Abstract
If points of indeterminacy are the most rigorous way of characterizing medial objects and classes of them, then the spatial and temporal arts are the most basic division between such classes. Returning to the idea of existential dependence in Chap. 2, one can note a distinct kind of dependence occurring in each class. In spatial arts, all views of a work are one-sidedly dependent on the work; none is privileged. In temporal works, each successive phase of the work is dependent on a prior phase. Using ontological rigor gives new support for Lessing’s ancient argument in the Laocoön, with which Arnheim was quite sympathetic. Phenomenological analysis of cases of spatial and temporal arts reveal this basic ontological division. In the narratological distinction between plot and subject, sequence is essential to temporal arts, unlike in the arts of painting, sculpture or architecture. Consequently, each class has wholesale differences in kinds of in/determinacy. Spatial arts excel at capturing determinacies of permanence and temporal arts supply the determinacies of change. Invoking Arnheim’s categories, spatial arts are more “self-images” than “likenesses.” Just because ontology prescribes basic features of a medial object does not mean that practices cannot go against their grain. A viewer versed in the Bible will dutifully follow the narrative sequence of Christ’s life in Brueghel’s painting.
Objects or parts of objects which exist in space are called bodies. Accordingly, bodies with their visible properties are the true subjects of painting.
Objects or parts of objects which follow one another are called actions. Accordingly, actions are the true subjects of literature.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. tr. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1984)
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Notes
- 1.
Vincent Bohlinger, “Arnheim on the Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Scott Higgins, ed., Arnheim for Film and Media Studies (New York: Routledge, 2011).
- 2.
Philip Gourevitch, “The Abu Ghraib we Cannot See,” New York Times, May 24, 2009.
- 3.
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. By Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1983).
- 4.
Lessing, Laocoön, 16, 17.
- 5.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Arnheim’s review, “Ambiguities of the image,” Times Literary Supplement (27 June 1986): 712.
- 6.
For the axiom of realism, see Rudolf Arnheim, “Inverted Perspective and the Axiom of Realism,” New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 159–85.
- 7.
Wolfgang Ernst, “Telling versus Counting? A Media Archaelogical Point of View,” Intermédialités 2 (2003): 31–44, 38.
- 8.
Goodman, Languages of Art.
- 9.
Arnheim, “Unity and Diversity of the Arts,” 70. Compare Chatman (Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, 7): a text “temporally controls its reception by the audience.”
- 10.
Ingarden, Literary Work of Art, 310.
- 11.
Heinrich Wölfflin, “Über Abbildungen und Deutungen,” Gedanken zur Kunstgeschichte (Basel: 1941), 66–82; cited in Art and Visual Perception [1954], 408.
- 12.
Charles Hope, “Altarpieces and the Requirements of Patrons,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, eds. Timothy Verdon and J. Henderson (Syracuse, 1990), 535–71.
- 13.
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 408.
- 14.
Albert E. Elsen, Rodin (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1963), 52.
- 15.
Arnheim, Parables of Sunlight.
- 16.
Arnheim, “Unity and Diversity of the Arts,” 69.
- 17.
Arnheim, Power of the Center, 212.
- 18.
Arnheim, “Unity and Diversity of the Arts,” 70.
- 19.
Arnheim, The Power of the Center (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 232.
- 20.
Arnheim, “Notes on Seeing Sculpture,” 321.
- 21.
Arnheim, The Power of the Center (1982 edition), 231.
- 22.
Arnheim, “Sculpture: The Nature of a Medium.”
- 23.
Justin Remes, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
- 24.
Enlightening here is the Gestalt concept of self-satiation, where meaning changes with repetition.
- 25.
Rudolf Arnheim, “Commentary on Kennedy’s ‘Rudolf Arnheim’s Approach to Art and Visual perception,’” Leonardo 13 (1980): 175; responding to John M. Kennedy, “A Commentary on Rudolf Arnheim’s Approach to Art and Visual Perception,” Leonardo 13 (1980): 117–22.
- 26.
Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art, 222.
- 27.
Arnheim, Radio: An Art of Sound, 153: “The visual world…gives…much of the condition of the unalterable ‘being.’”
- 28.
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 378.
- 29.
Arnheim, “A Forecast of Television;” Radio: An Art of Sound, 152: “in essence the aural is more related to dramatic action than in the visual.”
- 30.
Göran Sonesson, “Perspective from a Semiotical Perspective,” in Göran Rossholm, ed., Essays on fiction and perspective (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 255–292.
- 31.
Thomas Y. Levin, “You Never Know the Whole Story, Ute Friedrike Jürss und die Ästhetik des heterochronen Bildes,” in Ute Friedrike Jürss, “You Never Know the Whole Story,” exh. cat. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Hatje Cantz, 2000), 57; cited in Ernst, “Telling versus Counting,” 41.
- 32.
See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 16; Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 7; Werner Wolf, “Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and Its Applicability to the Visual Arts,” Word & Image 19 (2003): 180–197.
- 33.
E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
- 34.
Edwin Rausch, “Die Eigenschaftsproblem in der Gestalttheorie der Wahrnehmung,” in Handbuch der Psychologie, ed. Wolfgang Metzger (Göttingen: Hogrefe, 1966), 866–953.
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Verstegen, I. (2018). The Two Elementary Classes of Aesthetic Objects: Spatial and Temporal Modalities. In: Arnheim, Gestalt and Media. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02970-8_5
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