Stefan Arteni

Writing Systems, Art, Communication

III

SolInvictus Press 2010

Cucuteni ceramic vessel, Romania

2
Art and Communication

Visual art functions in the medium of perception. “[Visual] art makes perception
(Wahrnehmung) available for communication, and it does so outside…
language…Art integrates perception and communication without merging…their
respective operations…[Visual] art, in circumventing language, establishes a
structural coupling between consciousness and communication…Consciousness
cannot communicate, communication cannot perceive…”, observes Niklas
Luhmann. He continues: “The reader needs only recall the art of ornament which
underscores the importance of the art object itself. The intention here was: the
surface interprets the inner depth. Divination techniques for older civilizations
along with diverse lineament on turtle shells, in animal entrails, in flights of birds -
taken as a sign of mystery - must have been a familiar way of thinking. Thus,
depth wasn´t only spatial distance, inasmuch as the contrary, invisible side of the
range of sight.”

Cucuteni amphora, Romania

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Coţofeni ceramic vessels, 2800-2600 BC, Romania

Bronze age Costişa culture, 1900-1600 BC, Romania

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St. Barbara church, Göreme, Turkey, 730-787

Snake church, Göreme, Turkey, 11th century

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Ağaçaltı Church, Ihlara valley, Turkey, 10th -11th centuries(?)

Ağaçaltı Church, Ihlara valley, Turkey, 10th -11th centuries(?)

Ağaçaltı Church, Ihlara valley, Turkey, 10th -11th centuries(?)

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Ağaçaltı Church, Ihlara valley, Turkey, 10th -11th centuries(?)

Ağaçaltı Church, Ihlara valley, Turkey, 10th -11th centuries(?)

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Mario Sironi, 20th century

Mario Sironi, 20th century

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Mario Sironi, 20th century

Mario Sironi, 20th century

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Mario Sironi, 20th century

Mario Sironi, 20th century

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Mario Sironi, 20th century

Mario Sironi, 20th century

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Before a hand can draw a mark on a surface, before reflection becomes
objective, seeing has become looking and this process entails the delimitation of
a visual field that can be inspected with one’s eyes and can thus constitute a
recipient for the marks impressed by a gesture.

Ioannis Pagomenos zographer, Agios Georgios church, Anidri, Crete,

14th century (?)

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Mario Sironi, 20th century

Mario Sironi, 20th century

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Etymologically ‘art’ (ars) means skill, artifice, handicraft. It is only fairly recently
that the terms Fine Arts, Belle Arti, Beaux Arts, Bildende Kuenste, which refer
exclusively to visual arts, have been introduced, while the sense of artist had
become limited toward the visual arts and especially painting. Artisan derives
from the Latin verb artire, ‘to instruct in the arts’. The French term Arts Plastiques
derives from the Greek plastikos, able to be molded, to be formed, from plastos,
formed, from plassein, to mold, to form.

Roman Jakobson argues that, by its very nature, art is artifice (artificium, that is
craftmanship, crafty strategy or expedient). Art is a playful fabrication: “The
signs of…art can carry the imprint of…symbol,…icon and…index, but it is
obviously above all in their artistic character that their significance is lodged”.
Art itself is an inscription of praxis and as such preserves the historicity of its
unstable and ever shifting horizon, the is-ness of the placeless place, the no-
man’s-land that spans a manifold of co-present different cultural systems and
perhaps dramatizes latency, the improbability of communication, and silence.
The fixed work, the closure, is based on the possibility of openness, it occurs as
nowness (Vergegenwaertigung) under erasure - for Heidegger, the crossing
out, the X, is not a simple negative sign.

Niklas Luhmann defines art as a symbolically generalized communication

medium, but he warns: “what one retrospectively perceives as art was
produced as support for other functional circles”. In fact, the functional
differentiation of art as a system, albeit a marginal one, begins in early modern
Western Europe, and is a historically circumscribed event.

Luhmann describes communication explicitly as the unity of information,

utterance [message, Mitteilung], and expectation of understanding. More
specifically, communication “arises through a synthesis of three different
selections, namely, selection of information, selection of utterance of this
information, and a selective understanding or misunderstanding of this utterance
and its information.”

A helpful bridge is Luhmann's understanding of information: once information is

expressed it is no longer information per se; it has exhausted itself. Though, this
"automatic mechanism does not exclude the possibility of repetition." Repetition
itself is a form of meta-information that can be interpreted as information
indicating the value and validity of the repeated (now) non-information.
Recipients repeatedly view certain programs. In terms of system theory, Niklas
Luhmann describes familiarity as a genuinely human means for reducing
systemic complexity: "Familiarity ... enables relative secure anticipations and thus
absorbs remaining risks ..." James Carey argues that the ritual view focuses on
the communication of this meta-information of commonality, instead of novelty.

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A lot of communication will typically take place on the level of
meta-communication, i.e. communication about communication. In meta-
communication one communicates not only about a particular content but also
about the effect that a communication has, in other words about what difference
the particular communication makes, and about how it communicates.

