Models and Decoys
The First Condition No.3
2004
Models and Decoys
introduction
This essay is an inquiry into two forms of making likenesses that have largely been marginalized, denigrated or ignored in the professional discourses of art and art interpretation. Models and decoys are both, at best, marginal forms of artistic production. These absences are potentially informative about the operations of the practices of the interpretation of art, as well as, perhaps, offering resources for critical practices of art making and interpretation.
Models and decoys are something like opposites within the register of art: they drop off opposite ends, so to speak, of the normal scale of artistic production. What seems difficult for either models or decoys to provide, is the possibility for rich and diverse acts of interpretation. The model seems to have limited possibilities for aesthetic appreciation because its criteria of success are based in something else: the interpretation of a model is bound up with how successfully it represents that which it is a model of. It is difficult to image circumstances in which judging a model could be free from considerations of its object, without it ceasing to function as a model. In this sense, the model is too representational for the normative terms of art discourse. The decoy seems to have limited possibilities for aesthetic appreciation because its criteria of success are based on not being seen at all. The decoy is not representational enough, or rather not representational at all, in that it is not meant to be seen to be standing in for something else at all: it is meant to be taken for that something else.
The model and the decoy are similar in their need for similitude. The model must look like (or sometimes behave like) that for which it is a model and the decoy must look like that for which it is a substitute. They both need to be accurate, in some respects. A model which is unlike that of which it is a model (in the ways intended) is a failed model and a decoy which is not mistaken for that for which it is a substitute is a failed decoy. Both models and decoys only exist in relation to something else. This is not to say that accounting for such a relation is a sufficient condition for accounts of art but that to neglect the ontology of reference is to misrepresent what reference is. As Bhaskar says, everyone has a theory of ontology but for some it is a hidden assumption rather than being an explicit commitment.
Paul de Man wrote about how interpreters of literature conceal the contradictions within their own practice. De Man theorized the inherent undecidibility in language between the figurative aspect of language (rhetoric) and the literal aspect (grammar and logic (semantics)) and how claims for the primacy of one always rely upon the other: how, indeed, they are inseparable. De Man argues that the dominant practices and institutions of literary criticism assume that the value of literature lies in the figural aspect. And what it tends to do in practise, is to talk about the motivations, feelings and meanings of the fictional characters it addresses; the fictional world in which they are placed; the intentions of the writer; and so on. In short, it analyses the fictional world of the text as an allegory of this world qua an intentional product of the writer. But the twist, for de Man, is that this indulgence of the figural relies upon, indeed takes for granted, the literal efficacy of language at a more basic level. It is taken as unproblematic that the text under consideration conjures up the fictional world in that text: i.e. it is assumed in practice that language at a basic level (in terms of sentences and words) refers in a literal and mechanical way. The literary critic, prior to deconstruction, tended to talk about what literature was about rather than be interested in how this might be got to, by a process of reading. As de Man puts it, critics tend to pass quickly over the text in order to get talking about the world.
De Man promotes reading not as the championing of grammar over rhetoric (nor vice versa) but as the only way to get at the difficulty of reference per se: the close analysis of grammar makes the distinction between grammar and rhetoric impossible to sustain. Reading here is not about the recovery of the writer’s intentions nor the validation of origins. It is about the complexities and contradictions of how a text gets to refer to the world.
I think that the dominant methods of interpretation for art, follow a parallel procedure in looking for stability in reference and intention. The splits, hiatuses and irresolvibility of iconic reference are quite distinct from those of literature and need their own analysis. Nevertheless, the similarity remains in how professional interpreters cover over, deny or circumnavigate these splits, hiatuses and irresolvibilities in the ways their object of analysis refers to the world. These processes of misrepresentation and denial are themselves misrepresented as specialist knowledge or dispositions within the discourses of professional interpretation, where consistency and coherence tend to be a mark of respectability and professionalism. Tyranny is the refusal of doubt. In art, interpreters pass over all too quickly the difficulties in the ontology of reference in order to get going (with relief and epistemology zeal) about meaning.
