Toward a Cognitive Semiotics of the Visual Artwork — Elements of a grammar of intuition

Abstract

In this paper I introduce some of the principles which rule meaning making in visual artworks — both in regard to construction and interpretation of meaning. The approach is naturalistic in that aesthetic meaning construction is claimed to rest on features and structures which are intrinsically significant for the visuo-cognitive system in plain, everyday perception: the artist exploits such features, and so doing he transforms the automatisms of perception into a rhetoric of aesthetic intuition. Section 1 of the paper consists of a phenomenological characterization of the aesthetic object as such (in its difference from everyday objects). In the core of the present work, section 2, I give concrete examples (with a general import) of the meaning making tools used in visual art and their roots in everyday perception. The central concern here is to show how purely spatial relations can become significant, or, in other words, how conceptual meaning can be anchored in perception, or, finally, how artists can encode meaning in shape. The final section discusses the general principles ruling the semiotics of the visual artwork and addresses a couple of methodological issues.