Aleš Erjavec 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
i 
In his n o w a l ready classical book Vision and Painting hom 1983 N o r m a n 
Bryson d i spu ted w h a t he saw as some of the s tandard tenets of art history. His 
o p e n i n g a r g u m e n t c o n c e r n i n g tradit ional art history was that f rom their very 
b e g i n n i n g in an t iqui ty W e s t e r n views on paint ing consist of the desire to 
c rea te a »perfec t copy«: f r o m Pliny th rough renaissance and Dante to Ernst 
G o m b r i c h Bryson de tec ted this desire to create a paint ing - and, to do this, to 
d iscover the pe r fec t t echn ique for its execut ion - that would enable us to 
r e p r o d u c e the pe rce ived in a t ruthful way. F rom the t imes of Zeuxis 's picto-
rial r e n d e r i n g of g rapes which misled the birds into bel ieving they were real 
to the m o d e r n age, pa in t ing is »thought of as a rivalry between technicians 
for the p r o d u c t i o n of a repl ica so perfect that art will take the palm f rom 
na ture . (...) T h e difficult ies conf ron ted by the painter are executive and con-
cern the f ideli ty of his registrat ion of the world before him.«1 T h e painter 's 
task is to m i r ro r the reali ty be fore him, to carry out in paint ing what in geom-
etry and in opt ics the rena issance deve lopmen t - or, in accordance with such 
th inking, »discovery« - of perspect ive offered to the painter . It is unders tand-
able that wi thin such a contex t paint ing is a craft, and that the not ion of 
c rea t ion is r e se rved for the divine being. The perce ived and the represented 
are one and the same. All h u m a n beings possess in pr inciple the same per-
ceptual facul t ies and share the same visual field, a c o m m o n technique of 
r e n d e r i n g a r ep resen ta t ion of the perceived is therefore possible. Renaissance 
d e v e l o p m e n t s in the arts and sciences, the latter offering the former tools for 
a t ru thfu l r end i t i on of the perce ived world , for the so-called »construzione 
legittima, the perspec t ive called 'correct ' or 'exact ' ,«2 offer the hope of the 
fu r the r d iminu t ion of the chasm between the paint ing and what Bryson calls 
»the Essent ial Copy« - the perfec t replica. 
For Bryson the p r o b l e m with art history was the hold ing on to opinions 
1 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze, Yale University Press, New 
Haven 1983, pp. 1 and 3. 
2 Hubert Damisch, L'origine de la perspective, Flammarion, Paris 1993, p. 107. 
Filozofski vestnih, XVII (2/1996), pp. 25-43. 
Aleš Erjavec 
such as the ones p resen ted above. I l lust ra t ing this wi th the w o r k of Erns t 
Gombr ich (although at the same t ime p resen t ing the lat ter 's wri t ings as »a 
transitional aesthetics«) Bryson poin ted ou t that G o m b r i c h was, b y accep t ing 
as his epistemological c redo Popper ' s t heo ry of ver i f ica t ion and falsif icat ion, 
effectively ascribing to, or developing, an art h is tory wh ich f o u n d its evalua-
tive criterion in a hypothes is of a con t inued progress towards the Essential 
Copy, a progress dr iven by novel d e m a n d s u p o n schemat ic c o n v e n t i o n s of 
image-making, 3 and hence a »provisional and in te r im i m p r o v e m e n t on the 
existing corpus of hypotheses or schemata , i m p r o v e d because tested against 
the world, through falsification«.4 
Art his tory is f i rmly rooted within the m o d e r n epis temologica l hor izon . 
