arnheim, rudolf - art among the objects

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Art among the ObjectsAuthor(s): Rudolf ArnheimSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer, 1987), pp. 677-685Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343523

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Art among the Objects

Rudolf Arnheim

Et l'on trouverait mille intermediaires entre la realite et les symbolessi l'on donnait aux choses tous les mouvements qu'elles suggerent.

-GASTON BACHELARD,a Poetiquede l'espace

With the emergence of man from nature art emerged among the objects.There was nothing to distinguish or exalt it in the beginning. Art did

not separate one kind of thing from the others but was rather a qualitycommon to them all. To the extent to which things were made by human

beings, art did not necessarily call for the skill of specialists. All thingstook skill, and almost everybody had it.

This is the way an essayist of the eighteenth century might have

begun a treatise on our subject. By now his recourse to a mythical past

would sound naive and misleading, mainly because we have come topride ourselves on defining things by what distinguishes them from the

rest of the world. Thus art is laboriously separated from what is supposednot to be art-a hopeless endeavor, which has more and more disfiguredour image of art by extirpating it from its context. We have been left

with the absurd notion of art as a collection of useless artifacts generatingan unexplainable kind of pleasure.

Rescue from this impasse of our thinking is not likely to come primarilyfrom those of us who, established on the island of artistic theory and

practice, look around at what else there is in the world to see; rather itwill come from those who are curious about what human beings meet,

make, and use, and who in the course of their explorations run into

CriticalInquiry 13 (Summer 1987)

? 1987 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/87/1304-0001$01.00. All rights reserved.

677



678 Rudolf Arnheim Art among the Objects

objects prominently displaying the property we call art. Psychologists,sociologists, and anthropologists have been driven to view art in the

context of nature, ritual, shelter, and the whole furniture of civilization.As a characteristic recent example I mention a thorough interview study,TheMeaning of Things, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, in which three generations of families from the Chicago areawere questioned about their favorite possessions.1 Pictures, sculptures,and all sorts of craft work turned up at a more or less modest place inthe inventory of the home, and the reasons given for their value makewholesome reading for specialists in aesthetics.

As the subtitle of theChicago study-Symbols

in theDevelopmentoftheSelf-indicates, its authors were mainly concerned with the psychological

questions of what those cherished objects do for their possessors, whatneeds they satisfy, and what traits they acquire by the uses to which theyare put. This leaves room for further studies focusing on the nature ofthe objects themselves. Seen in the context of the rest of the world, whatare the characteristics of the objects we single out when we talk about

art? A few observations on this equally psychological aspect of the subjectare offered in what follows.

Art objects like all otherphysical things

are known to usexclusivelyas perceptual experiences, that is, as things we see or hear, touch or

smell. In this respect there is no difference between a tree, a chair, anda painting. There is no difference either as to the two ways we deal withthose experiences. We can handle objects, as when we fell a tree or carvea block of marble or crate a painting; or we can contemplate them, aswhen we admire a waterfall or listen to a concert.

There also is no primary difference between the ways in which wecome to know objects as independent entities in the first place. Althoughwe can influence

percepts by handlingthem or

by changingour

positionin relation to them, we learn soon that they have an obstinacy of theirown. They cling to their place or move at their own initiative. It is therecalcitrance of the perceptual object's behavior that makes us experiencethe world as existing independently of our own selves. The psychoanalystshave taught us that this realization causes a traumatic shock which is

1. See Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, TheMeaning of Things:

Symbols n the Developmentof the Self (Cambridge, 1981).

Rudolf Arnheim retired from Harvard University as professoremeritus of the psychology of art. He then taught as a visiting professorat the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 1983. His most recentlypublished book is New Essays on the Psychologyof Art. At present he is

preparing the new edition of The Power of the Center,a theory of visual

composition first published in 1982.



