Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach

Abstract

This study explores some ways of perceiving and interpreting the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez's proposition as regards the status of painting. It draws on Saussure's and Hegel's approaches to creative consciousness, in which a subject is supposed not only to negate the distinctions between the past and the present, but also to open up his/her thoughts for the future. This paper begins with a series of questioning as regards a compositional scheme that Velázquez included in two of his major works, Las Meninas and Fable of Arachne. First of all, it is argued that it is essential to recognize the ambiguity of the actual object of representation in these paintings. Then Saussure is conjoined with Peirce in the light of Jakobson's charged interest in decoding artifices devised in the arts. Such a mingled approach helps to expand our perception by stringing Velázquez's works together with those of his forerunners. In the first stage of interpretation, his technique is appreciated as a result of the need to overcome rivalries or surpass previous achievements. However, in order to look deeper into the painter's mind, this study introduces another stage of interpretation by drawing on Hegel's radical notion of memory. This second stage underlines the paradox that we cannot really get rid of the past when coming up with any kind of genuine innovation. Velázquez's thoughts are therefore revealed as a continuous process of piecing together and modifying desirable elements found in his forerunners. Finally, both interpretations are integrated within the larger context of evolutionary epistemology that actually allows the coexistence of different truths within our consciousness. This context helps extend our perception to certain artists beyond Velázquez's time and environment. It is argued that Velázquez's proposition actually questions the thorny task of achieving objective representations. It is also discovered that his proposition has invited some collaborations in which artists engage with pleasure with the negativity between seeing and thinking.