“Advertisement and persuasion are phenomena that game theoreticians have

had problems explaining…Advertisement works because of the design of our
brains. There are empirical psychological data showing that humans like other
animals are sensitive to the form of signals and not just to the information they
convey…Some of the qualities found in ritualized biological signals, such as large
size, frequent repetition, symmetry, elaborate ornamentation and mimicry, also
appear in human advertisement… Spectacular cultural phenomena can evolve
that convey little meaningful information, but still have strong impact on
spectators.” [Magnus Enquist, Anthony Arak, Stefano Ghirlanda, and Carl-
Adam Wachtmeister, Spectacular phenomena and limits to rationality in genetic
and cultural evolution, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London.
Series B, Biological sciences 357(1427):1585-94, 2002 Nov 29,
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/357/1427/1585.long ]

Carlo McCormick explains:“In advertising, we must understand that the product is

incidental to its position in our imagination …[advertising is ] primarily concerned
with the subtleties and incidentals of perception…Advertising is a… tool that both
locates memory and manifests it.”

The high-context nature of oral society allows individuals to use inferences and
indirect references. A viewer may require little more than reminders to recall, as
much has been absorbed through osmosis in the culture. It is equally important,
however, to consider the ''execution' of works, that is the visual production
techniques especially in high-context cultures where communication is often
based merely on symbols. Models of pattern perception suggest that, with
increased familiarity, subjects become able to reconstruct a previous
representation from very small, unique segments of the pattern.
In calligraphy, a well-known text could be written in many different ways; in
painting, there may be many different instantiations of a well-known image.
Since the works are often variations on established themes and usually allude to
earlier works, the repeated and now familiar information (the content) appears as
a construct that may be dissociated from the form of the utterance. This is how
'art constructs art' [S.J.Schmidt.] One should heed that story of Correggio
standing before some great masterpiece and crying: Anch' io son' pittore
["I too, am a painter!".]

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Theophanes the Cretan zographer, St Nikolaos Anapafsas, Meteora, Greece,
16th century

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Theophanes the Cretan zographer, St Nikolaos Anapafsas, Meteora, Greece,
16th century

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Theophanes the Cretan zographer, St Nikolaos Anapafsas, Meteora, Greece,
16th century

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Theophanes the Cretan zographer, St Nikolaos Anapafsas, Meteora, Greece,
16th century

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Greece, 17th century

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Detail of the Icon above, Greece, 17th century

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Macedonia, 17th century

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Detail of the Icon above, Macedonia, 17th century

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Gianni Vagnetti, 20th century

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Gianni Vagnetti, 20th century

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Gianni Vagnetti, 20th century

Gianni Vagnetti, 20th century

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Gianni Vagnetti, 20th century

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Mario Marcucci, 20th century

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Mario Marcucci, 20th century

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“Conventions are congealed practices: sedimentations, deposits of, actually, fluid
acts and events that accrue and accumulate, and eventually transmute into a
structure. Were one to inquire into the concrete discourse-economical
mechanism that brings about conventions…one would, quite likely, first point to
repetition. Conventions are grounded in repetitions, and they trigger entire
chains of future repetitions. Deposited as a system, however, they become an
agglomerate, and hence monumental…The notion of repetition contains the
entire problem: it combines the idea of linear progression (as it is presumed by
the notion of an act) with the idea of a cyclical return. Both ideas, initially,
contradict one another. Repetition, however, is inconceivable without this
contradiction. Even more: it can easily be seen as the model or concept for this
contradiction. Repetition, as I said earlier, contains a moment of identity or
similarity; otherwise, it could not be recognized as such in the whirl of events. At
the same time, it also contains a moment of difference in that it always combines
self-contained/heterogeneous events. Instead of speaking of a cycle, therefore,
one could speak of a spiral…”
[Hartmut Winkler, Discourses, Schemata, Technology, Monuments: Outline for
a Theory of Cultural Continuity, Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz,
http://homepages.uni-paderborn.de/winkler/modell_e.html]

“…graphical signs that evolve within a community offer distinct advantages when
compared with those that locally develop among isolated pairs. In particular, the
meaning associated with a particular sign is more accessible for a subsequent
generation of sign learners…But what about the global evolution unique to the
community signs? In a group context, signs need to be effective both in terms of
communicative fitness within each pair of the group and in terms of transmission
fitness for other group members. Our results indicate that communities achieve
this by developing increasingly simple signs, but nevertheless signs that retain
sufficient residual iconicity to be easily recognized…and learned…by new
members of the population from which the community was drawn. So, in both
community and isolated pair conditions, graphical signs evolve functionally,
becoming progressively refined and therefore more efficiently produced and
decoded by interlocutors. However, only community evolved signs exhibit
learning and decoding benefits for persons not actively engaged in sign
construction. As these benefits are unanticipated (i.e. the signs are not ‘designed’
with an external audience in mind), sign fitness is a ‘functional by-product’ of
adaptation in the community condition”.
[Nicolas Fay, Simon Garrod and Leo Roberts, The fitness and
functionality of culturally evolved communication systems,
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1509/3553.full.pdf ]

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Elmali (Apple) rock cut church, Göreme, Turkey, 11th century (?)

