Stefan Arteni

Painting Calligraphy

SolInvictus Press 2004

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PAINTING CALLIGRAPHY

An essay for the ICMS8 Conference [Gestures, forms, and signifying processes in music and
the semiotics of the interrelation of arts], Paris, France, October 2004

Resume

Notre approche est basee sur la distinction entre presentation et representation, et s’ancre dans la
demarche plus large de Niklas Luhmann et la logique des calculs de G. Spencer-Brown,
aboutissant aux relations de complementarite entre ecriture, en tant que medium pour la
construction des formes, et peinture, le decouplage de l’enonce [expression] et information, le
deploiement du paradoxe de la forme et l’operation de re-entrée, les operations d’observation et
leur double hermeneutique - les dimensions Emique et Etique – , la materialite et les contraintes
du medium, et les traces de l’outil qui s’integrent a d’autres modalites semiotiques. On introduit
ainsi les formants sous-semiotiques - la signature de l’artiste - sous-jacents au probleme des
signes, le jeu des distinctions formelles et les agencements perceptifs – visuels, gestuels, tactiles,
etc. – qui ne peuvent etre saisi que dans des categories de presentation

Cette assimilation de l’art a une forme emergentielle amene ainsi l’auteur a comparer ce
processus envisage comme enstasis a la demarche du Bouddhisme et du Hesychasme qui permet
de s’ouvrir a l’idee de l’absence de fondement [sunyata], l’enaction ouverte a son ancrage
corporel, la polysensorialite, le paradoxe de l’autoreference signique et des codes graphiques et
iconographiques, la memoire et perception tactile-kinesthesique et l’habilite motrice implicite,
mises en action dans l’acte rituel de l’evenement performance qui scande un espace de la forme.

Abstract

The point of departure will be the distinction presentation/representation in the context of Niklas
Luhmann’s investigations and of G. Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, thus showing the
complementarity of script, envisioned as a medium for the construction of forms, and painting,
the uncoupling of utterance and information, the paradox of form and of re-entry,, the
operations of observation and their double hermeneutics [the concepts of emic and etic], the
material constraints of the medium, and the mark integrated to other semiotic modalities. The
subsemiotic marks, the artist’s signature underlaying the sign, open up the possibility of a
gameplay of formal distinctions and of perceptual correlates – visual, gestural, tactile – and may
be subsumed and described within the category of presentation.

The assimilation of art to emergence facilitates connecting the painting process, thought of as
enstasis, with the views of Buddhism and Hesychasm, i.e. with the idea of groundlessness
[sunyata], with enaction as embodiment, and with polysensoriality. The paradox of the self-
reference of signs and of graphic and iconographic codes, the role of tactile-kinesthetic memory
and perception as well as implicit knowledge, are crucial to the ludic ritual act of the
performance event that creates a form space.

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 Written communication consists of the
processing of sense in the medium of
imaginality.
Barbara Kastner

The terms vision and word suggest a dynamic semiotic conflict. Niklas Luhmann speaks of script
as an effort at the “transposition of speech into an optical medium”, and consequently as a
secondary communication medium. Luhmann has shown that it is actually impossible to exactly
transpose oral communication in the form of a written text.

Script uncouples utterance and information. Script is testing semiotic borders. Written
communication is not constituted as such by writing or reading, but by understanding - J.
Hoffmeyer has introduced the concept of semetic interaction (from the Greek semeion = sign, and
etos = habit). The beyond of language, its otherness, is the presence of the materiality of marks.
Wolfgang Welsch argues that art perception actually consists of plural level and inter-iconic
perceptive processes that provide the viewer with culture-specific medially embodied realities -
“experience, be it aesthetic or not, is experience under ontic constraint”, remarks Peer F.
Bundgaard.

The artist structures pictorial spaces through intervention in the material and semiotic universe.
To use Francisco Varela’s terminology, the work is the form space, the virtual space of the artistic
performance itself.