CriticalInquiry Summer1987

overcome only by a considerable cognitive effort. At the very beginningof life the infant has to cope with the illusion of what D. W. Winnicott

has called the primordial omnipotence of the self.2 Gradually the infantlearns how to come to terms with the other wills, embodied in living and

nonliving things-a task made easier by the assistance of "transitional

objects." The thumb, the teddy bear, and the security blanket are calledtransitional by Winnicott because they are more readily at the beck andcall of the child than other things but also begin to acquaint him withthe limits of his power. They will do some things for him but are unableor unwilling to do others.

The problem survives through everybody's lifetime, and there developsa scale of compliance, reaching from the most amenable objects to thosehardest to conquer. On this scale, somewhere between a kid glove anda Tibetan mountain, is the place of works of art. It stands to reason that

manmade things are among the most obedient, but it is also true that

our acquaintance with the nature of physical materials teaches us to be

patient with the limits of the service to be expected from tools and

furniture. Wood will not bend, and water will not stay put.Here art offers a special difficulty to our thinking because it involves

not only the making of physical objects or the bringing about of physical

performance, but it is also, and perhaps first of all, a projection of ourown mental images upon the world of things. To be sure, such goal

images guide the conception of many objects, but the mental anticipationof, say, a boat to be built tends to include the image of the wooden objectwith its physical virtues and limitations. The goal image of a painting or

musical composition, on the other hand, is much more likely to include

the properties of the medium only "in the pure," that is, as idealized

character traits, fused with the thematic and compositional image of the

work, rather than as agents of explicit material constraints. Now, mental

images are the realm of experience over which the mind rules most

completely; therefore, nowhere does the infant's illusion of omnipotencesurvive more effectively in the adult than in the materialization of mental

models. Works of art are the adult's transitional objects par excellence.

Hence the characteristic struggle of the artist with his or her medium,the exasperating discrepancy between the work as envisioned and its

realization in the "flesh." The sculptor argues with the wood or stone,the dancer with his or her body. Trying to get around the problem by

contending, as some aestheticians have done, that the mental conceptionof the work of art, uncontaminated by its material embodiment, is thetrue work, misrepresents the situation seriously, because the incarnation

of the artist's vision, his or her version of the eucharistic miracle, is an

indispensable value of the work.

2. See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York, 1971).

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680 Rudolf Arnheim Art among the Objects

Through the struggle with their materials, artists come to realize ina particularly dramatic way that the experiences we call physical objects

are anything but inert matter. They are vehicles of behavior, embodiedinitiatives, and only when their dynamic nature confronts us actively are

we likely to notice them explicitly. Martin Heidegger, in his essay "Das

Ding," points out that in the European languages things are closelyrelated to causes, choseor cosa to causa, and in the same vein Hans-GeorgGadamer refers to the kinship of Ding and Sache in German.3 Objectsare things that concern us, in the original Latin sense of objectum, hat

is, of things thrown into our way as obstacles or signs, forbidding or

inviting, calling for response. And soberingly enough, language defines

the counterparts of objects as subjects, that is, as what is passively subjectedto the things. Language tells us that we are what we are by what we are

subjected to. In the arts, this has been brought home to us by the earlyfilmmakers, who knew that their medium converted the props of the

setting, immobile on the theater stage, into actors. The film mobilized

the furniture of nature and the manmade environment by singling out

its items, giving them entrances and exits, making them approach or

recede, and varying their appearance as demanded by their roles in the

plot.

What are some of the character traits that enable objects to playtheir active part? Remember, first of all, that the isolated object, the

single thing that comes to mind when we think of art nowadays, is a

secondary crystallization, an enfeebled leftover of what is originally an

undivided environment. It is true that within the world of a painting or

film, things derive their meaning from the context in which they areshown. The work of art as a whole, however, can no longer rely on asimilar support from the outer world in which it dwells. This extirpationfrom its space and time is due to special cultural conditions. Just as in

society the group precedes the individual, it takes special conditions todetach objects from their surroundings.