It also ascribes to an Aristotelian poet ics wh ich is also visible f r o m resem-
blances be tween Aristot le 's and G o m b r i c h ' s p r e s e n t a t i o n of mimes i s : for 
Aristotle mimesis is one of the features tha t dis t inguish h u m a n s f r o m beasts , 
by mimetic activity we learn, and »a r e p r o d u c e d object invokes p leasu re in 
all people«.5 Gombr i ch expresses the s ame thought : »The p leasure is in rec-
ognition.«6 
Problems concern ing art history, such as those discussed by Bryson, are 
related to its epistemological status since its const i tut ion a cen tury ago and its 
inclusion into a modern is t scheme of ref lect ive th inking. In o ther words , art 
history has probably , just as t radit ional aesthetics, as a mode rn i s t discipl ine 
emptied itself in the fo rm we have b e c o m e used to in the first half of this 
century and has been, just as rationalist ph i lo sophy , caugh t in tha t same tra-
dition which is most of ten identif ied with Car tes ian perspec t iva l i sm and its 
dependency u p o n monocu la r and abst ract vis ion and optics, no t to m e n t i o n 
its phi losophical dualism. Since the aim of pa in t ing u n d e r discussion is pri-
marily cognit ive - the render ing of a r ep resen ta t ion in such a way that a 
recognized mean ing is established, since Alber t i this b e i n g accompl i shed with 
the use of perspectival mechan i sms - the a im of the artist is to accompl i sh a 
pictorial t echnique which will be, as a procedure, h i d d e n f r o m our scrut iniz ing 
eyes and will offer to our gaze only the p ic ture itself as a comple t e whole . 
W h a t is then called »perspectiva artificialis«, the »perspect ive of the pa in te rs 
as it is dist inguished f r o m the perspect iva natural is of au thors of the Midd le 
Ages, the theory of direct vision, ref lected or r e f rac ted (...), is as such con-
fused with that of optics.« ' Nonetheless , perspectiva artificialis h ad to be as-
3 Cf. Bryson, op. cit., p. 21. 
4 Ibid. 
5 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b. 
6 E.H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye, Phaidon, Oxford 1982, p. 122. 
7 Damisch, op. cit., p. 90. 
26 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
sisted by the two-poin t perspect ive (or »construzione legittima«) for it was found 
insuff ic ient by itself, w h e n conf ron ted with cont inuous at tempts to appropr i -
ate it wi thin the concep tua l field of the monocu la r and static eye of optics. 
H e n c e even Descar tes himself in Dioptrics pays special attention to visual 
e r rors , m e n t i o n i n g tha t o f ten circles are bet ter represented by ovals and that 
»of ten to be m o r e pe r fec t as concerns the quality of images and to bet ter 
r ep re sen t an object , they mus t no t resemble it.«8 A re la ted story is recounted 
by Pl iny in c o n n e c t i o n with a compet i t ion be tween Alcamenes and Phidias 
for a sculp ture of M i n e r v a which was to sit on top of a tall pillar. »Alcamenes 
scu lp ted a h a r m o n i o u s sculp ture and Phidias a figure with de formed limbs, 
wi th a gap ing m o u t h and a s t re tched neck. O n the day of the exhibi t ion the 
first r ece ived the votes, whi le his rival was stoned. But the situation was re-
ve r sed w h e n the sculptures were put in their place. Installed on top of the 
pil lar , Phidias ' s s tatue acqui red great beauty, while the other became an ob-
jec t of der is ion.« 9 As even a hasty glance upon the elevated sculptures and 
facades of chu rches and medieva l towns attests, the pract icing sculptors and 
archi tects were very consc ious of the need to accommoda te the observer ' s 
gaze and its pecul iar i t ies , which of ten d iverged f r o m the geometrical and 
opt ical laws i m p o s e d by the monocu la r static gaze and even f rom the two-
po in t perspec t ive . T h e l imitat ions of the »perfect copy« were imposed also 
by the in t rus ion of the b o d y . 
In paint ings , engrav ings or drawings a special case were the anamor-
phoses , today the bes t -known a m o n g them certainly be ing that of a skull on 
H a n s H o l b e i n ' s »Two Ambassadors« . A n a m o r p h i s m is a case of pictorial 
r ep resen ta t ion requ i r ing a d i f ferent perspectival vantage point . Other »scopic 
regimes« r ange f r o m Du tch and ba roque paint ing to El Lissitzky.10 
E x a m p l e s such as a n a m o r p h o s e s witness that perce ived objects, if they 
are to offer »true« representa t ions , i.e. such that our percept ion will accept 
t h e m as such, mus t of ten resor t to devices that visibly diverge f rom rules that 
a re in acco rdance with the monocu l a r static gaze. Artists have to resort to all 
k inds of g immicks to m a k e ad jus tments for the pair of h u m a n eyes which 
8 Descartes, La Dioptrique (Oeuvres et lettres), Gallimard, Paris 1952, p. 204. 
9 Quoted in Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Anamorphoses. Les perspectives dépravées - II, Flammarion, 
Paris 1996, p. 19. 
