SESSION: Images and Pictures
The relationship between pictures and images – not only the retinal images processed in visual perception but also the mental images of memories, dreams and visualisations – has been an object of scientific investigation since the late nineteenth century, and philosophical speculation since antiquity. But what art historians mean by ‘image’ varies considerably, depending on the scholar’s language and approach (‘Bild’ has a wider extension than ‘picture’; ‘social imaginaries’ are not just in your head). Sometimes, ‘image’ simply designates an artefact specifically made to be seen in terms of its visible configuration; at other times, the injunction to ‘look at such-and-such an image’ could be oxymoronic. This session re-appraises the multi-faceted problem by asking: in what senses do pictures on the wall require, replicate and revise images constituted in the ‘mind’s eye’, and/or vice versa? The historiography and current research on this matter, inside and outside art history, are rich. Do pre-modern and non-Western theories and practices of visualisation contain untapped intellectual resources? What uses – and abuses – have been made of the concept of ‘projection’ (an ‘internal’ image informing and even materialising as ‘external’), as theorised, for example, in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy? What are the cultural and historical implications of neuro-cognitive diversity in visualising, from ‘eideticism’ or ‘hyper-phantasia’ (rich and replete recall of ‘images’ seen) to ‘aphantasia’ (thinking and recall without visual imagery)? Is speaking in a rigorous and cohesive way of (external) pictures and (internal) images even possible, or are the disciplinary boundaries too great?.
Session Convenors:
Whitney Davis, University of California at Berkeley
Matthew MacKisack, Independent Scholar
Session Speakers:
Eunha Chang, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Wall Text, Ekphrasis, and Internal Images
What happens when institutional texts of external pictures attempt to shape internal images? I examine how museum wall captions or texts—precisely, description not interpretation—and sustained ekphrastic practice differently generate what Liliane Louvel calls the “pictorial third” while producing surplus meaning arising when external pictures encounter internal imagination through language. Two case studies will be discussed: (1) the Menil Collection’s deliberate erasure or minimization of wall text, which stages an inverse but equally ideological relationship between picture and internal image; (2) T. J. Clark’s six-month diary engagement with Poussin, which demonstrates how sustained, resistant looking produces accumulating internal images that explicitly refuse the closure that institutional practices demand. The Menil’s institutional texts function as what I call “informational ekphrasis”—brief, authoritative descriptions that stabilize interpretation through selective emphasis. Clark’s daily entries, by contrast, exemplify what ancient rhetoric called ekphrasis proper: vivid, subjective linguistic rendering that acknowledges its own inadequacy before the image. Ultimately, the pictorial third (or the internal image) forms differently through these two modes while oscillating between them: institutional texts compress meaning toward fixity; ekphrastic diaries expand meaning toward multiplicity.
Barbara Jaffee, Northern Illinois University
The Diagrammed Picture
The relationship between images in the ‘mind’s eye’ and pictures on the wall is often mediated through the set of traditions and practices known as pictorial composition, which links seeing with drawing by insisting that artists direct a viewer’s eye into and around a picture by way of prescribed pathways. Some of the earliest expressions of this idea may be found in the painting treatises of 17th century French academicians André Félibien and Roger de Piles. But the concept was never as self-evident as these theorists imagined. The English painter and engraver William Hogarth, for example, was moved in 1753 to offer his readers additional assurances, noting, ‘The eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms . . . are composed principally of what, I call, the waving and serpentine lines’. Eventually, even this degree of elaboration proved insufficient. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, even as enterprising artists published their wildly unsystematic compositional systems (including schematic ‘how-to’ diagrams intended as interior scaffolding for the building of successful pictures), the authors of art history and appreciation textbooks began to sprinkle their own works with illustrations that featured bold and graphic overlays purporting to reveal sometimes subtle, occasionally even subliminal aspects of the internal structure of historical and contemporary pictures. In either case, such diagrammatic pictures use the power of visual analogy to paradoxically demonstrate the self-evident (il)legibility of visual representation.
Matthew Vollgraff, University of California at Berkeley
A Paleolithic Childhood? Eidetic Images and Prehistoric Pictures in the 1930s
In the early twentieth century, psychology and aesthetics converged around the concept of eidetic vision: the putative capacity of certain children (and select adults) to ‘see’ mental images before their eyes with the vivid immediacy of a lived perception. Coined by German psychologist Erich Jaensch in the 1920s, the term ‘eidetic image’ continued to circulate between psychiatry and art history well into the postwar period, when it was taken up by the likes of Ernst Gombrich and George Kubler; yet the concept’s deeper history has seldom been investigated closely. This talk aims to redress this omission by investigating key interwar studies on comparative eidetic imagery by two Dutch scholars: psychiatrist Klaas Herman Bouman and the classicist (and Nazi collaborator) Geerto A. S. Snijder. Using historical pictures both as evidence and as experimental material, Bouman and Snijder interpreted the ‘naturalistic’ mark-making of Paleolithic artists, mentally disabled children, and ancient Cretans as products of a shared, ‘primitive’ eidetic visuality. Disentangling this psychiatric collapse of image and picture, the talk explores how notions of race and disability informed eidetic theory’s influential efforts to naturalize naturalism itself.
Matthew MacKisack, Independent Scholar
Art History and Differential Imagery Experience
Recent psychological research has shown that imagery experience, or ‘seeing with the mind’s eye’, varies widely across the population. Individuals at the extremes experience ‘hyperphantasia’ – perception-like clarity and detail – and ‘aphantasia’, the complete absence of imagery. This presentation reports on an investigation into artists with these traits and describes how the traits seem to affect their practices and creative processes. From there, it moves to look at how differential imagery experience might affect art history (as an ‘invisible’ dimension of experience, the imagery should not be presumed to do so). Rather than engaging in epistemologically shaky ‘retrospective diagnosis’ – arguing that x individual artist was aphantasic, or y artist was hyperphantasic – I take the more profitable route of showing how the image of the artist in the Western tradition has been informed by an assumption of imagery. The existence of aphantasic artists serves to undermine this, forcing us to challenge or give new context to received narratives of creativity.