The focus on reference in this essay is precisely not to try to fix meaning; prioritize an originary moment; or seek out stability and coherence. It is exactly the opposite: it is only through a process of close attention to what I just called the ontology of reference, that the real difficulties in reference can emerge: its multiplicities, divisions, ambiguities and so on. Indeed, I expect the boundaries between the analysis of reference and acts of interpretation to become unsustainable in interesting ways.
the model
The scandal of the model, for the interpretation of art, is that there is something in the world, for which the model stands. Often a model comes before an object in the world as a kind of test of how things might be, such as architectural models or engineering models. Nevertheless, the model sets up a relationship to its object, which calls for a judgement in terms of accuracy, or appropriateness of some kind, to that object or potential object. I take the exemplary model to be a three dimensional scale replica of an object and the exemplary fundamental criterion for model making to be the accurate reproduction of proportions in three dimensions. A model can be non-committal about aspects of its object (for example, architectural models are often monochrome, which is to say non-committal about colour) but if a model isn’t intended to stand for something in the world (to be accurate in some sense), then it isn’t a model. The model is not intended to look like what it is of but rather to be the same, in the ways intended by the model-maker. The model is a kind of promise of something in the world, either that already exists or might exist.
Judgements of accuracy, of some sort, to objects in the world, are more or less anathema to the practices of the interpreters of art. Accuracy and adequacy are neither normal aesthetic criteria nor common terms in art discourse. In art, the pursuit of accuracy in the form of intricate detail is generally perceived as what Jake Chapman has characterised as the practice of psychotics, in relation to paintings of tigers and steam trains. Such a description places such practices squarely outside what is acceptable as contemporary art (although it might be more interesting to characterise such practices as amateur and philistine, rather than psychotic). The model arises in social practices where accuracy is a necessary condition of reproduction rather than a sign of mental deviation. The model is not a thing in itself, in the way that the dominant discourses of art and art history interpolate the artwork as a thing in itself. The immanent properties of the model are subsumed to the representation of something else, in a way that is not true of figurative sculpture, say.
Model making which is not technical and professional, tends to be an amateur practice or hobby. This distances model making further from the professional practices of art and interpolates it as a practice of craft. With the hobbyist who builds a model of the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks, there is an implicit request to admire the work of the model-maker: his or her skill with materials. This makes the material of the model visible – something to be seen. But there is a doubling here: the material (i.e. matchsticks) and appearance of the building are in contradiction with each other, to be seen on different registers. In admiring the skill of the matchstick model-maker, one is admiring the quantity of labour involved: the excessive time spent on such a perverse task. Such model-making can be disdained instead of admired, of course, but for much the same reasons: the idea of laborious copying is at odds with the categories of interpretation of art discourse. It is the sheer unlikeliness of the Taj Mahal being made out of matchsticks that is admirable. But this is not a judgement of aesthetic worth. This model must be accepted or rejected within the terms of amateur practice and, as Art & Language have suggested, one thing professional art can not assimilate is amateur art.
The work of the amateur is to be seen, judged and admired as work: there is no denying that it takes a lot of time and effort to make the Taj Mahal out of matchsticks. There is a persistence of labour in the product of the amateur’s practice. In contrast, the work of the professional is sublimated within the terms of art discourse. Within the dichotomy of form and content (and its variations – Charles Harrison, for example, talks of ‘the painting’ and ‘the picture’), the idea of ‘form’ is a way of not talking about the literal process of production but of its results: it is a way of keeping a productive tension in the artwork. In the work of the amateur there is a dissolution of tension: the process of making (gluing matchsticks together) clearly precedes the final appearance (the Taj Mahal). For the amateur, making and appearance are kept in their discrete places: the former to be judged by devotion and the latter by exactness.
Dave Beech has pointed out the dangers of considering models apart from their embodiment in particular social practices. That is to say, models (like everything else) are always made and used within particular practices, which will impose value and significance upon them. What is considered valuable or significant is liable to change between practices; or between rival versions of a practice; or within a practice over time. So there can be no fundamental criteria for model making in the sense of a transhistorical absolute. However, I am interested in model making to the extent to which it has been difficult to assimilate it into the practices of art and its interpretation. It is my conjecture that what unites various practices of model making is the same thing which has made it difficult for model making to be taken seriously as a possibility for art practice.
