The Opticality of Pictorial Representation

Abstract

In Art and Knowledge James Young explores the visual arts of the past hundred years and notes that the most striking development has been the emergence of the avant-garde style, adopted by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko, and Andy Warhol.1 All works employing the avant-garde style, Young argues, are discoursedependent representations: they represent what they do via an associated body of discourse, which is usually the theory of art or the ideology of the artist. Young regards such representations as being more akin to language rather than to traditional works of visual art, as all typical instances of the latter are thought to represent in a direct manner: traditional works, according to Young, are illustrative, that is, they just show what they represent. According to Young, the discontinuity between traditional and avant-garde visual art rests on the fact that the latter has ceased to be visual. And it has ceased to be visual in a twofold sense. On