“Semiotics and Art History” article, by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson. PDF

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I discussed “Semiotics and Art History” article, by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson....

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In the following journal, I am going to discuss “ Semiotics and Art History” article, by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson. By reading the title, most they will wonder what semiotics is, just like I did. So, I have searched Oxford English Dictionary and found out that semiotics is the science of communication studied through the interpretation of signs and symbols. According to Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, semiotics is the theory of sign and sign use. But what does this have to do with art history? We are going to discover it through this paper, which came form a journal called “Art Bulletin”, so the audience is assumed to be very specialized and well prepared to read about famous artists and art works, which are presented throughout the article. It is clearly presented in eight subjections and each subjection gives us clearly what is going to follow next. Reading this article, few questions come to my mind, like do semiotics help us to understand and interpret all works of art, in every circumstance? Or is it only to a limited field of art? Moreover, does semiotics used to manipulate the audience and give targeted messages? The first section is all about context. To be more specified, Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson support that context is a text that consists of signs, which require interpretation. One of context’s important task is considering the question between the ideas, their interpretation and their manifestation. To understand better how context works, we could take artwork examples of Rene Magritte and Marchel Duchamp, precursors to Conceptual art. For instance, Magritte’s painting “This is not a Pipe”, reflects the philosophy of semiology for me. It includes the sign, which is the image of the pipe as a representation of an idea, the signifier, which is the text “Ceci nest pas une pipe”, describing the idea or the object and the signified, which manifests how representations and descriptions of an idea translate into a physical entity. Also, Marchel Duchamp was using semiol ogy, by questioning the faction of art, by taking everyday objects and pronouncing them as art. (Ex. “Fountain”) So, conceptual art is a movement which uses semiology as a basis and exposes ideas and meanings over forms and materials. Erwin Panofsky though, has found an issue and he gives an example of the problem with contextual interpretation in his “Et in Arcadia Ego - Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition”. He points out that the interpretation of the piece differs in the interpreta tion of the meaning of the name of the piece. It can either be interpreted as “I too, lived in Arcady”, or “Even in Arcady, here I am”, which produces two completely different meanings. So, the lan guage can often disorient semiology. Furthermore, Umberto Eco, noted in 1976, that the meaning between the sign and the signified should be real for semiology to work as a method. There can be no interpretation described by the language based on a concept not existing in reality, so the problem with semiology and Abstract movement has started to becoming obvious. Semiology works best, when all three aspects of the sign, signifier and signified are made relatively clear. Sometimes semiology can function when two of three are clear, but the approach fails when ideas are unclear or abstract. The second and the third section is devoted to the “ senders” and the “receivers”. The “senders” are the artists who are sending the signs to the spectators. The problem here is , that sometimes the “sender” and the “context” can be identified. The signs that are being sent, derive form the artist’s mind and imagination, so the “ sender” defines the “context” , most of the time. Then, the writers are talking about the “receivers” and they distinguish them in two kinds, the “ideal” and the “empirical” spectators. The “empirical” are more and are those, who are wandering in the gallery, in couples, or even in groups, looking at the paintings and chatting about what they see. The “ideal” viewers are fewer and are those, who interpret the paintings by putting them-

selves into it. So, we have to have in mind, that no matter what type of the spectator is each time, everyone has his or her own experience which affects how he or she approaches an artwork. The fourth and the fifth section are describing the effects of Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Sassure philosophy in semiotics. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), was an american philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics. His thought was starting from the representamen, which is the form, which a sign takes, such as an apple and that can lead either the object which the sign refers, or the interpretant, which is the idea that exists in someone’s mind for an object. He classifies signs into three types: symbols, icons, and index. The icon is something that we can easily identify, because it is physi cally similar to what it stands for. The index is something that we connect direct to what we mean, can be inferred or observed, for example it could be smoke for fire. And the symbol, can be identified by a habit or a norm, it is learned unlike index, for example it could be the signs that we learn for driving. Peirce’s semiotic theory is relevant for the study of art, because it helps us to think about the aspects of the process of art in history, society, in a way that it is not bound up with the artist’s intention. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), is claimed to be the founder of the modern linguistics. He changed the name from semiotics to “semiosis”, which was derived from the Greek word “simeion”, and he was supporting the idea of conceiving the sign not as a thing, but as an event, to trade the possible emergence of the sign in a concrete situation, as an event in the world. The sign is the whole that results from the association of the signifier with the signified. The process from the signifier to the signified is called signification. The sixth and the seventh section is about Psychoanalysis as a semiotic theory and Narratol ogy. Psychoanalysis is the mode of reading the unconscious and its relationship to expression, and such it is a semiotic theory. The article analyzes four stands of criticism, that derive from the Freudian thought, the analogical model, the medical model, the specification model and the hermeneutic model, before turning to Jacques Lacan’s work in the role of signification in the formation of visual subjectivity and the stages of the visual experience. There is a very good example of the versions of “ Las Meninas” painting, the original and the Picasso’s one. Picasso’s painting trying to reconstruct Infanta Margarita’s psychological perplexity in a very unique way. There are many different contradictory feelings and ideas in her mind. We also see her effort to balance them all at once. The geometric shapes (square, triangle, etc) that shape her figure are indicative of this effort. Picasso twisted Infanta Margarita’s face (creating a frontal and a profile view of her face at the same time) in order to show how difficult it was for the young princess to balance her contra dictory feelings and emotions between traditional etiquette and controlled behavior on the one hand and playfulness on the other. Velazquez wanted to pass another meaning to the audience, since he was a painter chosen from the loyal court. But that wasn’t happening also for Picasso. As for Narratology, is the process of a story, which exists, behind the work of art. It turns from visual allusions to verbal narratives. The article gives us two examples from a painting titled “Susanna”. On the one hand there is Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting, in which Susanna doesn’t look to the spectators and that implies a discomfort at the situation of voyeurism. On the other hand, there is Rembrand’s painting in which the woman is presented to the viewer, exposed for sight and delight, and also the woman either looking away or looking at the viewer, does not care about the voyeuristic position offered. So, the narrative depends on the social impact, as we can notice Rembrand’s painting was created thirty - seven years later. The last section, is about semiotic ap proach into the role of history, focusing on intertextuality and iconography in relation to the meaning, as well as the polysemous nature of signs. It points out that a sign is not a thing, but an event

that occurs in a historically and socially specific situation that is then interpreted within a frame work of socially constructed codes. In conclusion, semiotics is a very important and complex field in studying art that is still developing right now. It acknowledges the variable relationship we may have to representation and therefore images or objects are understood as dynamic; that is, the significance of images or ob jects is not understood as a one-way process from image or object to the individual but the result of complex inter-relationships between the individual, the image or object and other factors such as culture and society. However, as we saw above, we cannot use semiotics to interpret every type of art, in abstract art there is a gap, because the context is not based on truth, so the field that we can use it as a method is limited.

Bibliography: 1) Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History” (1991) 174-208. 2) Rachel Winter, “The Death of Semiology After Conceptual Art”, (2015), University of Iowa. 3) Panofsky, Erwin, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition” (1936) in Meaning in the Visual Arts, abridged in Preziosi, 257-62. 4) Umberto, Eco, “A Theory of Semiotics”,Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.

pipe”, 1928-29

Nicolas Poussin - “Et in Arcadia Ego”, 1637-38

Diego Velasquez - “Las Meninas”, 1656

Pablo Picasso - “Las Meninas”, 1957

Rembrandt - “Susanna Surprised by the Elders”, 1647

Artemisia Gentileschi - “Susanna”, 1610...