It is then, in this context of rich history and exciting possibilities, that one operates on the
principle of unfolding a range of concerns that have a bearing on systemic research
methodologies. Alexandra Hefner indicates that “for each observer a different guiding
distinction results to be the first and relevant one”. Regarding the implicit/explicit knowledge
distinction and observer-specific blind spots, Hefner remarks: “An outside observer can make
this blind spot [implicit knowledge] visible…but in so doing, any such second-order observation
must rely on its own blind spot”. Artists also act as observers of their own participation in the
process, and it is in such a context that Jerome McGann may say that artists “construct second-
order illusions that expose the functioning presence of the first-order illusions”.

This double hermeneutics, the distinction between inside and outside viewpoints, has been also
used under the names emic and etic. An emic perspective may consist also of a plural cultural
identity and, given a certain mutational element in every appropriating event, of mappings
between systems, neologisms, adapted and reinterpreted ‘outside’ elements. One may postulate
a global ‘etic’ dimension but the question is ontological: what is being modelled , what is the
role of the observer in modelling, and what intentions guide the observer? Moreover, the
emphasis on constructing second-order models, on transferring theories across cultures, theories
that may re-enter the very practices they describe thus affecting these practices and becoming
more like self-fulfilling prophesies, as well as the effects of subliminal enticement, may result in
imposed-etic perspectives or etic bias, and in maladaptive cultural practices. Niklas Luhmann
notes that “it is true that the second-order observer, too, is tied to his own blind spot…his a
priori, as it were”. The ‘etic’ perspective enables one to position this perspective in relation to
other discourses. The fact is that philosophical considerations are always situated in specific
settings and may be thus conceptualized as second-order observations. The point of departure of
this paper will be the fundamental distinction presentation/representation thus necessarily
establishing the interfaces and overlaps between painting and calligraphy art. There is no
culture-free all-seeing observer. No one can escape cultural boundedness. But can one transcend
paradigm clashes?

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 A work of art is the inscription of layered and
selected traces of culture.
Misko Suvakovic

Theories tend to fall into the trap of making the kind of generalizations they disparage. Such is
the contemporary ‘hegemonic’ theory that appears as the ‘Western’ paradigm, especially the
theory of the Avant-garde and Neo-avant-garde, a theory supposed to be operative for all. “Art
works are replaced with the formulation of open information work”, notes Misko Suvakovic.
The rejection of art is combined with a substitution of politics for art. Why should this be so?

In what regards non-Western cultures, Lev Kreft wonders whether they are merely a periphery
reflecting the elsewhere centered core. But Barry Smith points out that there is a significant
comparative advantage of smaller nations in those fields where native language is of secondary
import and where pre-modernism has influenced a broad range of activities. Moreover, one has
to question the very concept of politics used in relation to Avant-garde attitudes.

Why then, is this theory so popular in certain circles? Barry Smith suggests that it is much rather
the case that “a fashion economy, when once established, manifests a quite remarkable
resilience”. In system’s diction, one may use the notion of pathological autopoiesis invented by
Stafford Beer. Pathological autopoiesis leads the system to a stationary image of itself, to
parasitic self-production.

One will have no choice but to depart from the rather restricted discussion on signification which
also needs to address the viability of current concepts. Paraphrasing Bernhard Peorksen, one
may say that the presentation reality constructed by the medium of art is the reality that the art
medium constructs, that is all. What, then, is the moment of unity of presentation and
representation? Terry Marks-Tarlow, Robin Robertson, and Allan Combs indicate that
“opposites are all created through a…distinction and thus are inextricably joined through a
third, the indicative act that creates them…” There is effectively a recursive frame of reference
and thus “each sign becomes the object of another sign…, increasingly complex networks of
signs are created that reflect each other like jewels in the Net of Indra…”

For the sign as form there is in fact

no reference…The distinction
signifier/signified may be used or not…
Niklas Luhmann

“The ultimate form of art manifests itself as contingent…Contingency has the remarkable
characteristic of being real, and, at the same time, nothingness”, writes Kuki Shuzo.

