What is a Picture? What is Representation?

As seen in my last post on Aesthetics, Plato thinks of a Picture as an imitation of reality. The more it looks like the real thing, the better it is. This is called realism, and is representation as imitation. Now we have photography. Isn't painting just to imitate reality pretty meaningless when a camera can do it better?

Plato presents a very intuitive but naive way to think of representation, but what then is a Picture? We can say that a picture is not really about the things that are painted, the things in the picture are symbols made to create an experience for the viewer of the painting. Hegel describes a good artwork as something where the soul is revealed to itself. I think this is a good description of art and representation.

Las Meninas

Las Meninas is an enormous painting, almost 3 metres tall from 1656, made by Diego Velázquez. This painting is one of the most mysterious paintings in art history and many philosophers have pondered its meaning. John Searle called this painting a paradoxical representation.

In the painting we see the child Princess Margarita of Spain and her two maids. To the left is the painter Velasquez himself, a character in the painting, in the act of painting the King and Queen who can bee seen in the mirror hanging on the wall behind the people. The paradox of this painting is that we as viewers take the place of the King and Queen, who, as seen in the mirror, are outside of the painting but still in many ways the main characters of the painting. Most of the people in the picture have their eyes turned toward us, the viewers. But this position is already occupied by the royal couple. In most classical realist paintings the viewer is supposed to have the same perspective as the painter when he painted the scene, but in this picture the artist is part of the painting, and the main characters are outside it.

Plato's idea of a picture as an illusion, a mirror held up to reality shows us a flat, 2D surface presented as 3D. However this is not really the way we relate to visual representation. We pay attention to something that is painted as well as the painting itself, the painting is a vehicle of what is represented. It is not only what is represented, but how it is represented that is important. Van Gogh's bedroom painting is interesting because of how it is done. This painting is far from realistic, yet it is a great representation. What it represents is the artist's state of mind, not the state of the particular bedroom.

A visual representation is not a kind of illusion where our attention slips back and forth from seeing lines and colors to seeing the scene represented, it is not like we switch from giving in to the illusion to noticing it, like in the duck, rabbit illusion. We see a two dimensional canvas with lines and paint and IN this we see something three dimensional. It is not like we imagine the Princess Marguerite AS paint and canvas but we see her IN the paint and canvas. It is not about imagining or being fooled by illusion, it is a peculiar kind of seeing. When you see the duck rabbit you can see only one at the time, but when you see a painting you see the twofoldness at the same time. We get lost in the painting without forgetting that it is a painting

References

Michel Foucault, “Las Meninas”, The Order of Things, ch. 1
John Searle, “Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial representation”
Richard Wollheim, “Seeing-as, seeing-in, and pictorial representation”