gombrich 1984_representation and misrepresentation

5/28/2018 Gombrich 1984_Representation and Misrepresentation

Representation and MisrepresentationAuthor(s): E. H. GombrichSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Dec., 1984), pp. 195-201Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343391.

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Representation and Misrepresentation

E. H. Gombrich

It is a thankless task to have to reply to Professor Murray Krieger'sRetrospective. Qui s'excuse,s'accuse,and since I cannot ask my readersto embark on their own retrospective of my writings and test them forconsistency, I have little chance of restoring my reputation in their eyes.Hence I would have been happier to leave Professor Krieger to hisagonising, if he did not present himself as the spokesman or a significantbody of theorists who appear to have acclaimed my book on Art andIllusion without ever having read it. The followers of this school of crit-icism-of which Professor Krieger is a prominent member-had apparentlyconvinced themselves that the book lent support to an aesthetics in whichthe notions of reality and of nature had no place. They thought that Ihad subverted the old idea of mimesis and that all that remained weredifferent systems of conventional signs which were made to stand for anunknowable reality. True, Professor Krieger admits that I never endorsedsuch an interpretation of my views, and he even concedes that there arepassages in Art and Illusion which contradict such an out-and-out relativism,but he wants to convince his readers that these contradictions lead preciselyto the ambiguities he now proposes to analyse.If he were right that the book encourages such a misreading, all Icould do would be to express my regrets for having failed to make myselfsufficiently clear. Luckily I can draw comfort from the fact that unlikethese literary critics, the leading archaeologist of this country, ProfessorStuart Piggott, had no difficulty at all in discerning my meaning andprofiting from my arguments. In his Walter Neurath Memorial LectureCriticalInquiry 11 (December 1984)? 1984 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/84/1102-0008$01.00. All rights reserved.

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196 E. H. Gombrichof 1978, entitled AntiquityDepicted:AspectsofArchaeological llustration,theauthor did me the honour of taking a statement from my book as hisstarting point. It is the passage at the end of part 1 in which I recapitulatethe content of the first two chapters:

What matters to us is that the correct portrait, like the useful map,is an end product on a long road through schema and correction.It is not a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithfulconstruction of a relational model.Neither the subjectivity of vision nor the sway of conventionsneed lead us to deny that such a model can be constructed to anyrequired degree of accuracy. What is decisive here is clearly theword required. The form of a representation cannot be divorcedfrom its purpose and the requirements of the society in which thegiven visual language gains currency.'

There is a simple answer to the questions of why an archaeologistfound no difficulty in accepting the notion of an accurate model orrepresentation which so worries Professor Krieger: he is writing not aboutart but about illustration. He is concerned with documentation, not withaesthetics. Here, and here alone, lies the key to the misunderstandingbetween me and the theorists I am supposed to have misled.At the risk of seeming pedantic, I should like to recap the reca-pitulation and ask the reader whether he finds any of the steps in theargument difficult or unacceptable. It is an argument, remember, notabout art but about images, and it claims that there is such a thing as afaithful portrait or a useful map, just as there are models of buildings,miniature railways, or facsimiles of the kind that interest archaeologists(for example, of coins or tools).To make this kind of representation in three or two dimensions ispossible despite what I have called the subjectivity of vision and thesway of conventions. The model-maker may be astigmatic or he may beused to isometric conventions in perspective, but once he understandswhat is required, he can approximate the model to the motif-how perfectsuch an approximation can be may vary from case to case, but this does

E. H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professorof the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of Londonfrom 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The Storyof Art,Art and Illusion, Meditationson a HobbyHorse, The Senseof Order,Ideals andIdols, The Image and the Eye, and, most recently, Tributes.His previouscontributions to CriticalInquiryinclude The Museum: Past, Present andFuture (Spring 1977) and Standards of Truth: The Arrested Imageand the Moving Eye (Winter 1980).