The Buddhist notion of Coemergent Arising can be connected to systems theory and appears
similar to the Western ‘hermeneutic circle’. As Fabio Rambelli points out, Kukai’s esoteric
Buddhism seems close to radical constructivism. This brings to mind Francisco Varela’s
cognitivism and Buddhism, as well as the metaphor of autopoiesis, which, like that of Ch’an
(Zen), is the circle. Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova argues that Ch’an(Zen) favours non-verbal
arts, for example “the graphic quality of Chinese and Japanese ideograms which are…processed
by the right cerebral hemisphere and which acquire also rhythmically patterned sound, when
the poem is read aloud’.

The right hemisphere is specialized for encoding global configurations of visuo-spatial

information. The Chinese and Japanese writing system mandates elaborative processing -

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motor or tactilo-kinesthetic modalities draw principally upon the right hemisphere. Kimihiro
Nakamura and Sid Kouider argue that “graphic constituents of kanji…have separate motor
representations which might constitute a basic ‘motor unit’ for writing out a complex graphic
form”. At the same time, a visuo-motor or procedural memory based outlook facilitates a
polycontextural view of the artistic process. Vadim S. Rotenberg points out that “organization of
the polysemantic context by the right hemisphere is based on the mechanism which makes
different probabilities subjectively equivalent”. Art is a self-organized creative process that is
not aimed at a true image of the real world. Visual art differentiates itself along the lines of a
system-specific play with forms. The task of the artist is to come to terms with different artistic
operational constructs. For the configuration of marks, the possible mediation by inter- or
transcontextural operations leads to pure relationship, a restructuring and concretization in
different universalities and types of formalisations.

Art raises the question whether a trend

toward ‘morphogenesis’ might be
implied in any operational sequence.
Niklas Luhmann

Abe Masao places a cross mark on Emptiness or Nothingness just as Heidegger puts a cross mark
on Sein. “The void is…a state where there are no distinctions”, writes Edward R. Close. “In
Laws of Form, G. Spencer-Brown speculates that an entire universe is created when a region of
space is separated from the rest”.

Within certain Buddhist traditions, “the lack of meaning…constitutes in fact…significance,

because only meaningless signs can somehow represent emptiness”, notes Fabio Rambelli. Jack
Engstrom alludes to form as originating in formlessness, as “a residue of the process of
distinction, indication, and unfoldment”. Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann argue that
“these systems of graphic presentation are operational, not merely passive schematic
structures…Conventions can be described as elements of a pictographic logic…The basis of
pictographic logic is graphic, rather than linguistic”.

Joseph Goguen defines a sign system as a system of distinctions. G. Spencer-Brown’s injunction is

strongly visual: the mark as visual operator “draws a distinction” - perceptual, notational,
spatial - and an indication of one or the other side of the distinction. Any distinction is
contingent. Distinctions function as elements of structuration. The form of the distinction is the
form, the unity of the operation that places what it distinguishes, the marked space, against the
unmarked space. While making something visible, art makes, simultaneously, something else
invisible. And yet, as Louis H. Kauffman admits, “the one mark unifies the sides that it
divides”. Paradoxically, by means of a sort of performative apophasis, the mark affirms this
unity by severing it.

“The cut or mark”, argues Floyd Merrell, “indicates (indexes) what it is only insofar as it is
something other than the possibility of everything else”.

It is not the ‘what’ but rather the ‘how’

that is of importance.
Steven Toetoesy de Zepetnek

The work of art exists within the modality of contingency, affirms Niklas Luhmann, and the
function of art is to make the contingent visible. Cognitive aesthetics and cognitive semiotics

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investigate organization and structure in terms of generative actions that construct a pictorial
space. The various emergent contingent forms of configuring marks can be viewed as involving
the visual mode of semiosis. “Semiotic complexity is organized as a semiotic gestalt”, notes
Lucia Santaella. On the other hand, the multiple fractures that constitute the boundaries of
semiospheres or the liminal space between those borders, are the site where signs mingle,
interfere, and become opaque, and where the metamorphoses of simple or complex (composite)
signs and the transfer or interpretative appropriation of an ‘empty’ repertoire may occur.

