On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs

Abstract

My theme is the non-mimetic elements of the imagesign and their role in constituting the sign. It is not clear to what extent these elements are arbitrary and to what extent they inhere in the organic conditions of imaging and perception. Certain of them, like the frame, are historically developed, highly variable forms; yet though obviously conventional, they do not have to be learned for the image to be understood; they may even acquire a semantic value. We take for granted today as indispensable means the rectangular form of the sheet of paper and its clearly defined smooth surface on which one draws and writes. But such a field corresponds to nothing in nature or mental imagery where the phantoms of visual memory come up in a vague unbounded void. The student of prehistoric art knows that the regular field is an advanced artifact presupposing a long development of art. The cave paintings of the Old Stone Age are on an unprepared ground, the rough wall of a cave; the irregularities of earth and rock show through the image. The artist worked then on a field with no set boundaries and thought so little of the surface as a distinct ground that he often painted his animal figure over a previously painted image without erasing the latter, as if it were invisible to the viewer. Or if he thought of his own work, perhaps, as occupying on the wall a place reserved for successive paintings because of a special rite or custom, as one makes fires year after year on the same hearth over past embers, he did not regard this place as a field in the same sense in which later artists saw their figures as standing out from a suitably contrasting ground. The smooth prepared field is an invention of a later stage of humanity. It accompanies the development of polished tools in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages and the creation of pottery and an architecture with regular courses of jointed masonry. It might have come about through the use of these artifacts as sign-bearing objects. The inventive imagination recognized their value as grounds, and in time gave to pictures and writing on smoothed and symmetrical supports a corresponding regularity of direction, spacing and grouping, in harmony with the form of the object like the associated ornament of the neighboring parts. Through the closure and smoothness of the prepared picture surface, often with a distinct color of the reserved background, the image acquired a definite space of its own, in contrast to the prehistoric wall paintings and reliefs; these had to compete with the noise-like accidents and irregularities of a ground which was no less articulated than the sign and could intrude upon it. The new smoothness and closure made possible the later transparency of the picture-plane without which the representation of threedimensional space would not have been successful.1 With this new conception of the ground, the art of representation constructs, I have said, a field with a distinct plane (or regular curvature) of the surface and a definite boundary that may be the smoothed edges of an artifact. The horizontals of this boundary are at first supporting ground lines which connect the figures with each other and also divide the surface into parallel bands, establishing more firmly the axes of the field as coordinates of stability and movement in the image. We do not know just when this organization of the image field was introduced; students have given little attention to this fundamental change in art which is basic for our own imagery, even for the photograph, the film and the television screen. In scrutinizing the drawings of children for the most primitive processes of image-making, one forgets that these drawings, made