Primarily there is the total setting of the space in which we operate.In the practice of daily life this setting is a pattern of constraints and

offerings, the path in the landscape, the streets in the city, the walls andthe doors. Only secondarily is this "life space," as the psychologist KurtLewin has called it, broken down into a configuration of objects, eachendowed with its own messages.4 The art object in particular, the single

sculpture or dance or song or indeed the single building, is only a remnant

of the undiminished cityscape or ceremony or the integrated interior of,say, a medieval church. By now, the single art object, instead of being

3. See Martin Heidegger, "Das Ding," Vortrdgeund Aufsdtze Pfullingen, 1954); Hans-

Georg Gadamer, PhilosophicalHermeneutics,ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley andLos Angeles, 1976), p. 71.

4. See Kurt Lewin, A Dynamic Theoryof Personality:SelectedPapers, trans. Donald K.

Adams and Karl E. Zener (New York, 1935).



Summer1987 681

supported in its partial function by its place and time, is expected to

carrya total and complete message against the opposition of an incongruous

neighborhood.Lewin has defined the behavior of objects as their valence or demand

quality (Aufforderungscharakter). aturally, in order to call forth human

responses, objects must be known and understood, and the perceivermust feel the urge to approach or avoid them. Sigmund Freud hasremarked: "But if I have a path open to me, does that fact automaticallydecide that I shall take it? I need a motive in addition before I resolvein favor of it and furthermore a force to propel me along the path."5Even so, the attractions and repulsions are experienced as issuing from

the objects themselves.In their most radical social manifestation the motivating forces of

objects are revealed by the pathology of what Karl Marx described asthe fetishism of commodities. Recently, Gaspare Barbiellini Amidei andBachisio Bandinu, in what they call "a disquieting investigation of our

captivity among the objects," have derived from the Marxist concept an

analysis of traditional and modern attitudes based on the observation,"the fact is that the objects speak, and that people speak through the

objects."6 I shall refer later to this study but will cite here a striking

illustration of its thesis in a short novel, Les Chosesby Georges Perec,which describes a group of Parisian students in the 1960s. Employed bymarket research agencies to trace the responses of consumers, these

students themselves are hopelessly addicted to the lure of objects offeringcomfort and prestige. "In their world it was almost the rule always to

desire more than one could acquire. This was not of their own making,it was a law of the civilization, a given fact most aptly expressed in

publicity quite in general, the magazines, the art of window display, the

spectacle of street life, and in certain ways even in all of what goes by

the name of cultural products."7 The novel opens with a long, ghostlypanorama of a dream apartment, filled with all the luxury objects of

enviable living, an assembly of silent sirens, each displaying its seductive

charms, but all in the total absence of human beings. Presented here isvalence in the abstract, attractiveness as such.

It is particularly pertinent to the valence of art objects that quite in

general so many of the properties inviting response are directly containedin perceptual appearance. Lewin speaks of forces going out "from a

sharp edge, from a breakable object, or from the symmetrical or asym-

metrical disposition of objects on both sides of the path taken by the

5. Sigmund Freud, A GeneralIntroduction oPsychoanalysis, rans. Joan Riviere (Garden

City, N.Y., 1943), p. 43; translation modified.

6. Gaspare Barbiellini Amidei and Bachisio Bandinu, II re e unfeticcio: romanzodi cose

(Milan, 1976), p. 24; my translation.

7. Georges Perec, Les Choses:une Histoire des Annees soixante (Paris, 1965), p. 44; mytranslation.

CriticalInquiry



682 Rudolf Arnheim

child."8 Another psychologist, James J. Gibson, has somewhat elaboratedon the description of the perceptual qualities that invite action and has

given them the name "affordances."9The basicaffordance of a work of art is that of being readilyperceivable.Since the human senses are geared biologically to the apprehension ofrelevant signals, a bugle tune, a fire alarm, or a piece of music detaches

itself from a background of noises by its definable tones, and this com-

prehensibility arouses in the hearer the urge to respond. Similarly in

painting, sculpture, or architecture, the orderly visual structure of shape,size, and color in a well-made work attracts viewers through its immediate

readability. This primary affordance gives access to all the obvious allures

deriving from the subject matter of the work and the various personalassociations that may bind the consumer to it. In the most general senseit is the very order and harmony of its appearance that distinguishes theart object as an oasis in a disturbinglychaotic world. And only this organizedperceptual structure enables the art object spontaneously to illustratedefinite constellations of forces that underlie physical and mental func-

tioning in general. The purified experience of such basic dynamic themesas harmony and discord, balance, hierarchy, parallelism, crescendo, com-

pression, or liberation is an affordance of fundamental cognitive value.