Representation



December1984 197not mean that we lack criteria. Taking a leaf out of Karl Popper's meth-odology of science, we can always search out deviations from the motifand can proceed to a better approximation by eliminating the fault.Obviously, though, the form of representation cannot be divorcedfrom the purpose it is intended to serve. Different societies assign differentpurposes to the image and therefore require different degrees of accuracy.The wax doll made in the service of sorcery differs from the anatomicalmodel used for teaching.Now in what I must call the aesthetic misreading of my book, onlythe two points in the middle were picked up, my reference to the subjectivityof vision and to the sway of convention. And yet it is hard to see howthese points can ever have been considered the whole message of thebook, for what would have been the use of talking at such length aboutschema and correction and making and matching if there wereno standards whatever by which to correct or match an image?It should be clear, however, that far from considering representationto be coextensive with art, or art coextensive with representation, mystudyof the psychology of pictorial representation -to quote the subtitleof the book-was intended to establish the study of the visual image asa scientific enterprise. In an age in which new forms of images are offeredus almost daily by the wizards of science, it should no longer be possibleto talk of subjectivity and convention without regard to the proven facts.Professor Krieger is distressed at my interest in illusion which, he thinks,borders on delusion, but how would he describe the effect of a holograph?Admittedly this device is at present lying largely outside the precincts ofart-but the time is surely at hand when artists will appropriate it fortheir own purpose.It is the absence of the scientific temper I find so depressing inProfessor Krieger's discussion. He shows no inclination anywhere to askwhether any of the hypotheses I have put forward over the years is trueor false. I, by contrast, have tried to keep them under constant review,and here I am quite ready to plead guilty of having learned somethingabout visual perception since I wrote Art and Illusion. I am proud to haveprofited from the researches of that foremost student of vision, the lateJames J. Gibson, who himself never ceased to correct and refine his viewsin the three great books he gave us: The Perception of the Visual World(1950); TheSensesConsideredsPerceptual ystems1966); and his posthumouslast word, TheEcologicalApproach o VisualPerception 1979). It is only toosymptomatic of Professor Krieger's approach that he nowhere mentionsGibson, though he must have known from the book he discusses howmuch importance I attach to my debates with this great and humanescientist. No doubt these discussions have made me a little more circumspectin my estimate of the subjectivity of vision, but as the book also shows,I also occasionally felt able to stick to my guns, and I never felt compelledto abandon my central thesis.

CriticalInquiry



198 E. H. Gombrich RepresentationThis thesis, which Professor Krieger also ignored, is summed up inthe opening paragraph of the final chapter of Art and Illusion. It is athesis which indeed rejects the idea of mimesis as based on the tran-scription of nature and concentrates instead on the creation of certainvisual effects which were discovered by trial and error in certain societiesunder the pressure of novel demands made on the image. This newemphasis on what might be called the trigger effects of certain devicesby which the image-maker can give the impression of depth, of sheen,or of facial expression has also enabled me to reformulate the problemof conventions in representation. Many of these conventions-say thehighlight or the streaks behind a figure to suggest movement-are rootedin certain easily acquired tricks which secure a given response that maybe inborn or is very easily learned. I was happy to find that this refor-mulation has narrowed the gap between my own views and those ofNelson Goodman, whose generous response to my paper on Image andCode, which he allowed me to publish in a footnote to that essay, isequally passed over in silence by Professor Krieger though it would surelyhave been germane to his topic.2I know that while accepting the role of human dispositions ProfessorGoodman would not want to go along with me in looking for their rootsin our biological heritage. It is this aspect of my work which seems tohave particularlyshocked Professor Krieger, who sees his dignity as Homosapiens undermined by my interest in animal behaviour. He cannot haveremembered my remark in Art and Illusion that I do not believe thatthe mystery of Raphael will one day be solved through the study ofgulls.... We are not simple slot machines which begin to tick when coinsare dropped into us, for, unlike the stickleback,we have what psychoanalystscall an 'ego' which tests reality and shapes the impulses from the id....Our twin nature, poised between animality and rationality,finds expressionin that twin world of symbolism with its willing suspension of disbelief. 3Here, as the reader perceives, my study impinges on aesthetics.Indeed aesthetics, too, is concerned with responses and evidently notonly or mainly with the response to life-likeness. In Art and Illusion I tookaccount of this fact by devoting a whole chapter to caricature and bydiscussing the images of artists as diverse as Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian,Gino Severini, and Pablo Picasso-but no matter, I must be branded asan enemy of twentieth-century art because I have been concerned withone particular learning process that affected the artists of the ancientand the modern world and also those of the Far East in so many ways.The fact that painters from Paolo Uccello to Leonardo da Vinci, fromJohn Constable to Georges Seurat displayed an interest in science cannothave escaped the theorists of whom Professor Krieger speaks, but somehowthey want to dismiss these episodes as irrelevant to their aesthetics. Themerit I claim for my approach is really that I did not take these preoc-cupations for granted but turned them into a problem of research. I did



