richardson, 1992: 40–3, emphasis in
original)
Notes
This article was first presented at the Yale University Art Museum as a lecture in
the series called ‘Object Lessons’. I have chosen to maintain the form of this verbal
presentation. For a discussion of the broader issues which embed it, see the
‘Bibliographic/Theoretical Note’. I would like to acknowledge the stimulation of
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Ron Eyerman, Ian Woodward and Frédéric Vandenberghe, and to note especially
Eyerman’s ‘Towards a Meaningful Sociology of the Arts’ (2006). An earlier version
of this article was published in Studi Culturali 2 (2004): 253–66.
1. These and the following quotes are from these pages of Nietzche.
2. For the ambiguities of realism, see Roman Jacobson (1987).
3. From Alberto Giacometti, ‘The Dream, the Sphinx and the Death of T.’, first
published in Labyrinthe 22–3, December 1946.
4. See also Lamarche-Vadel (n.d.: passim) for the discussion of the role of distance
in Giacometti’s aesthetic.
5.
The principle of counterinduction, of ignoring the apparent, visible ‘facts,’ in
order to produce a new kind of experience, has a direct counterpart in the
world of image-making, and it is this: the pictorial artist, even one who works
in the tradition known as ‘realism’ or ‘illusionism,’ is as much concerned with
the invisible as the visible world. (Mitchell, 1986: 39)
6.
Early existence lives on in certain forms of object-seeking in adult life, when
the object is sought for its function as a signifier of transformation. Thus, in
adult life, the quest is not to possess the object; rather the object is pursued
in order to surrender to it as a medium that alters the self, where the subjectas-supplicant
now feels himself to be the recipient of enviro-somatic [sic]
caring, identified with metamorphoses of the self. . . . The memory of . . . early
object relation[s] manifests itself in the person’s search for an object (a
person, place, event, ideology) that promises to transform the self. (Bollas,
1987: 14)
The dialectic I am describing here bears a family resemblance to the process of
subjectivity-creating-objects that Hegel formulates in The Phenomenology of the
Spirit, an understanding that subsequently informed the phenomenological
movement’s interest in subjectivity from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty. (For a significant
appropriation of this Hegelian theory to explain the subjective and meaningful
dimension of contemporary consumer behavior, see Daniel Miller, 1987.) My
understanding differs in its suggestion that the moment of materialization need not
be the prelude to a necessary estrangement or alienation. The objects so created
can also provide a typifying, or ‘icon-izing’, moment, such that they provide
pathways for subjectification.
7. For a sociological investigation of the relationships between artistic forms,
archetypes, and the ideal-typical representations that form popular culture, see
John Carroll (2001).
8.
Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face
still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost
oneself in a human image as one would in a philter, when the face represented
a kind of absolute state of the flesh [that] gives rise to mystical feelings
of perdition. [Her] make-up has the snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a
painted face, but one set in plaster . . . Amid all this snow at once fragile and
compact, the eyes alone, black like strange soft flesh, but not in the least
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expressive, are two faintly tremulous wounds. In spite of its extreme beauty,
this face, not drawn but sculpted in something smooth and friable . . . is at
once perfect and ephemeral . . . The temptation of the absolute mask (the
mask of antiquity, for instance) perhaps implies less the theme of the secret
(as is the case with the Italian half mask) than that of an archetype of the
human face. Garbo offered to one’s gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human
creature, which explains why her face is almost sexually undefined, without
however leaving one in doubt. (Roland Barthes, 1970: 56)
See also, e.g., Edgar Morin (2005 [1957]: 27–109, 135–49), Garry Wills (1997:
11–27, 309–14), Chris Rojek (2004) and Sarah Gilligan (2000).
9. For revealing studies of the iconic, artistic-cum-religious experience provided
by such everyday objects as motorcycles and cigarettes, see Paul Willis (1978) and
Richard Klein (1993: esp. 1–76, 135–56).
10. For the archetypical analysis of conspicuous material consumption and the
maintenance of elite identity, see Thorstein Veblen (1899). Veblen contrasts this
with the less pecuniary and more authentic ‘instinct of workmanship’ that may
continue to motivate non-elite classes, and that ‘disposes men to look with favour
upon productive efficiency and on whatever is of human use [and] disposes them
to deprecate waste of substance or effort’ (1899: 93). As I suggest below, however,
such an instinct for workmanship is as dependent on iconicity as leisure class
consumption.
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Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology
at Yale University, where he is also a Director of the Center for
Cultural Sociology. He is the author, most recently, of The Civil Sphere
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