10 This topic was most fully developed by Martin Jay in the essay »Scopic Regimes of 
Modernity« in Force Fields, Routledge, London 1993; cf. also Martin Jay, Downcast 
Eyes, University of California Press, Berkeley 1993; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of De-
scribing: Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago University Press, Chicago 
1983; Christine Buci-Glucks-mann La folie de voir: De l'esthétique baroque, Flammarion, 
Paris 1986; on Lissitzky see Damisch, op. cit., p. 51. 
27 
Aleš Erjavec 
gaze at their works f r o m various posi t ions, d is tances and angles: heads of 
sculptures lowered more or less than normal ly , eyes in d i f fe ren t pos i t ions 
within the face, taller or shorter figures, ad ju s tmen t s for d i f fe ren t van tage 
points, etc. - these are all compensa t ions artists have to m a k e for the fact tha t 
human sight is not a mechan ic optical ins t rument , b u t an integral pa r t of the 
h u m a n body. 
Bryson based his cri t ique of the »na tura l a t t i tude« - the bel ief t ha t 
perspectival paint ing is through most of his tory of pa in t ing cons ide red the 
most appropr ia te , exact, scientific and t rue - on Husser l ' s descr ip t ion of such 
an attitude within sciences.1 1 Husserl ' s a t t empt to re t ract the Car tes ian dual-
ism and »return to things themselves« was re la ted to his belief tha t phi loso-
phy is essentially seeing. Wesenschau, intui t ion, is visual, a l though it is far re-
moved f r o m ocularcentr ism of m o d e r n science and Car tes ian i sm. Ins tead , 
p h e n o m e n o l o g y wants to regain the uni ty of the ob jec t and the subjec t wh ich 
was obliterated by that very same Cartesianism and which, fu r the rmore , caused 
also the emergence of the »natural at t i tude« of m o d e r n sciences crit icized by 
Husserl . 
W h a t Bryson seems to have of fe red as an a l ternat ive to the art of West -
ern art history as a history of the d e v e l o p m e n t of the »Essential Copy« , was a 
history of art as that »of paint ing as a material practice«}2 If, po in ted out Bryson, 
art history, or any theory for that mat ter , were to be able to at tain this a im, it 
should have taken into considerat ion the role of the h u m a n b o d y in the ex-
ecution of a paint ing: it no longer suffices for us to perce ive a pa in t ing as a 
result, ignor ing at the same time the p r o c e d u r e (»material practice«) that led 
to it. Instead, we should heed this pract ice as well as the bodi ly f r a m e w o r k 
within which and with the visible he lp of wh ich this deed is accompl i shed . 
Bryson suggests t radit ional Chinese pa in t ing as a posi t ive e x a m p l e of the way 
in which the bodily de te rmina t ion of a pa in t ing is to be pe rce ived : the visible 
way in which brushst rokes were execu ted and the fact tha t the s trokes are no t 
only vehicles of a technique but are s imul taneous ly also direct ly the expres-
sive means of paint ing as such. Wes te rn pa in t ing is ins tead p u r p o r t e d l y es-
sentially of fe red to our gaze as a static scene, p r e s e n t e d to our m o n o c u l a r 
vision. Classical painting, executed in acco rdance with the perspec t iva l rules, 
fur thermore offers what Kaja Silverman ascribes to still p h o t o g r a p h : »Whereas 
the moving image consigns what it depicts to obl iv ion, the still p h o t o g r a p h 
gives us access to a stable and durab le image of self.«1 3 It is this fea ture of 
11 Cf. Bryson, op. cit., pp. 4-5 et passim 
12 Ibid., p. 16. 
13 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World Routledge, New York 1996, p. 198. 