Julian Kuecklich underscores the apparent paradoxical “tendency of semiosis to progress by

referring to itself…[a] phenomenon of re-entry”. Winfried Noeth argues that “the aesthetic sign,
according to semiotic aesthetics, is a sign which functions as such due to its own quality and not
on the basis of its reference to something else…the aesthetic function of a message is opposed to
its referential function…” Per Aage Brandt suggest that the self-referentiality of artworks “makes
them paradoxically be signs of themselves”. It is necessary to distinguish between the emergence
of the sign as form on the one hand, and the still constant tendency of the viewer to perceptually
shift from presentation to representation on the other.

The artist explores the possibility of dissociation between visual configuration structures of
characters, acoustic-phonetic, and semantic factors. The mirror reversal used in seal cutting
may also facilitate this process. Yasumi Kuriya indicates that “the motor or kinetic
representation of the kanji can be retrieved directly without retrieving the accompanying
phonetic or semantic representations”. In the same way a painter retrieves visual design
configurations and dissociates between the configured brushstrokes or colored areas, and a
possible imaginality and the symbolic meaning it may convey - “a symbol depends on the
interaction between the sign and a base of knowledge”, remarks David Lidov. Peter Bogh
Andersen argues that “the difference between the painting system model and the user’s model
means two interpretations of the same sign-complex produced by artist and user that access
different parts of it”.

What is of importance here, is to remember the category of ‘traditional art’. While keeping in
mind culture-specific pragmatic differences, one may say that Byzantine Painting, for example,
was a ‘traditional art’ like calligraphy. What counted was the form of the form. The correctness
of pictorial iconic aggregates could be ascertained with the assistance of how-to handbooks
containing the model schemata. Calligraphy, as an art form, is still alive. Notwithstanding the
medium-imposed restrictions, there is a variety of styles and visual experiments - Wang Dwo,
Zhang Rui-tu and Fu Shan, Jin Nong, He Shao-ji and Yu You-ren, Zhang Yu-zao, Kamijo
Shinzan and Tanaka Setsuzan, Ning Fucheng and Shi Lu, to name but a few artists. Are Zao
Wou-ki’s ink works just abstract calligraphies, or is he more likely following in the footsteps of
the Literati by using calligraphic operations in his paintings?

Who or what brings forth art as art?…Art constructs art.

S. J. Schmidt

“An aesthetical information rests on its means, on its singular realization”, writes Max Bense.
He emphasizes the play-element, the ritual game-playing path, the dynamic game, the game for
the sake of gaming, although bound by medium imposed constraints. The game is “the
elementary life-movement”, remarks Rudolf zur Lippe - rules, targets, recursivity,
redundance, intersecting and contradictory strategies. The system of injunctions points to
practical experience. There is a construction-related liminocentric self-reference - Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi defines play as a meta-communication which refers exclusively to itself - the
primary model being the ritual ludic emergence of a configuration. In calligraphy, the

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ritualizing is more evident in the preparation process, in the mastering of the tacit knowledge or
action sequences that Richard Schechner calls a “generative code”.

While investigating complex systems and the emergence of diversity, Jenna Bednar and Scott
Page have shown that a game-theoretic framework where “agents play multiple distinct games
and are cognitively constrained” may explain the emergence of culture. According to Klaus-
Peter Koepping, it is only the artist who still remains playful, reconstructing constantly the
tension rule < > unrule by means of the ritualized processes of the artistic gameplay. In play,
“the ‘how’ obstructs the ‘what’ “, remarks Bo Kampmann Walther.

Brian Sutton-Smith points out that “the installation of the form of the play-world-non-play-world
distinction must, performatively, feed back on itself during play…the deep fascination lies in the
oscillation between play and non-play…Make-believe and world building through specific
functional form operations are crucial factors”.