Bearing this proviso in mind (that is, that models might become subject to epistemological change in social practices) it seems tenable to argue that the model making practices that we have, are predicated upon an ontological connection between the model and the object of the model. Indeed, within model making practices as they stand, it is a fundamental criteria that a model stands for something else. However, this is a potentially fraught relationship. Dave Beech has also pointed out the possibility of a rough architect’s model, which vaguely, rather than accurately, represents the shape a building might take: he gives the example of a cigarette packet with a straw stuck in it. In the model railway fraternity, there are persons known as “rivet counters,” who count the rivets on other persons’ model trains, to check their exactness. Accuracy is not free from the interests of those who pursue it. And roughness is not merely the lack of accuracy, it is the indication of a different purpose. Nevertheless, the roughness of the rough achictectural model is functional for a process of negotiation with the architects’ clients. In such a case, the roughness of the model is appropriate to the roughness of the situation: a building in the process of being conceived. The model is still standing in for a building and representing that potential building in some form, however rough. The same model would not be appropriate in other architectural circumstances.
There is another type of roughness which has its own difficulties. In architectural model making, it is very common to expect an indication of how a proposed building might relate to other things around it, including such ephemeral things as persons and traffic. Such models are littered with generic figures, cars, etc. Whilst each of these extrinsic objects is accurate in itself, their relationship to the building is general and speculative, which is to say not based on accuracy but a projection of the intention of the architect (or client). These extrinsic objects are an indication of the temporal dimension of the building and as such are to be seen according to a different register from the building itself. The projected normative functioning of the building in relation to the figures around it, is ideological. Figures shown are never the revolutionary mass breaking down the doors, for example.
Another difficult case is models of things that not only do not yet exist but cannot exist. A model of the Starship Enterprise, for example, has no real Starship Enterprise against which it could be deemed accurate or not. Of course, there is an original model that fulfils this purpose for subsequent models – but this original model had no object. Structurally, this is the same problem as fictive names or pictures with fictive referents. There are no such things as unicorns. But this does not stop us using the word ‘unicorn’ as though it referred to a white, horse like creature with a single, long, straight horn coming out of the middle of its forehead. And there are plenty of pictures showing how a unicorn might look. But the unicorn only exists, culturally, as an image: there can by no records of its habitat, behaviour, or anatomy, for example (although we could always make up these things). There is the word unicorn and a rough image of how one might look, which is s necessarily rough because there are no such creatures as unicorns against which to judge any images. The word ‘unicorn’ and these pictures cannot refer to anything at all. These signs are ontologically vacuous, so to speak.
Compare this case with that of willow warblers and chiff chaffs. These are both small, greeny-yellow warblers, that look identical. A picture of one could be a picture of either. But there are other ways of telling them apart, most notably song: the willow warbler’s melodious warble is quite distinct from the chiff chaff’s brusque, two note, ‘chiff chaff’ call. These birds can be told apart by one set on ontological features (their songs) but not by another (their looks).
However, within certain discourses, to refer to unicorns is meaningful. In effect, we pretend unicorns exist in certain circumstances, where the fiction has been conventionally established, such as fairy stories. In other circumstances, such as at a naturalist’s convention, to talk or picture unicorns as if they existed would be interpreted as meaningless. And something similar could be said about models of the Starship Enterprise. At a Star Trek convention, such a model would routinely and conventionally be treated as though it referred to something real. In such circumstance, there is even a whole pseudo-scientific chain of fictional explanations as to how it works (warp drives fuelled by anti-matter and the like). These are all, ultimately, ontologically vacuous, despite appropriating terms from science. The same model at a Nasa convention would not be meaningful qua model of a real spaceship.
None of the above is to argue that the only way that models, pictures and the like get to be meaningful is through their ‘genetic’ connections to their referents. It is to argue that a neglect of such reference is to misrepresent the complexity of reference in favour of the coherence and stability of expansive interpretation: a hermeneutics based upon a concealed, monovalent ontology.
The apparent inappropriateness of model making to artistic practice is based upon the supposed simplicity in the ways in which the reference of the model is determined by the world: that criteria of accuracy limit or exclude the rich and expansive hermeneutic possibilities needed for interesting art. The truth is the opposite. The rich and expansive hermeneutic discourses of art rely upon a simple idea of reference based on a monovalent ontology. Talk of the complexity of meaning is predicated upon silence over the means of getting from the artwork to the meaning. It is assumed that what icons are of, and how they refer to their objects, are fairly straight forward. The obviousness of the connection between the model and the world draws attention to what is usually neglected: the ontological assumptions of any epistemology. The reference of the model is not necessarily simple; the fact that it must be thought of as so, by the dominant discourses of art, is because it must externalize and distance, that which is denied within. The complexity of the model must be to do with ontology rather than flights of epistemology.