December1984 199so precisely because I could not be satisfied with the vague and faciletalk about the history of styles reflecting the history of the way in whichthe world was seen, an unexamined assumption which somehow pervadedthe art historial literature of my student days without ever being formulatedwith sufficient precision to permit testing or refutation. It was, of course,this vague talk I wanted to satirize through the choice of Alain's cartoonof the Egyptian drawing class which Professor Krieger so cruelly mis-understood. Unfamiliar as he must be with the literature of my subject,he took me to advocate precisely the position I wished to criticize.Needless to say, I, too, saw the development of naturalistic art fromthe vantage point of twentieth-century movements; I would not otherwisehave confronted this aspect of Western art history as a problem muchin need of fresh analysis. That such an analysis was and is taken as acovert method of advocacy is one of the crosses I have to bear. Since nodisclaimer is likely to have the slightest effect, I should by now resignmyself to the lazy conclusion that it is my aim to turn all sculptures intoreplicas of Madame Tussaud's wax figures and all paintings into trompel'oeils, and to hold these up as examples of great art in order to downnonnaturalistic styles, as Professor Krieger seriously maintains. If I amnot resigned, after all, it is for the simple reason that I regard suchintellectual sloth as an alarming symptom of academic decline. In thepreface to a previous volume of essays (Ideals and Idols), I wrote that Iwant the critic to ask What has he found out? rather than Where doeshe stand? Professor Krieger's piece is a choice specimen of that alternativeI reject.How can this tendency to speak in terms of movements, theories,revolutions, or schools have taken so strong a hold on academic life? Ifear I personally regard it as the manifestation of another biologicalheritage-the herd instinct with its corollary of the pecking order. In asociety which is happily free from other social stratifications, the gamewhich Stephen Potter dubbed one-up-manship has taken hold of largesections of the campus. Even academic teaching is frequently expectedto serve as an initiation to this all-important game. There are few safergambits in that game than the assertion that one does not believe whateverybody else believes. Hence the prestige that attaches to startling,revolutionary, or ground-breaking theories, quite regardless of theevidence that is offered in their support. Too many intellectual fashionsin the humanities show the mark of this disease. In placing themselvesin opposition to common sense, they generate a sense of superiorityamong their adherents and absolve them of any need to engage in rationalargument; in other words, they become campus ideologies. If you belong,you are OK; if not, you must be denounced, as Professor Krieger hasdecided to denounce me as a flat-earther who must be taught that theglobe of art is round and that any belief in objective criteria is vieuxjeu.Give the dog a bad name and hang it.

CriticalInquiry



200 E. H. GombrichI wish Professor Krieger's piece would not offer such a perfect il-lustration of these tactics. His footnote 18 would not deserve a rebuttal

if it would not have to be nailed and presented as an exhibit, even at therisk of devoting too much attention to such unworthy insinuations.If I understand his sneers, he seems to allege that I have come toapplaud the art of Constable because I am a kind of renegade-a refugeewho has been knighted must have earned the accolade by becoming aturncoat and a conformist. Does he really not know that such dignitiesare awarded for services to the administration of museums or such placesof learning as the Warburg Institute, quite regardless, of course, of therecipient's outlook or field of research? But worse is to come. I am tobe tarred with the brush of Edward Said's orientalism because I referredin The Story of Art to the 'Egyptian' in us, a turn of phrase, by the way,which is intended to link up with the opening pages of the book whereI write: Insteadof beginning with the Ice Age, let us begin with ourselves. 4I stand in no need of instruction from Professor Krieger about thestatus of Egyptian art. Though I am not, of course, an Egyptologist, Ihave been asked by one to write the introduction to the English translationof Heinrich Schafer's standard work on the Principles of Egyptian Art(1974) and more recently to review for theJournal of EgyptianArchaeologyWilliam H. Peck's Drawingsfrom Ancient Egypt.5In the latter I refer myreaders to Gibson's approach, which in many ways renders earlier inter-pretations of Egyptian art obsolete: Gibson, I write, does not fall intothe trap of dismissing perspective as a mere convention. What he arguesinstead is that the arrested monocular vision of the world is an artificialabstraction which can never dojustice to the workings of our visual system... geared ... to extracting what he calls the invariants of our environment... independent of any particular viewing point. 6It so happens that I made a similar point in a series of broadcastsin February and March of 1979 on The Primitive and Its Value in Art(published in the Listener),which anticipates some of the conclusions ofa book on which I am now engaged. Harking back to Art and Illusion, Isaid in the concluding talk that the appearance of nature can only be'trapped' by a roundabout strategy. But, paradoxically, knowing howcomplex this 'trap' is, makes me question the description of nonnaturalisticstyles as 'primitive.' 7There is no reason why Professor Krieger should have read theseitems, but there is no excuse for another omission: in the preface to thebook he is ostensibly reviewing, I referred to items not included in theselection and wrote: I venture to hope, however, that those who maywant to discuss and criticizemy views in any detail will also take cognizanceof the writings and, of course, of my book The Sense of Order whichconcentrates on the perception of patterns rather than images. 8Now if there is a recent book which, in its choice of illustrations andits appreciation of the artistic achievements of our whole globe, is less

Representation



CriticalInquiry December1984 201marked by ethnocentric parochialism than my study of ornament, Iam yet to hear of it. Here Professor Krieger would have found a gooddeal about a form of art which is not linked to appearances, but hedecided to ignore it. Maybe this is just as well, however. He might haveaccused me of wanting to introduce the reactionary practice of tatooing-at least among the knights of the realm.

1. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Studyin the Psychologyof PictorialRepresentation,A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956 (New York, 1960), p. 90.2. See my The Image and the Eye (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), p. 824.3. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 102-3.4. Gombrich, The Storyof Art, 13th ed. (Oxford, 1978), p. 20.5. See my review of Drawings rom AncientEgyptby William H. Peck,Journal ofEgyptianArchaeology69 (1983):192-93.6. Ibid., p. 193.7. Gombrich, The Tree of Knowledge, Listener,8 March 1979, p. 348.8. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye, pp. 8-9.


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