28 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
pa in t ing as well, i.e., the representa t ional stability which it can offer to the 
subject , tha t p rec ludes classical Wes te rn paint ing to t read the same pa th as its 
C h i n e s e coun te rpa r t . Bryson argues that European pain t ing disclaims what 
he cal led »deictic marke r s« , 1 4 marks of the bodi ly inscription into the repre-
senta t ion: »Western pa in t ing is p red ica ted on the disavowal of deictic reference, 
on the d i s appea rance of the b o d y as site of the image; and this twice over: for 
the pa in te r , and for the v iewing subject. (...) [I]f China and Europe possess 
the two mos t anc ien t t radi t ions of representat ional painting, the traditions 
never the less b i furca te , f r o m the beginning, at the point of deixis.«15 
If, then , one of Ch inese paint ing 's salient features is the visible trace of 
the exis tence of the artist 's b o d y within the picture itself, f rom where does 
t hen this fea tu re arise? W h y is it that »[t]he work of product ion is constantly 
d isp layed in the wake of its traces; [that] in this tradit ion the body of labour is 
on cons tan t display, jus t as it is j udged in terms which, in the West, would 
apply only to a performing ar t«?1 6 Far f rom wishing to engage in a discussion 
c o n c e r n i n g Ch inese art , I would never theless like to poin t out that obviously 
the E u r o p e a n t radi t ion, or at least its more recent part, is not necessarily thus 
far r e m o v e d f r o m the k ind of pa in t ing that Bryson is he re opposing to the 
m o r e classical W e s t e r n paint ing. I shall develop this a rgument in Parts II and 
IV . 
As François C h e n g explains, the Chinese art »always tends to recreate a 
total m a c r o c o s m whe re the p r ime unif icatory action of the Breath-Spirit, or 
the Empt ines s itself, far f r o m be ing synonymous with the vague or arbitrary, 
is the in te rna l p lace whe re the grid of vital breaths is established. We witness 
he re a system which p r o c e e d s m o r e by integrat ion of successive contribu-
t ions t han by ruptures . T h e Stroke of the Brush, the art of which is carried by 
pa in te r s to an e x t r e m e degree of re f inement , incarnat ing the O n e and the 
Mul t ip le in the m e a s u r e in which it is identif ied with the original Breath and 
with all of its m e t a m o r p h o s e s , contr ibutes no less to this pe rmanence of a 
tirelessly p u r s u e d s ignifying practice.«1 7 Since a paint ing is a microcosm re-
la ted to the m a c r o c o s m and is s imultaneously its integral part, the emptiness 
wi thin a pa in t ing is n o t »an inert presence [but] is t raversed by breaths link-
ing the visible wor ld [the pa in ted space] with the invisible one«.1 8 As the 
au thor explains , the e m p t y space of the picture media tes be tween its various 
14 Bryson, op. cit., p. 89. 
15 Ibid. 
16 Ibid., p. 92. 
17 François Cheng, Vide et plein. Le langage pictural chinois, Seuil, Paris 1991, p. 10. 
18 Ibid., p. 47. 
29 
Aleš Erjavec 
elements - be tween the Moun ta in and the W a t e r for e x a m p l e , the re la t ion 
be tween which would otherwise appea r rigid and static. A n addi t iona l ele-
m e n t is b rough t into the pic ture since the T ' a n g dynas ty (618-907), w h e n 
painters c o m m e n c e d to in t roduce p o e m s in to the whi te e m p t y space of their 
pictures. T h e p o e m »is not a simple, art if icial ly a d d e d c o m m e n t a r y ; it i nhab -
its a real space (there is no hiatus b e t w e e n the ca l l ig raphed signs a n d the 
painted elements , for they bo th come f r o m the same brush) , i n t roduc ing in to 
the picture a living d imension, that of T ime .« 1 9 T h e wor ld is a whole , there-
fore the empt iness in the picture, which depic ts a f r a g m e n t a r y pa r t of this 
wholeness, represents the invisible which s t ructures re la t ions wi thin the vis-
ible itself, and is consequent ly just as crucial as the pa in ted surfaces. In this 
way paint ing witnesses to the cosmological uni ty ; it is h e n c e no w o n d e r tha t 
»[i]n China , of all the arts, pa in t ing occupies the s u p r e m e p lace« . 2 0 
II 
Read ing Bryson, especially his b o o k Vision and Painting f r o m which I 
quoted above , as well as Tradition an<fDesire (1984), and h e n c e his cr i t ique of 
art history and some of its tenets, a rguing for a pa in t ing and theory thereof 
which would not only, at most , take into cons ide ra t ion the optical ly »defi-
cient« gaze of the viewer but also corporea l m a r k s of the pa in te r (i l lustrating 
the two sides by classical Eu ropean pa in t ing on the o n e h a n d and Ch inese on 
the other), one is cont inuously r e m i n d e d of a ph i l o sophe r and a pa in te r w h o 
both pursued a similar aim. T h e pair of course is that of Mer l eau -Pon ty and 
Cézanne . As in the case of Bryson, Mer l eau -Pon ty too criticizes the »natura l 
attitude« admon i shed by Husserl and carr ies this out no t only in the r ea lm of 
science bu t foremost ly in the rea lm of pa in t ing 2 1 wh ich he sees no t only as 