the decoy
The scandal of the decoy, in terms of art history, is that it is not a representation at all, whist fulfilling all the visual criteria for representation. It looks like what it is of but does not present itself as an object of contemplation. When Norman Bryson set out to rescue Still Life painting from its art historical neglect, he did so by showing the complexity of meaning in Still Life that had been overlooked, as indicated in the title of his book, Looking at the Overlooked. This complexity of meaning, he convincingly argued, would have been there for contemporaneous onlookers and has subsequently become opaque and neglected. Bryson deals with trompe l’oeil painting as though it were an anomalous kind of Still Life: as though it were interested in the visual representation of things. He sees the haphazard organization of everyday bits and pieces as a displacement of privileged position of the sovereign spectator but he analyses these deceptive paintings as if they were intended to be seen: as if their visual properties were there to engender an unusual type of spectatorship. But trompe l’oeil painting isn’t a form of Still Life; trompe l’oeil paintings are decoys. Their function is to deceive not represent.
As such, the trompe l’oeil painting introduces a different idea of the overlooked than that of Bryson. Trompe l’oeil painting was intended to be overlooked, qua painting. It was never intended to carry complex meanings accessible to careful spectatorship. The practice of deceptive painting is quite distinct from the practice of representational painting. For art history to take seriously such a deceptive function (rather than treating it as a trivial and marginal diversion) would be to create some kind of hiatus in the discourses of art.
A decoy is an object which mimics something else. A decoy is made to look like a particular thing and to be mistaken for that particular thing. In this technical sense of the term, the idea of the decoy applies to its own properties: it does not imply the colloquial sense of distracting a viewer from something else, where the imperative is that the ‘something else’ should remain undiscovered. Here, the decoy is a distraction from itself, so to speak. Nevertheless, the decoy is a functional term, in that its existence is bound up with the intention to deceive: the decoy could only ever exist as part of a social practice.
A decoy need not be accurate in the way that a model needs to be seen to be accurate. To be successful, a decoy need only be adequate enough to dissuade the onlooker from questioning what it is: it needs to look like what it is of only to the extent that it is taken for that thing and is therefore not looked at any further, even though it might be paid further attention. A decoy tank on a battlefield, for example, will likely receive further attention from an enemy, once it has been mistaken for a real tank, but not further scrutiny. This further attention is not looking in any strong sense: it is assuming one knows what one is seeing. It is precisely this theory-laden aspect of seeing that the decoy (unless it is perfect) relies upon to fool its onlookers. A decoy brick in a brickyard is less likely to be rumbled than a decoy brick in the middle of a pristine white gallery, for example (although not necessarily).
Flint Schier introduces the idea of the decoy in talking of ‘problem cases’ for theories of picturing, where something (X) might look like an icon but isn’t.
If X is an artefact which might naturally be taken to represent O, it does not follow that X depicts O. Someone might make something which looks vaguely pear-like with the intention of deceiving someone into thinking it is a pear. He fails, and instead of being taken for a pear X is taken to be a Claes Oldenburg sculptural representation of a pear. The object which is made with the intention that it will deceive people into thinking it is O when it is not O is not an icon of O. Being a pear decoy is just not the same sort of thing as being a representation of a pear. The deceptive function and the representational function are quite distinct. Indeed, they vary inversely; the nearer X comes to being a successful pear decoy, the less likely it becomes that we would naturally generate the interpretation that X depicts a pear. {…} The crucial point here is that the function of the artefact seems paramount; if X is such that those able to recognise O would take it that X represents O, it does not follow that X represents O – even if X causally depends upon O – unless its function is to be taken to represent O.
The decoy here is defined by its functional relationship within a visual, communicative economy. Contrary to an icon, the decoy is not intended to function as a representation.
Schier is interested in sorting out the confusion over the ways in which picturing is conventional and the ways in which it isn’t. Pictures are not conventional at a semantic level, in the way that language is: pictures have neither conventional signs nor grammar. The view that they do, he calls the semiological heresy. Pictures naturally generate the interpretation that they are of what they are of: one interprets in a picture what one would see in the world. But pictures do not create an illusion of seeing the things that they are of. The view that they do, Schier calls the illusionist heresy. What is conventional about picturing is not the individual contents of any particular picture but rather the fact that there is such a thing as picturing.
