Okay, we begin again with our investigation of the aesthetic experience. In particular we consider the pictorial work. I think I am a little out of order from Dufrenne, but we have done the foundational work, and we can pick and choose a little bit. And we may return to the musical work sometime later.

So we return to Dufrenne at Chapter 9, “The Pictorial Work”.  Dufrenne begins by pointing out the difference between the pictorial and the musical work.  In particular he mentions that pictorial works are located in space and time in a way that the musical work is not.  The musical work has a temporal dimension, in a way intrinsically.  We listen from start to finish and that takes place in time rather than space.  The pictorial work is experienced in space, but this experience is based on the representational nature of the picture.  Dufrenne mentions at the beginning the problem of the temporality of the pictorial, but he stops to mention the more obvious property of space, and the (to him) related property of representation. 

We notice space in the picture in so far as it is itself represented by the picture.  So, perspective or foreshortening, or other ways that the artist has of representing 3-dimensions in the space of 2-dimensions (sorry I originally had 3-d here, but that does not make sense).  The pictorial work tries to represent, in a way that music does not.  I wonder why that is.  Sometimes music tries to represent.  Think here about St. Saens birds and other things.  But the origin of music is not at all representational.  There are artificial things that sound like other things, for example, bird calls, or other sort of animal noises for hunters for example.  No one would confuse these with music.  So music is not representational, but in the pictorial arts, and maybe we can say the visual arts entirely, representation is, at least in the beginning, very much in the forefront.

Dufrenne’s point is that this representational nature of pictorial work deprives it of the possibility of temporality.  It is not entirely clear to me why he says this, but part of it is the conceptual nature of the representation.  So, the picture is a picture of something, and we are left with thinking of the thing represented.  We are struck by what is represented, and we are left, in a way, wondering or thinking of what it is.  What is represented takes us to the conceptual realm.  “Our attention is involved in the domain of concepts, i.e., in the nontemporal."(274)

The temporal nature of art.

Yet there is a temporal aspect of the visual arts.  It is not in the manner of music.  In drama we may experience the temporal in the passage of time through the play.  But in painting or sculpture?  Again considering space.  For the representational painting, space is almost given to the artist.  Dufrenne appeals to Sartre’s idea of the “perceiving more and other than I see”.  Let me appeal to another musical analogy.  Sometimes in the harmony to a melody, we can drop the tonic, or the fifth, note of the chord, and if the melody is strong enough, the listener will fill it in.  The listener can make up for what the music lacks, if there is enough hinting in the right direction.  Dufrenne thinks that pictorial art can do the same.  If we think there is a person in the painting, we will fill it in.  We do not need much from the artist.  Dufrenne even suggests that the work on perspective in the Renaissance was not really necessary in order to get the viewer to perceive or at least experience depth in the painting. 

Of course an artist can work on representation.  The artist can be better at representing.  But in doing so he is moving the viewer in a direction that he is going anyway.  To get someone to look at the painting, we need to move in the direction of non-representational.  Even worse if the painting is of something that is intrisically interesting in its own right. 

So, spaciality is something more or less given in the representational work.  What about temporality?  There is something interesting here in considering how the work is presented.  Not just that the static picture can represent something in motion.  We are already beyond pictures (which has more to do with drawing than painting), but even if we are considering pictures, there is more to motion than a simple attempt to represent.