19 Ibid., p. 105. 
2 0 Cf. Cheng, op. cit., p. l ln . 
2 1 »[T]he classical perspective is only one of the ways humanity has invented for pro-
jecting the perceived world before itself, and not the copy of that world. The classical 
perspective is an optional interpretation of spontaneous vision, not because the per-
ceived world contradicts the laws of classical perspective and imposes others, but 
rather because it does not require any particular one, and is not of the order of laws.« 
- Merleau-Ponty, »Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence«, in The Merleau-Ponty 
Aesthetics Reader. Philosophy and Painting (ed. and intr. by Galen A. Johnson), North-
western University Press, Evanston, 111. 1993, p. 86. 
A perhaps even more revealing passage concerningperspectiva artificial can be found 
in the »Eye and Mind« essay: *[T]he painters knew from experience that no tech-
nique of perspective is an exact solution and there is no projection of the existing 
30 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
re la ted to the first, b u t as showing its inheren t truth, a t ru th which was dis-
to r ted in the rena i ssance artistic tradit ion. Mer leau-Ponty ' s aim was - and 
r e m a i n e d - Husser l ' s c r edo to »return to things themselves«: »To re turn to 
th ings themse lves is to r e tu rn to that world which p recedes knowledge, of 
wh ich k n o w l e d g e a lways speaks, and in relat ion to which every scientific 
schemat iza t ion is an abst ract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in 
re la t ion to the count ry-s ide in which we have learnt b e f o r e h a n d what a for-
est, a pra i r ie or a r iver is.«22 For Mer leau-Ponty it is fo remos t pa in t ing which 
offers a pr iv i leged access to wha t he will later start call ing Being. Al though 
ph i l o sophy is, like ar t »the act of br inging t ruth into being«, 2 3 »art, especially 
paint ing, draws u p o n this fabr ic of brute meaning which operat ional ism would 
p re fe r to ignore . Ar t and only art does so in full innocence . (...) [We want] the 
wri ter and the ph i l o sophe r (...) to take a stand; they canno t waive the respon-
sibilities of h u m a n s w h o speak.« 2 4 
It was ve ry consis tent with such views that Merleau-Ponty ' s (as well as 
He idegger ' s ) exis tent ia l p h e n o m e n o l o g y had to end in a poet ic ized discourse 
wh ich a t t e m p t e d to emu la t e the world, to avoid the »abstract and derivative 
s ign-language« which is a lways a discourse on the world. W h a t ph i losophy 
can do is o p e n our eyes to the world and make us conscious of its own limita-
t ions and limits: »A ph i l o sophy becomes t ranscendenta l , or radical, not by 
tak ing its p lace in absolu te consciousness without men t ion ing the ways by 
which this is r e ached , b u t by consider ing itself as a p r o b l e m ; no t by postulat-
ing a k n o w l e d g e r e n d e r e d totally explicit, bu t by recognizing as its funda-
m e n t a l t r a n s c e n d e n t a l p h i l o s o p h i c p r o b l e m this presumption on r eason ' s 
pa r t .« 2 5 A par t of this »presumpt ion on reason 's part« is also the belief into 
world which respects it in all aspects and deserves to become the fundamental law of 
painting. For example, the Italians took the way of representing the object, but the 
Northern painters discovered and worked out the formal technique of Hochraum, 
Nahraum, and Schrdgraum. Thus plane projection does not always stimulate our thought 
to rediscover the true form of things, as Descartes believed. Beyond a certain degree 
of deformation, it refers us back, on the contrary to our own vantage point; as for the 
things, they flee into a remoteness out of reach of all thought. Something about space 
evades our attempts to survey it from above.« (»Eye and Mind«, The Merleau-Ponty 
Aesthetics Reader, p. 135.) An analysis of the decentralized organization of visual space 
of the »Northern painters«, implying links between such painting and optical devel-
opments of the time, is offered by Svetlana Alpers in her book The Art of Describing: 
Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century (cf. note 10). 