The ubiquitous example of how seeing pictures must be learnt, and therefore conventional, is the introduction of photography to cultures who have no pictures. Members of such cultures, do not naturally recognize photographs of themselves or anything else. They have to be taught how to see a picture in a piece of paper. But, once someone has been taught to interpret any random (but adequately replete) picture, he or she can go on instantly to interpret any other picture of anything else, without further tuition. What needs to be learnt is not something equivalent to the intricacies of grammar, vocabulary and so on, as one would with learning something completely conventional, such as a language. The only thing one needs to learn, is that there are such things as pictures: that flat bits of paper can contain images of three dimensional things. Prepared with this knowledge, interpretation follows naturally.
There is only one convention in picturing. Schier formulates this convention as follows:
C: Given that S is of O, it is intended that those who are able to recognise O should be able, on that basis, to interpret S.
Convention C is a kind of meta-condition for iconicity: it explains what it is for S’s content to be iconic. It is a necessary condition of something being a picture, both that it was produced under the intention of it being taken for a picture and that it will be taken to be a picture by those who look at it, given that they are conversant with the idea of pictures. There is a certain circularity here: the picture maker makes a picture under the knowledge that an onlooker will take a naturally generated interpretation to be correct (governed by Convention C); the onlooker knows that this is what the picture maker expects of the onlooker; the picture maker knows that the onlooker knows that this is what the picture maker expects of the onlooker; and etc. This is to say that Convention C is the mark of a social practice.
This idea of intention is not to do with meaning. Schier is not suggesting that the maker of a picture can will its reference or meaning. Rather, he is keen to emphasise that pictures do not happen by accident: there is communicative convention involved in iconicity.
So the decoy, whilst looking like something else, is not an icon. The problem for normal art historical interpreters, is that the decoy is not presenting itself as an object for spectatorship. Interpreters can’t talk about what the decoy represents because it doesn’t represent at all.
A subsequent scandal of the decoy is that it leads the onlooker astray. Cornelius Gjeisbrecht’s infamous painting of the back of a painting (a decoy back of a painting) intends the onlooker not to look at it but to pick it up to see what is on the front – only to discover the real back. Thus the onlooker is caught in a process of doing rather than looking; in a relationship of immediacy rather than distance: the onlooker is given a body. Even without the denouement of ‘being caught,’ the successful decoy makes the onlooker act in relation to it rather than look at it.
As with the model, the apparent inappropriateness of the decoy to artistic practice is based upon the supposed simplicity of ways in which the reference of the decoy is determined by the world: the mimicry of the decoy is seen to limit or exclude the rich and expansive hermeneutic possibilities needed for interesting art. The real problem of the decoy for its normal art world interpreters is not that it has a simplistic referent but that, in contrast to the model, the decoy is not representational at all. Although it is made to be like the object it mimics, it is not made to be seen to be like the object it mimics. It is not made to be seen at all (at least, not at first). The purpose of the decoy is to fool the onlooker: to make the onlooker act in relation to the thing the decoy mimics. Therefore there can be no criteria for judging, nor seeing, a decoy. It is a failure for the decoy to be seen as a decoy. The rich and expansive hermeneutic discourses of art rely upon an object of interpretation to get their talk going. The denial of the offer of such an object leaves them in something of a pickle. As with the model, the complexity of the decoy must be to do with ontology rather than flights of epistemology.
return to Trobriand Island
Art & Language, twenty years ago, charactorized Modernism and its antipodes as a kind of Trobriand Island, consisting of natives and Winchian anthropologists. The latter study the former by immersing themselves in their culture, to the extent the anthropologist’s interpretations of the Islanders behaviour is identified explicitly with the meanings expressed by the islanders themselves. Observation replaces causal explanation so that the answer to the question ‘Why does he carry a stone in his forked stick?’ is ‘Because it is his soul’: and the statement that souls are not such as to be carried in forked sticks is neither here nor there. The Islander’s reason is taken to be sufficient explanation of the cause of his or her actions. In art, the artist’s are the natives and art historians and critics the anthropologists. So that:
The art historian merely represents artists as aspects of the structure of the art-historical tableau; and it is the structure he’s interested in, not what it holds up or is held up by. The activities whereby members of the art world produce and manage ‘settings’ for themselves within that world are identical with their procedures for making those activities accountable. Such practices may be widespread, but their effect is to facilitate mystification.