The social history of Western art during the recent few centurieshas shown that art is not necessarily deprived of these values when it istorn from its moorings in space and time. By now, a Raphael or Picasso

belongs everywhere and nowhere, and the relation of the Acropolis tomodern Athens is essentially geographical. Like watches, barometers, or

books, such art objects perform their service wherever they are put. In

fact, the detachment from their birthplace tends to stress the timelesswisdom of works of art, overshadowing their more local meaning. At thesame time there can be no question that Michelangelo's David was gravely

impaired when the original of the statue was moved from its politicallydefined location in front of the Palazzo Vecchio to the anonymous tribunain the Academy. When sculptures and paintings are kidnapped by ourmuseums they offer a vital gain to the places to which they have been

taken, but they are no longer of and about those places.This detachment interferes with the symbiotic intimacy tying art to

its users. Heidegger, at the beginning of the essay I cited above, complainsabout today's reduction of all distances in space and time. The relationthat used to distinguish between close by and far away, present and past,

has been leveled by modern technology to a uniform optimal distance.Heidegger asserts that this practical convenience has destroyed true"nearness" between the viewer and the object viewed. His observationreminds us that in an undisturbed spatial and temporal context the

variety of distances symbolizes degrees of belonging together or being

8. Lewin, A Dynamic Theoryof Personality,p. 50.

9. See James J. Gibson, The EcologicalApproach o Visual Perception(Boston, 1979).




CriticalInquiry Summer1987

remote. One is close to a lover but distant from a judge, close to one's

workshop or away from home. In the organized architectural environment

of a church, one's distancefrom the

altaror

ceiling or the sharing of apew with one's neighbors are symbolically defined spatial relations.

Within the pictorial space of a painting the relations between the

objects it represents are similarly defined by meaning. In Seurat's SundayAfternoonon the GrandeJatte, chilling gaps keep the figures at a distance

from one another. The distance from the viewer outside the frame is

also determined, but only to the extent of the picture's power. Thelocation of the viewer is curiously twofold. The situation is similar to that

of reading a novel, which can place the reader at a chosen distance from

what is to be seen or heard in the story while leaving him bodily seatedat a fixed distance from the book. Similarly the painting splits the viewerinto two persons-one nailed to a fictitious place through the outward

projection of the pictorial space, the other free to move back and forth

before the wall to which the canvas is attached.

The things looked at also lead a double life. As physical objects theyremain unaffected by being viewed. As percepts, however, they are subjectto the idiosyncrasies of the viewer's mind. Furthermore, percepts aretransformed into memory images, and they may assume the material

shape of works of art. Removed from the control of the original stimulus,they are manipulated even more freely-an exclusively human trick,which made it possible for Freud to accuse art of serving gratuitous wishfulfillment. This same distinction between physical things and mental

images, however, suggests that the Freudian approach calls for someamendments.

First, it seems curious for a psychologist to accept the preeminenceof the world of bodily action to the extent of rejecting imagination as an

escape from reality. Is it not at least equally in keeping with the special

gifts of human nature to acknowledge the alternative standard of value?Why not anchor true reality in the creations of the mind and treat the

"physical" world as a mere resource supplying the materials for theexalted and purified images of the artist or thinker? This certainly is theattitude of many devoted artists, poets, or scientists, even though it putsthem in conflict with almost any civilization.

