[incli]nation

This week on Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes, he has put out a challenge to bloggers to share their own take on the idea of Paintings That Rhyme. He kicked things off with his own take, looking at an 1887 trompe l’oeil painting by George Cope titled Civil War Regalia of Major Levi Gheen McCauley, which made him think about Marsden Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer, 1914.

It’s a fun and creative way to get back to actually writing about art, rather than art world politics, finances and scandals. I’m pretty sure it’s also a not-so-subtle comment on the recent art thievery debates, the most public being the Hirst/Precious spat in LA.

Maybe not, but I like to think Tyler is intentionally (and playfully) pointing us to a much more interesting aspect of all this; semiotics. That’s right, the good, old-fashioned joy of reading ‘texts’. It’s brilliant, actually.

From where I’m sitting, Tyler’s ‘rhymes’ are about how pictures speak to each other, but more importantly, how they speak to us.

Briefly oversimplifying Semiotics 101, a picture can be seen as a ‘text’ made up of ‘signs’. A sign is simply a single unit of a text (so if we look at a picture of a horse let’s say, each element in that picture or text is a sign; the horse, rider, ground, sky, tree, bird, rock, cloud, and on and on. And by the way, semiotics considers most things texts – pictures, sculptures, films, houses, people, places…just about everything actually. Oh, and books too.) Anyway, we are constantly in the process of reading texts by decoding the signs. We do this naturally through the simultaneous processes of ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. And here is where we get back to Tyler’s ‘rhymes.

Looking at the picture of the horse, the rider, as a sign, carries a denotation, as in the most basic idea of ‘the rider’–male, young, caucasian etc. The rider, as a sign, also carries a connotation, which is all the things ‘the rider’ may suggest–rich, spoiled, mean, bully, class struggle, suffering, injustice, death etc. Denotation and connotation take place simultaneously and automatically. They are also both subject to the unique views of each individual. And while each sign’s denotation may be relatively easy to name within a given social milleaux, it’s connotation varies wildly from individual to individual. And it is in the process of connotation that we finally get to Tyler’s ‘rhymes’.

Take for example, I recently saw Baldesarri’s Stonehenge in Green:

which made me think of Davie Salle’s Sextant in Dogtown:

which made me think of Buren’s Palais Royale for some reason, those circles maybe:

then this by Monet:

which, of course led me to one of my favorite of all time:

which came full circle to Nan Goldin here:

and on and on it goes.

Looked at this way, every picture rhymes. Try it! I’m going to do more. Thanks Tyler…

d.