Ontologically Interactive Painting: On Susan Rothenberg’s Three Heads

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that paintings are transformations of the perceptual world, transformations that the world itself elicits but does not determine, thus undercutting the subjective-objective divide in art. First, I describe Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution, according to which sense develops only by changing, that is, by being taken up and coherently deformed. Next, I use this notion to argue that paintings develop the perceptual sense of the world by coherently deforming it. In other words, paintings are transformations of the perceptual world that are called for by the world itself. To make my case, I analyze Susan Rothenberg’s painting Three Heads, a work that develops and furthers the perceptual sense of horses only by taking it up and changing it. Finally, I suggest that this view of painting motivates an interactive ontology according to which things are not self-contained but interactive, fundamentally opening onto things beyond themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics
• Merleau-Ponty
• phenomenology
• philosophy of art
• Rothenberg
• institution

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 139.

2 Ibid.

3 Karl Ruhrberg, Painting, ed. Ingo F. Walther, vol. 1 of Art of the 20th Century (Köln: Taschen, 2005), 383.

4 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 139.

5 For brilliant accounts of many such threads, see Galen Johnson’s introductory essay to “Eye and Mind” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Galen A. Johnson, “Ontology and Painting: ‘Eye and Mind,’” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993], 35−55) as well as the chapter entitled “Thinking Through ‘Eye and Mind’” in his book The Retrieval of the Beautiful (Galen A. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010], 13−42).

6 In Phénoménologie de la perception, Merleau-Ponty employs locutions such as l’engrenage (“the gearing”), engrener (“to gear into”), and en prise (“in gear”) to refer to how sense appears “at the intersection of my experiences” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes [London: Routledge, 2012), lxxxiv). As Donald A. Landes notes (ibid., 496, fn. 47), this is meant to indicate that making sense of the world is a matter of fitting or attuning, adjusting or adapting ourselves to the evolutions of experience.

7 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 123.

8 Ibid.

9 David Morris emphasizes this passive or exposed nature of embodied existence, noting that, in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the body is “equal in significance to Descartes’s cogito. But the cogito would close philosophical problems by having the philosophizing ‘I’ certify itself from within. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty poses philosophy’s initial question − ‘Who am I?’ − within a body open to the world. This inherently exposes [my emphasis] philosophy to living, perceptual, emotional, sexual and expressive drives, to other people, to lived space and time − it uncovers philosophy’s permanent openness to what Merleau-Ponty later calls the pre-philosophical or pre-theoretical” (David Morris, “Body,” in Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds [London: Routledge, 2014], 111).

10 “ … meaning is never literally given or passively fixed, but is in a process of becoming that involves receptivity and transformation, a mixture of activity and passivity” (Don Beith, The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy [Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2018], 6).

11 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 124.

12 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954−1955), trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 7: “Time is the very model of institution.” Jessica Wiskus adds that institution “works according to a temporal dimension of depth … . Institution is the process through which noncoincident hesitations, approaches, experiments, and productions cohere as a sense that exceeds every individual instant; it is a movement – a radiance – the reverberation of a call.” (Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013], 63−4). Cf. Beith, The Birth, 69−70.

13 Merleau-Ponty, Institution, 77.

14 Ibid.

15 See ibid., 8.

16 See Beith, The Birth, 71. See also Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 429−30.

17 Merleau-Ponty, Institution, 10.

18 Ibid., 11.

19 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 105–106.

20 Merleau-Ponty, Institution, 9.

21 Ibid., 10.

22 Ibid.

23 We might also cite Cézanne’s pondering “hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, trans. Michael B. Smith [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993], 65−6) or Francis Bacon’s experience of intending to paint one thing but being moved by “accidents” that occur during the painting process to create an entirely different picture. See David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 9−10. This is not to deny, of course, that different authors engage in different levels of pre-planning.

24 Note that even if the plot is mapped out in advance, the execution of this plan in writing will introduce subtle changes into the work as it develops.

25 Merleau-Ponty suggests that this logic is where we get the impression that a book creates itself, each successive chapter motivating what comes next. See Merleau-Ponty, Institution, 10−11.

26 Ibid., 11.

27 Ibid., 41.

28 “[The] task of the painter [is] inherited, [intends a] pictorial telos  … Personal institution that resumes collective institution” (ibid., brackets in original).

29 The sense of painting is thus an “open sense, which develops by means of proliferation, by curves, decentering and recentering, zigzag, ambiguous passage, with a sort of identity between the whole and part, the beginning and the end. A sort of existential eternity by means of self-interpretation” (ibid., 48−9).

