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Word and Object: Museums and the Matter of Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

Garry L. Hagberg
Garry L. Hagberg*
Affiliation:
Bard College
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Abstract

We often think of works of art as possessors of meaning, and we think of museums as places where that meaning can be exhibited and encountered. But it is precisely at this first step of thinking about artistic meaning that we too easily import a conceptually entrenched model or picture of linguistic meaning that then constrains our appreciation of artistic meaning and what museum exhibitions actually do. That model of linguistic meaning is atomism: the notion that the single, self-contained word is the ultimate building block of meaning. This picture was excavated with exacting precision in Wittgenstein's sustained reflections on the nature of meaning, and the new way of seeing linguistic meaning that those reflections usher in holds direct significance for our understanding of artistic meaning, as we see here in examples from Rembrandt, Rietveld, and others. A more complete understanding of a dynamic, interactive, contextual, and use-based conception of language better reveals what actually happens in museums and the nature of the meaning we find there.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 79: Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums , October 2016 , pp. 261 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 I discuss what I call “Duchampian questions” in ‘The Institutional Theory of Art: Theory and Anti-Theory’, in Smith, P. and Wilde, C. (eds), Blackwell Companion to Art Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 487–504 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. What such questions place sharp focus upon is the nature and justification of the distinctions that fall on a three-stage continuum that we naturally employ, that is, a trifurcation with an object (e.g. a stone) on one end, an artefact (a pediment) in the middle, and an artefact-with-meaning (a sculpture) on the other end.

2 Russell, Bertrand, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (London: Fontana, 1972), 10 Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 12.

4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by Pears, D. F. and McGuinness, B. F. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961)Google Scholar.

5 Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, op. cit., 23.

6 Ibid., 23.

7 Ibid., 30.

8 Ibid., 30.

9 On any list of works of art history that broke free of formalist methodology and its atomistic presuppositions, one would have to include (and perhaps at the top) Steinberg, Leo, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. Steinberg refers to the earliest piece in his collection as ‘a declaration of independence from formalist indoctrination’. Ibid., vii. The critical work undertaken here is of a kind that shows (with the degree of detail I will argue is necessary below) the complexly-intertwined and irreducible character of artistic meaning; indeed one could start with this study, that is, on the artistic side of the analogy between art and language that I am discussing here, and then consider the far-reaching implications that artistic meaning holds for our understanding of linguistic meaning. But I am also suggesting that among the best ways to declare independence from formalist indoctrination and its continuing influence is to remove the misleading presuppositions about linguistic meaning lying beneath it. (This suggestion will become clearer as the discussion unfolds.) It is also of interest to note that the Rauschenberg Combines just mentioned were, in the 1960s, widely and almost exclusively critically examined for their formal, structural, abstract-compositional features; in more recent decades they have been discussed in terms of hidden messages amenable to verbal articulation and overall narrative content.

10 Wittgenstein, , Philosophical Investigations, revised 4th edition, edited by Hacker, P. M. S. and Schulte, Joachim, translated by Anscombe, G. E. M., Hacker, P. M. S., and Schulte, Joachim (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)Google Scholar.

11 I offer a discussion of Wittgenstein on language-games and the significance of this for understanding artistic style in Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 9–44 Google Scholar.

12 Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., Section 30.

13 Ibid., Section 152.

14 Ibid., Section 185.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., Section 186.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., Section 187.

19 We see this in some recent discussions of what has come to be generically called contextualism in the philosophy of language, where the presupposition of contained ingredient-content is left untouched while arguing that the context of an utterance contributes to that content. The frequent misunderstanding of ordinary-language philosophy follows exactly along these lines (as though contextualism captures what is important in that tradition); the deeper work in that tradition unearthed the presuppositions and broke free of them. See, for example, Ebersole, Frank B., Saying and Meaning (Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1979)Google Scholar; and Wisdom, John, Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964)Google Scholar.

20 Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., Section 197.

21 Rhees, Rush, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, 2nd edition, ed. Phillips, D. Z. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 243 Google Scholar.

22 Baxandall, Michael, Patterns of Intention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 64–65 Google Scholar.

23 Ibid.

24 And so at this point in Baxandall's remarks (and as I suggested above this is also true of Steinberg's critical writing), light is being shed in the reverse direction to that considered in most of this discussion. That is, we can also gain an increasingly nuanced conception of how intention works in language by looking first at how it works in art.

25 This is Wittgenstein's point in his blunt statement in Philosophical Investigations, Section 199, op. cit.: ‘To understand a sentence means to understand a language.’ This sentence shows what it says: it itself can only be understood against an expansive background discussion of linguistic meaning and its reductive misconstruals.

26 Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, op. cit., 64–65.

27 This opens into the extensive matter of aspect-perception or seeing-as; see Day, William and Krebs, Victor (eds), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Consider in this light Steinberg's remarks on Picasso: ‘The staggering corpus of Picasso's production seems still to be opening up, the familiar reappears undiscovered. I am convinced that all of Picasso's work needs rethinking in light of the whole; that the prevailing trend to deprecate work done after the thirties is misconceived; that the significant unity of Picasso's creation will become ever clearer, so that even his Cubism will eventually come to seem more like the rest of Picasso and less like the Cubism of other men.’ Steinberg, Other Criteria, op. cit., viii. And of his writing on this artist, Steinberg adds: ‘The Picasso chapters at the core of the book continue to write themselves in my mind, and I am sorry to be letting them go’ (ibid., viii). Art is indeed here functioning in a way parallel to (Wittgenstein's conception of) language – including language about this art.