It is self evident that the terms of art discourse have undergone a radical transformation, or expansion, since the early 1980s. The type of explanations given by artists and interpreters, the habitual tropes and vocabulary used in accounting for art, have changed. Not that the Modernist preoccupations with, e.g.., expression and so on do not persist. But they have been joined by other explanations that borrow their terms of reference from structuralist, poststructuralist, semiological and self-declared postmodern sources, amongst others. This expanded field of reference is characteristic of contemporary art discourse, where theoretical claims for art go unbounded. It is, perhaps, notable but unsurprising that the manifest contradictions in the manifold different positions of various artists and critics provokes little or no comment. It is as if the ability to say something rather than nothing is what is important: the act of interpretation covers over the lack of coherence in what is said. What remains the same is the relationship between artist and interpreter – native and anthropologist. The new terminology of ideas is just as vigorous as the old terminology of feelings and authenticity in treating the artist as the sui generis source of meaning for the artwork. This is the crux of the matter. The meaning of the artwork is still indexed directly to traits of the artist, in precisely the same way that the Winchian anthropologist looks no further than the explanations volunteered by the Trobriand Islanders for the causes of their actions. Artists and interpreters continue to collude in the mystification of art by propagating a discourse which eschews any terms that might produce a critique of its irrationalities (absences which might well be a necessary condition for the continuation of this world in this form).
Finding out that a decoy is a decoy, and not, say, a brick is a piece of information, or an experience, that fundamentally changes the relationship between onlooker and object. There is no going back. The onlooker who picks up Gijsbrecht’s back-of-a-painting-painting to see what is on the other side cannot maintain the position that he or she knew what he or she was doing. The decoy as artwork has this temporal aspect: it seems to be one thing but turns out to be something else. It has the peculiar power to make the onlooker someone who was wrong about what they were looking at.
Art & Language also imagined two ideal onlookers for art:
Imagine two ideal onlookers: (A) and (B). (A) goes immediately to P, waits until he gets the proper feelings, etc., and then her just might look up the title of P, seek information and confirmation concerning P, etc. (B) goes immediately to the catalogue (or etc.) seeking to discover how to read the picture. Indeed, we may suggest that this relative ordering of ‘reading’ of pictures and titles goes to different fragments of culture, social divisions and so on. (A) and (B) would be in different positions vis a vis hiatus. One would expect the hiatuses of (A) and (B) to be at different relative places or to be of different kind or to occur at different stages of reading. [Painting by mouth] shifts the advantage away from (A) towards (B). In Modernist (and etc.) culture the advantage would be supposed to;be the other way round: the possibility of an authentic reading would tend to be favoured by the tendencies of (A). The sensitive (A’s) search for unreflected content is more likely to be doomed to remain a convulsion or series of convulsions of his first-order discourse than is (B’s) relatively more sober practice.
Within the current state of the Trobriand Island which is the art world, I would expect the making of models and decoys to cause similar problems for the interpretative practices of descendants of (A). The treatment of trompe l’oeil painting shows how those aspects of art which do not present themselves as objects of contemplation are misrepresented (when not passed over in silence) by the dominant procedures of art history. The more sober practice of (B) does not assume that he or she knows what he or she is doing: as such, (B’s) activity is potentially a practice of open enquiry, including being open to the possibility of being transformed by what might happen in the process of being an onlooker.
The making of models and decoys is not an attempt to recover the neglected margins of representation, or champion a neglected cause, still less about the empowerment of any putative disempowered set of onlookers. What they might do, is demonstrate hiatuses in art’s dominant discourses of interpretation. As such, they could be, for the moment, part of a practice of open enquiry.
The ‘decoy’ is a term extrapolated from Flint Schier, Deeper Into Pictures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986/89
Jake Chapman on the Art Show, Channel 4. Jake Chapman was looking round the Not The Turner Prize exhibition at the Mall Galleries.
See Appendix to this issue of the First Condition.
Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, Reakton Books, London, 1990/1995.
Flilnt Schier, Deeper Into Pictures, p.130.
Ibid. p.137.
Art & Language, Painting By Mouth, in Art-Language, Vol. 5 No. 1, October 1982.
Ibid. Art & Language proposed an ideal onlooker (A) to contrast with (B), where (A) is caractorized by going straight to the artwork and waiting to get the proper feelings, etc. Today’s ideologues seem less patient.
markhutchinson.org 