If we claim that the semiotic universe is

structured by self-organized criticality,
its geometries should be fractal.
Franco Orsucci

Bo Kampmann Walther argues that “semiosis obeys the law of emergence…[and] the theory of
self-organized criticality might serve as a deep, unifying paradigm of semiosis”. Horace H. S.
Ip and Helena Tsui Fong Wong have investigated the fractal properties and dimensions of
calligraphy styles, brush geometry, brush orientation motions and friction, ink absorbtion and
depositing, and the generation of characters and their structural and random aspects.

Chaos theory testifies to the existence of self-similarities in processes. “Self-programming of art -

memory - requires the specification of a referential network identifying the types of form…”
indicates Niklas Luhmann. He continues: “Style respects tradition by deviating from it…
recursive reconstruction…”.

This inherent complexity is the core of a painting system. Peter Bogh Andersen hypothesizes that
the painting system may be described as a perturbed recursive system based on concurrent
processes, a model able to accommodate paradoxes and even contradictions, and stability and
change.

The recursive play of formal content, style as memory function, facilitates the autopoiesis of the
system by creating a context for the work, a context that the work may transgress. Recursion
refers to the built-in self-reflexiveness of art. Yuri Lotman speaks of the synchrony of culture’s
diachrony, of illegitimate, imprecise, approximate ‘translation’ as an important feature of
creative thinking, and of autocommunication as including increased indexicalization of signs.
“We are immersed in the network of on-going translations, indefinitely in never-ending
recursion…”, remarks Adam Skibinski.

The new idea springs from a new way

of seeing.
Ernst von Glasersfeld

C. S. Peirce brings into focus the fact that “a sign may be defined as a Medium for the
communication of a Form…[Form] is a power, [it] is the fact that something would happen

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under certain conditions…”. It may be worth mentioning that according even to string theory
form is everything.

The signic quality oscillates between gradually liberating itself from its materiality by tending to
become transparent, and the anchoring in the initial medial material. Peer F. Bundgaard points
out that the mereological structure changes from the first mode of perception (representation) to
the second (presentation). According to Bundgaard, one may speak of representational
indetermination where “factors of destabilization at a representational level may be pregnantial
vectors at a presentational level”. Floyd Merrell suggests that “in art, Firstness might involve a
two-dimensional…patch of color…Secondness…would include that patch’s interactive
interrelation to other…patches…Thirdness would be a matter of…putting them all together into
an imaginary…image…”.

It must be remembered that representational data were usually prescribed, e.g. iconographic
parameters within an iconographic communication system, or, in the case of calligraphy, a text
and the more or less codified conventions of its inscription. This is the case in many, if not most,
works of art. The artist will have to create a visual form within the constraints of a style allowing
certain transgressions. Put differently, one may say that a figural representation consists in the
construction of a medium-constrained artistic-formal visual equivalent within the framework of
a painting system. Alexius Meinong has conceptualized the dichotomy of phantasy phenomenon
– one does not believe in its being real - and a bona fide phenomenon. Barry Smith argues that
the powers of the play of complex combinations of phantasy phenomena can be extended by
works of art. Smith continues: “The crucial idea is that of compositionality”.

Art duplicates the world…The peculiarity of

Modern Art is rendering Media visible…the
brushwork is both brushwork and fictional
element of a work.
Armin Nassehi

The sign as form involves graphs and allographs, graphemic pattern and similarity, grapheme
clusters and inter-grapheme relationships, stylistic or accidental variations, mereological
deformations, prosody as rhythmic pattern, polyphony and layering, modulation of tones
and/or tints. The painting system shows tendencies to spatially and temporally structure by
integration and segregation. To paraphrase Per Aage Brandt, one can argue that in analogy with
music the visual work entails rhythm, i.e. recursive numerical series, coordinated ritualized
formal sequences or arrangements, and an harmonic pattern for interacting formants, e.g. an
organization schema and/or a gamut.

Seen systems-theoretically, a form can be used as a medium for further formations - in painting,
for example, the form of perspective as medium for other forms. The methods involved may
shed light on some of the questions surrounding the concept of perspective construction as
harmonic construction, to be viewed firstly as surface interplays, as the surface geometries
defined by James Elkins as non-illusionistic geometry. Brian Rotman underscores the ambiguous
role played by the vanishing point - both participating into and constructing the system. The
vanishing point thus calls attention to the virtuality of the system, to art as artifice.

