Notes from Classic Aesthetics, Tate Modern, Session 5

Aesthetics: Classic Theories - Notes from Session 5

Gotthold Lessing's ideas about the Laocoön were the main topic this week. This classical sculpture, now in the Vatican, depicts Laocoon and his two sons being attacked by serpents (a punishment meted out by the gods). Prior to Lessing's book, Winckelmann, the art historian, had maintained that Laocoön's mouth was only half-open in a sigh rather than bellowing as he is described in the Aeneid by Vergil because this reflected the grandeur and perhaps the stoicism of the Ancient Greeks.

Lessing disagrees. For him, this is about the visual arts doing what they do best: had the sculptor shown the face in the full grimace of a bellow, then the imagination would have had no further place to go...as it is, the sculpture engages our creative intellect and invites us to imagine the next phase of the writhing in agony.

Lessing disputes the Latin poet Horace's aphorism that 'ut pictura poesis'(i.e. that pictures and poetry are similar). For Lessing each has its distinctive potentials.

[The recent In Our Time BBC radio programme on Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' is relevant to this topic and even includes mention of Lessing. You should be able to listen to it here.]

In some ways Lessing's focus on the distinct properties of pictures and of words is a precursor of semiotics, and in particular C.S. Peirce's division of sign types into index, icon and symbol (there is a fuller explanation of this here). Roughly an index is a sign that represents by causal connection (smoke means fire); an icon by resemblance (a picture resembles what it is of); and a symbol represents by means of a convention ('cat' means that furry animal, but the word 'cat' is arbitrary - it could just as easily have been 'mountain').

With iconic signs, as Nelson Goodman pointed out, every change in the sign potentially represents something different (a smug retouching of the Mona Lisa's smile could, with a line as fine as a hair, radically change what was represented); whereas the colour or font in which a poem is printed don't (typically) affect the poem's meaning.

In the gallery we looked at works in Level 5 West  'States of Flux', Room 2, and also at Roy Lichtenstein's Wham! concentrating on the ways in which the still arts of painting and sculpture dealt with events unfolding over time, the main theme in Lessing's writing.

Comments

[australian artwork]

I just love ancient Greek sculptures!
Thanks for sharing!