30 See ibid., 78.

31 He then adds, “Everything hangs together, and yet it would not be possible to say where it is going” (ibid., 77−8).

32 As Joseph Berendzen notes, “While an expression stands as a kind of individual act, it also creates something that can be added, so to speak, to that reservoir of potentials and become the background of a new expression in turn” (Joseph C. Berendzen, Embodied Idealism: Merleau-Ponty’s Transcendental Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023]).

33 Merleau-Ponty, Institution, 41−2.

34 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 139.

35 “In a sense everything that may have been said and will be said about the French Revolution has always been and will henceforth be within it, in that wave arising from a roil of discrete facts, with its froth of the past and its crest of the future. And it is always by looking more deeply into how it came about that we make and will go on making new representations of it” (ibid., emphasis in original).

36 Ibid., bracketed material my alteration.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., emphases in original. Of course, Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term “legitimate” opens up the question of what counts as a legitimate interpretation. This is an important and worthwhile question of normativity, but for reasons of space and thematic focus, it must be left for future work.

39 “The accomplished work is thus not the work which exists in itself like a thing, but the work which reaches its viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it … ” (Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 88).

40 This view is already prefigured by Merleau-Ponty himself when he insists that “perception already stylizes” (ibid., 91). The perceptual thing that the painter depicts is not a painting (“for in that case the painting would be already completed”), but the painting is “at least called for” by the perceptual thing (ibid.).

41 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 139.

42 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 124. Cf. Johnson, The Retrieval, 30. In discussing Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term promiscuity (promiscuité), Johnson refers to “the metamorphosis of things into the sight of them.”

43 Cf. “Eye and Mind”: “The painter lives in fascination. The actions most proper to him – those gestures, those tracings of which he alone is capable and which will be revelations to others because they do not lack what he lacks – to him they seem to emanate from the things themselves” (Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 129, emphasis mine).

44 Ibid., 139.

45 For a reproduction, see Joan Simon, Susan Rothenberg (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 170.

46 Ibid., 169

47 Ibid., 168–9.

48 If anything, it is less immediately recognizable than her earlier horse paintings. Perhaps personal knowledge of horses scrubbed away some visual clichés (in the sense used by Deleuze in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation).

49 Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 169.

50 Ruhrberg, Painting, 383.

51 Simon, Susan Rothenberg, 9.

52 Ibid., 169, bracketed material my alteration.

53 Ibid., 168.

54 I should clarify that, although Three Heads (by virtue of its ambiguous balance between mimetic representation and abstraction) is a particularly clear or exemplary example, this same analysis could be extended even to the most representational or abstract paintings. Simply through the act of transforming fleshy and smelly horse bodies into paint on a canvas, a certain deformation is brought forth, no matter how photorealistic the result. Meanwhile, even the most abstract painting is still in communion with the rest of the perceptual world. Thus, a Pollock drip painting, e.g., can serve to modulate my perceptual sense of the desert landscape despite the painting’s utter lack of mimetic referent. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for challenging me to specify my view on the relationship of Three Heads to other paintings I could possibly have employed as examples.

55 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 139.

56 “It is the work itself that has opened the perspective from which it appears in another light. It transforms itself and becomes what follows; the interminable interpretations to which it is legitimately susceptible change it only into itself” (ibid., emphases original).

57 Ibid., 132.

58 “For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to isolated acts of any kind: we may not make isolated errors or hit upon isolated truths” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Vintage Books, 1967], 16 [“Preface,” section 2], emphasis in original).

59 See, e.g., the opening pages of Ruhrberg’s book on twentieth-century painting cited above. Ruhrberg echoes the familiar suggestion that modern art heralds an outbreak of subjectivity in artistic expression. Whereas in earlier traditions of painting spectators were presented with a more-or-less faithful reproduction of the painted thing, the idea is that in modern painting we are given a projection of the artist. Ruhrberg cites the writer André Malraux’s suggestion that a portrait by Manet “contains more of the painter than of the person portrayed” (Ruhrberg, Painting, 10). At work in such suggestions is the idea that the painter and the painted thing are ultimately separate entities, and it is thought that, in viewing a given painting, we detect this separation (hence the assumption of our ability to tell whether there is “more” or “less” of the subject matter or of the painter’s subjective style in a given artwork).

60 This is a necessarily brief sketch or preliminary articulation of the point. Clarifying what such an interactive view of individual specificity implies will require future work.

61 As Véronique Fóti writes, “the image renders visible what could not otherwise be so” (Véronique M. Fóti, Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery: Questioning Art beyond His Reach [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020], 14, emphasis in original).