Freud, of course, came to disapprove of the imagination as a cheapproduct of the childish illusion of omnipotence, used by the mind to

shape things at its own selfish pleasure. The defeatist effect of such

daydreams is well illustrated in Perec's novel: "But between those oversizedreveries, to which they abandoned themselves with a strange complacency,and the nonexistence of their real actions, no rational project that reconciledthe objective necessities with their financial possibilities asserted itself.The immensity of their wishes paralyzed them."'0

10. Perec, Les Choses,p. 21; my translation.

683



684 Rudolf Arheim

True imagination, however, is quite another matter, and in fact wehave noted that psychoanalysis has come to recognize "transitionalobjects"

as ways of introducing the immature mind to a world in which eachcomponent displays a character of its own to be coped with during theadventures of living. In this perspective, art must be recognized as a

prime instrument for weaning the mind at the adult level.An impressively large service is thereby demanded of art objects,

and indeed of objects in general. Heidegger makes this request most

radically when he expects a humble waterjug to reflect nothing less thanthe cosmic quaternion of heaven and earth, the divine and the mortal.More modestly we may be willing to limit the symbolism of the jug to

the humanly relevant activities of receiving, containing, and giving."1But even this smaller request insists on "makingthe objectsspeak."Gadamerhas observed that talk of respect for things has become more and more

unintelligible in an ever more technological world. Things, he says, "are

simply vanishing, and only the poet still remains true to them. But wecan still speak of a language of things when we remember what thingsreally are, namely, not a material that is used and consumed, not a toolthat is used and set aside, but something instead that has existence initself."12

Understanding the language of things is not a privilege of the so-phisticated. On the contrary, nonverbal language speaks most loudlywhere the original rapport between man and his tools is still preserved.Barbiellini Amidei and Bandinu, in the treatise I mentioned earlier, offera moving description of one of the most primitive populations left in

Europe, the shepherds of the Barbagia plains on Sardinia. Their simplehuts are equipped with two kinds of objects. A few are gotten in townand have to be paid for. "Not being natural objects, they are not protectedby nature: they are always in possible danger and may suddenly refuse

to function." All the other objects are made by the shepherd himself ofgranite, wood, hide, bone, or cork. "They don't cost money nor can their

price be translated into working hours." Making them emerge fromnature "is never a chore, even though they serve practical needs; in

making them there is always an element of playfulness. They are essentialbut replaceable, and their presence can be invented at any time. The

things of nature offer themselves as materials. Therefore the attitude isnot one of anxiety but of trust, almost an affectionate carelessness. [The

shepherd] treatsthem as he pleases because they are his, and he understands

their course from life to death."'3All those tools and implements are carved and kept in good shape

with the knife the shepherd always carries in his pocket. There is a

11. See Rudolf Arnheim, Towarda PsychologyofArt: CollectedEssays (Berkeley and Los

Angeles, 1966), p. 192.

12. Gadamer, PhilosophicalHermeneutics,p. 71.

13. Barbiellini Amidei and Bandinu, II re e unfeticcio, p. 68; my translation.




CriticalInquiry Summer1987 685

closeness between making and consuming that by now we rarely enjoy.There are no paintings on the walls of the shepherd's home, no objects

that specialize in providing images of distant worlds, but there is a familyresemblance between the utensils and their makers by which the objectsreflect the style of life of their users. Having been made the right wayfrom the right materials, the objects reflect standards of honesty and

solidity for human conduct. They are guiding images, leading the

thoughtful mind by the symbolism of their appearance to the foundations

of life and behavior. They do so without giving up their primary locationas tangible agents in the world of bodily action. Their intimacy with the

setting in which they operate as companions of their users makes it easier

for them to be not only handled but also seen and heard.In a world like ours in which objects, limited to practical function

and endowed with artificial values, no longer speak, works of art need

a special dispensation to do their duty, and their users need to be awakened

for a couple of hours at a time to be able to look and listen. And whereas

more normally it is the eloquence of the objects that makes art possible,our hope for reviving the objects now comes from the arts.

arnheim, rudolf - art among the objects

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