Script as symbolic generalization means building forms and the visibility of forms. The form of
any script may be used as medium for further formal structuralizations, regardless of readability
or unreadability.

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A medium can be used as form. In calligraphy, the material medium, paper - the blank, empty
paper - becomes form. In fact, Shutaro Mukai remarks that “when learning calligraphy…the
Japanese learn not only to write the character but also to incorporate the empty background”. The
black void of accidentally splashed ink or paint becomes form. This offers an interesting parallel
to Nishida Kitaro’s notion of ‘form of the formless’.

The artist tunes in. The hand thinks

and follows the material’s thinking.
Albertina Lourenci

According to Henri Focillon “touch is the very beginning of creation”. Claude Gandelman
writes of “the tactile eye”. Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec observes that the memorization of
characters is gestural - calligraphy involves tactile and kinetic memory - while Ryuji Takaki
speaks of training in pattern recognition, of the cooperation of the eye and hand, hence the
teaching method of repeated copying by which is meant kinetic practice centered on mastering
speed and pressure.

Paul Bouissac speaks of the symbolic meaning of movement - movements may be equivalent,
but semasiologically different acts may emerge, each unfolding a different action-sign system
reality notwithstanding the unmistakable syntactic similarities between, for example, kendo (the
way of the sword), dance, or the performance of a calligraphy demonstration. When engaging
in the structured interactions of ritualized art-making, a matrix of gestures, visual patterns
correlates, and even extramusical rhythmic sound texture as acoustic substructure - a Chinese
artist once remarked that the sound of the brush and the movement of ink sing and dance
together - constitute the performative dimension, the moment of instantiation.

Howard Gardner emphasizes the cultural context of multiple intelligences. Kinesthetic

intelligence, for example, is possibly related to the retrieval of kinesthetic image-schemata. The
use of kinetic and postural potential is connected with procedural memory - kinetic memory is
unlocked by activating a motor program. Speaking about Japan, Richard K. Payne uses the
category of ‘ritual culture’ as a ‘network of practices’ which includes also the performative
nature of art. While Dorinne K. Kondo remarks that martial arts “practice patterned movements,
until the movements are inscribed in muscle memory”, Richard K. Payne alludes to gesturo-
haptic writing as involving visual-motoric links, for example the practicing of characters by
finger tracing in the air. Calligraphic practice is experiential, repetitive, but not semantic.
Gesturality and pictorial rendering work as desemantisation. Irenaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt speaks of
cultural ritualization by artistic means. In ritual-based art, making is not semiotic. The phase of
generalized semiotization comes about as aesthetics of reception.

The idea of culture itself may be construed

as a form of ascetism.
Pierre Bourdieu

“The gestural is a category that goes beyond the frame imposed by the concept of text”, notes
Nicolas Pethes: the brush-mark is more like the Medieval Neuma, the musical notation that is a
sign only for the direction of the voice, or, in Goran Sonesson’s semiotic perspective, “being the
record of a hand-held tool, pictures are chirographic and largely indexicalities of the forces
producing them”.

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The work records recurrent semiotic modalities which were in operation - sign, color, cesias
(visual sensations aroused by distributions of light, i.e. gloss, darkness, opacity, translucency,
transparency), tactile modality, gesture, and so on - cross-coupled with the material domain,
that is, the oscillation between sensory material and structured experience, the graphical
interfaces and the framework of blending them in action and perception. Lucia Leao writes that
what defines the weave of complexity “is that it is formed by a circular game in which the
binomials order/disorder, chance/determination, interaction/retroaction are conjugated in an
infinite and simultaneous way”, while Craig A. Lindley argues that “playing the game is
performing the gameplay gestalt”, or, to put it in the words of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the
artist is being caught in “the ‘flow’ of the immersive gameplay”. At the same time, other
significant roles have been proposed for calligraphy in the individual development of the
practitioner - calligraphy is a ‘way’, a meditation with the brush.