Byzantine Icon, date unknown

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 Pietro Cavallini, Simone Martini, Giotto students,
Santa Maria Donnaregina Vecchia church, Naples, Italy, 14th century

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Probota monastery, St Nicholas church, Romania, 16th century

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Archangel Gabriel, Byzantine, 14th century

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Archangel Gabriel, Megalo Meteoron monastery, Greece, 15th-16th centuries

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Dionisy zographer, archangel Gabriel, Ferapontov monastery, Russia, 1502

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Archangel Michael, Russia, 13th century

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Archangel Michael, Byzantine, 14th century

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Archangel Michael, Balkans, 1700

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Sopoćani monastery, 13th century, Serbia

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Dečani monastery, Serbia (Kosovo), 14th century

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Dečani monastery, Serbia (Kosovo), 14th century

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Detail of the fresco above, Dečani monastery, Serbia (Kosovo), 14th century

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Megalo Meteoron monastery, Greece, painted in the 15th-16th centuries

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Neagoe Basarab, lady Despina and children, detached fresco, Curtea de Argeş,
Romania, 16th century

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 Fresco and detail, Valea-Valea Mănăstirii monastery, Holy Trinity church,
Romania, built in the 16th century, painted in the 16th, 18th, and 19th centuries

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Detail of the fresco above, portrait of Radu Paisie, Valea-Valea Mănăstirii
monastery, Holy Trinity church, Romania, built in the 16th century

Stavropoleos church, Bucharest, Romania, 18th century

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Strehăreţi monastery, Romania, 17th century, votive portraits painted in 1844

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Ibăneşti wood church, Romania, built in 1785, repaired in 1879 when the votive
portraits were also painted

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Mystras, Greece, 13th -14th centuries (?)

Dome, Spoleto, Italy, 15th century (?)

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 Santa Maria Maggiore, Assisi, Italy, 15th century (?)

Theophanes the Cretan, Mount Athos, Greece, 16th century

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 Novgorod, 13th century

Patriarchate of Pec, Church of the Virgin Hodigitria, Serbia, 14th century (?)

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Rock church, Kalishta monastery, Macedonia. 14th -15th centuries

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Bistriţa monastery, “Bolniţa” church, Romania, 1513 (?)

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 Theophanes the Cretan, Mount Athos, Greece, 16th century

Moldoviţa monastery, Annunciation church, Romania, 16th century

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 Russia, 16th century

Sümela monastery, Turkey, painted in the 15th -18th centuries (?)

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Russia, 17th century

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Russia, 1700

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Popa Dimitrie zographer, Bradu hermitage, Romania, 18th century

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Ohrid, Macedonia, fresco in St Sophia Church, 11th -13th centuries

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Siena, Italy, 13th century

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St. Barbara church, Göreme, Turkey, 730-787

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Rock cut Karanlik or Dark Church, Göreme, Turkey, 11th century

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Sinai, 12th century

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Fresco, Megalo Meteoron monastery, Greece, 15th-16th centuries

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Voroneţ monastery, St George church, Romania, 15th-16th centuries

Balkans, 1600

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Greece, 1700

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Russia, 16th century

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Dormition (Assumption) princely court church, Târgovişte, Romania,
16th -17th centuries

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Northern Greece, 17th century

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Macedonia, 17th century

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Macedonia, 1700

Macedonia, 1700

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Greece, 1700

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Greece, 1700

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Greece, 18th century

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Greece, 18th century

Balkans, 1800

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Greece, 1800

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 Dionysos's discovery of Ariadne on Naxos, Roman fresco

Dionysos's discovery of Ariadne on Naxos, Roman mosaic, Crete, 3rd century

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 Dionysos's discovery of Ariadne on Naxos, Roman mosaic,
Syria?, 3rd -4th centuries

Dionysos's discovery of Ariadne on Naxos, Roman mosaic, Cyrene museum,

Libya

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 Dionysos and Ariadne, Attic red-figure calyx-krater, 400-375 BC

Dionysos and Ariadne, Apulian red-figure squat lekythos, 380–370 BC

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Dionysos and Ariadne, fresco from the House of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii

Giulio Romano (1492 - 1546), Dionysos and Ariadne, Palazzo del Tè,
Mantua, Italy

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Judgment of Paris, Witt painter, Attic black-figure amphora, 560–550 BC

Judgment of Paris, Roman fresco

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Judgment of Paris, Roman mosaic, Archaeological Museum, Seville, Spain

Pierre Auguste Renoir, study for Judgment of Paris

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The Three Graces, Roman fresco

The Three Graces, Roman fresco

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The Three Graces, Roman mosaic

Marino Marini, The Three Graces

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 Baldassare Estense

After Leonardo da Vinci

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Giovanni Costetti

Primo Conti

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 Tiziano Vecellio

Giorgio de Chirico

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 Albrecht Dürer

Giorgio de Chirico

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