Synaesthetics: Art as Synaesthesia by Paul Gordon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Synaesthetics: Art as Synaesthesia by Paul Gordon Peter Dayan Synaesthetics: Art as Synaesthesia. By Paul Gordon. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 2020. vi+194 pp. £63.19. ISBN 978–1–5013–5679–7. This book is constructed around a central argument which is both powerful and timely given the current surge of interest, from students as well as academics, in intermediality and its relation to the concept of art. It is that art can be defined as that which is received synaesthetically. By this, Paul Gordon does not mean that artistically sensitive people are necessarily synaesthetes in the sense that they instinctively hear musical notes as colours, for example; rather, he suggests that becoming sensitive to the distinctive quality of an artwork is a process that must engage senses other than those on which we directly focus as we receive the work. This speaks to the presence in art of a kind of operation opposed to what Gordon often calls the literal, or the positivistic, or the rational; art functions, rather, through a kind of metaphoricity which situates its meaning beyond what is physically present. Unfortunately, his work will, I fear, have less academic traction than it might have merited because of the way he argues his case. All such attempts to define art face a challenge: to the sceptical (or academic) eye, it can easily appear that the person proposing the definition has simply decided in advance to limit the category of art to whatever fits the proposed definition. Gordon leaves himself open to this criticism. ‘All “fine art” speaks a language that is not our ordinary language,’ he writes (p. 11). We might ask: what work is that word ‘fine’ doing, and why the scare quotes? Similarly, when he tells us that ‘rock and roll, like all great art, is inherently synaesthetic’ (p. 132), whence does he derive his definition of greatness in art? To state that ‘animals do not hear music’ (p. 150) is to foreclose the question of what music is, in a way that neither Darwin nor Derrida would have found unproblematic. The artworks on which he concentrates date from between 1850 and 1980; why this chronological restriction? He does not tell us. As so often in this book, a perimeter seems to emerge delimiting ‘art’, but it is never explicitly mapped and little is done to dispel the suspicion that it proceeds from a petition of principle. [End Page 693] There are other loose ends and limitations to Gordon’s argument. But the most academically unforgivable defect of the book is, to be blunt, sloppiness. The numerous typos include some hilarious howlers. We find Heidegger’s peasant woman wearing ‘hoes’ instead of shoes (p. 37). Baudelaire’s ‘clarté’ transubstantiates into ‘claret’ (p. 54). Modern linguistics is ‘modem linguistics’ (p. 26). Marcel Duchamp becomes ‘Duchamps’ (p. 125), Jackson Pollock becomes ‘Pollack’ (p. 130), Klee’s ‘Einst dem Grau der Nacht’ is consistently given as ‘Einst der Grau der Nacht’ (my italics). Gordon affirms that Baudelaire’s line ‘Deux larges médailles de bronze’ contains ‘all stressed syllables except for de’ (p. 57); this, according to the rules of French prosody, is nonsense. There are missing and extraneous italics, faults in layout, missing translations, and mistranslations. Such inaccuracies can only encourage scepticism. One could be forgiven for developing the impression that Gordon is content to follow the logic of his ideas without investing the time and patience that academic readers expect, to persuade us that his argument is properly contextualized. This is a pity, because the fundamental point he is making is an important one. Gordon tells us that as we find art, ‘the logical separation between the different sense [sic] is superseded by a preexistent unity’ (p. 79). This concept of art retains its force. Gordon’s book has the merit of putting it centre stage. I hope others will come to argue the case more rigorously, and to situate it more carefully in opposition to alternative approaches to art. The visual artworks referred to in the book are presented not in the form of illustrations, but as QR codes to be scanned. One can see the advantages to the publisher; but...