If semasiology signifies assigning meaning to a form, then the idea of a form space is crucial to all
systems of human actions including art making. More generally, there is an interface between
painting and calligraphy - the ground of both consists of systems of nonsemiotic or, as James
Elkins puts it, subsemiotic marks. The play of complexity and dynamic heterarchy is subsumed
in the ‘suchness’ of the moment of instantiation.

The literature lacks discussion about the artistic processing of a painting or writing system,
about the artist performing a search for abstract patterns of visible marks or visual elements. The
question is not the ambiguous one of what they represent but the query as to what units make the
system work. Fernande Saint-Martin invented the coloreme, R. P. Harrison the picteme. In the
domain of calligraphy, Han-liang Chang has introduced the notion of semiographemics. The
graphemics - or, to create a new term, the pictoremics - of a system and its combinations should
be described on their own terms. For example, the investigation conducted by Robert Sablatnig,
Paul Kammerer, and Ernestine Zolda by means of computer-aided analysis and pattern
recognition, allows insights into the artist’s ‘structural signature’ based on brushstrokes and on
patterns of brushstrokes, joined strokes and overlapped strokes. The same technology allows for
the examination of traces of drawing devices and even of palette knife marks.

In the context of the medium concept, Niels Bruegger draws a further distinction between
substratum and material content: “The substratum [e.g. paper] is part of the medium on, or in,
which the material content [e.g. black ink marks] is placed”. In this sense, the material content
has no meaning beyond its visual form.

The distribution of marks and the trajectory of strokes must be decoded in order to recover
dynamic information. The creative gesture is the site of emergence. Winfried Noeth’s
observation springs to mind: “The function of painting does not consist in signifying, it consists
in showing”.

Finally, two words on the connection that exists between cognitive neuroscience and the insights
discussed above. Insofar as vision is concerned, William P. Seeley indicates that “form
recognition can be dissociated from object identification”. According to Eric Myin, there are two
kinds of vision science: a representational (creating an internal replica) and a
nonrepresentational one (a process of engagement with the environment - one reads in a paper
by J. Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noe about vision as exploratory activity mediated by knowledge
of sensorimotor contingencies).

Nicholas Humphrey argues about a non-conceptualising state of mind at the time of art making.
Michael Gazzaniga suggests that most of our memories are reconstructions filling out gaps in the

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story we weave. He speaks about ‘the fictional self’ while Joseph Goguen pursues the Buddhist
notions of Coemergent Arising and groundlesness.

Art as a culturally embedded activity can be examined within the scheme of ontic (productive)
and epistemic (interpretive) relations. Presentation and representation harbor a tension worth
exploring further. But, first of all, art making should be thought of as enstasis.

EXCURSUS

Terminology

Surprisingly, there have been many examples in the literature where ‘pictorial space’ appears to
mean the representation of an image and the accurate or convincing depiction of three-
dimensional space. In this paper’s parlance, ‘pictorial space’ is a medium-constrained
organization that allows one to formalize structures, i.e. a form space construct. ‘Pictorial’ means
painterly form, it does not mean picture or image of something. One cannot rely on the
original/copy correspondence metaphor, even in the case of a figurative work claiming to
‘mirror’ nature. “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature
exposed to our method of questioning”, remarks Werner Heisenberg. The ‘as if’ gives the ability
to construct. From this paper’s point of view, the construct indicates the move towards an idea of
order and first requires that one unfolds its logic in its own terms. The present author suggests
that the pictorial fact may take a polycontextural strategy, i.e. procedural switches between
formal domains and the interaction of the user of simultaneously valid contextures.

“The role of art is essentially contingent, a phenomenon that could have been otherwise”, argues
Niklas Luhmann. He emphasizes the “time-binding function” of the art object. Communication
‘through art’ occurs paradoxically by means of perception, a perception that lingers. At the same
time, Luhmann also raises the more general question: what difference does the art work make?
The answer resides in ascertaining the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of the communication, by focussing
on its utterance.

 Stefan Arteni 2004

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