2 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Preface), Routledge, London 1995, 
p. ix. 
23 Ibid., p. xx. 
2 4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, »Eye and Mind«, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 123. 
2 5 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 63. 
31 
Aleš Erjavec 
what Bryson will later call the »Essential Copy« , a belief tha t an au thent ic 
and universal ly valid render ing of the pe rce ived wor ld is poss ible t h rough 
pictorial representa t ion. To constrain the a t tempts of r eason to d is tance itself, 
as absolute consciousness, f rom the pe rce ived wor ld which no t only su r rounds 
it but of which it is, itself, an integral par t , ph i l o sophy mus t start at the closest 
possible start ing point , which is one ' s o w n b o d y . C o n t r a r y to Descar tes , w h o 
established an infinite distance be tween the res extensa and the res cogitans, 
Merleau-Ponty is one of the first ph i lo sophe r s n o t only to e m p h a s i z e the 
necessity of theorizing consciousness as a pa r t of our co rpo rea l be ing (such 
views a b o u n d already in the n ine teen th cen tury , in M a r x , a m o n g others) -
incessantly present ing this a rgument t h r o u g h o u t m o s t of his oeuvre - but , fur-
thermore , to »embody« his views wi thin his in te rpre ta t ions of the works of 
painters (and occasionally sculptors), h e n c e a rgu ing for a pe rcep tua l a n d cor-
poreal inscription of a painter within his p ic ture and , also, of its v iewer with 
w h o m the painter purpor ted ly shares the visual f ield. 
As in Chinese culture, in Mer leau-Ponty ' s ph i l o sophy too, pa in t ing is a 
privi leged art form. As Mer leau-Ponty argues in the Preface to Phenomenology 
of Perception, »[t] o seek the essence of pe rcep t ion is to dec la re that pe rcep t ion 
is, not p r e sumed true, but def ined as access to t ru th . (...) W e mus t no t (...) 
wonder whe the r we really perceive a wor ld , we mus t ins tead say: the wor ld is 
what we perceive.« 2 6 A privileged fo rm of pe rcep t ion is vision. In this respect 
M e r l e a u - P o n t y fo l lows in H u s s e r l ' s s t e p s a n d s h a r e s c e r t a i n t r a i t s of 
Heidegger ' s phi losophy. Al though He idegge r criticizes in 1938, in the essay 
by the same name, the m o d e r n »time of the wor ld p ic ture« and pr ivi leges the 
word and hear ing over the image and vision, a few years ear l ier he no t only 
uses a p ic ture - a van Gogh pain t ing - to expla in his u n d e r s t a n d i n g of an 
artwork, but generally regards the Greek cul tural un iverse as tha t of an un-
surpassed existential authentici ty - with this same wor ld also b e i n g that within 
which c o m m e n c e d the ocularcentr ism of the W e s t e r n civil ization. Still, for 
Heidegger , the word (language) never the less r ema ins the mos t au thent ic f o r m 
of communica t ion and, of course, the p r e c o n d i t i o n of thought . In Mer leau-
Ponty 's similar, but differently or iented ph i losophy , an authent ic i ty such as 
that which Heidegger finds in poetry , is r evea led in paint ing. It is no t the 
language which is »the house of Being«; ins tead »[t]he eye lives in this tex ture 
[of Being] as a man in his house«.2 7 
Both in the case of Chinese pa in t ing and in C e z a n n e ' s case (as inter-
pre ted by Merleau-Ponty , but of ten explici t ly s u p p o r t e d by ci tat ions f r o m 
26 Ibid., p. xvi. 
2 7 Merleau-Ponty, »Eye and Mind«, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 127. 
32 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
C e z a n n e ' s o w n s ta tements) the painter is someone who strives to present and 
r ep re sen t the holist ic uni ty of the invisible and the visible, the presence of a 
t e m p o r a l or spatial absence in what is perce ived as p resence - this also be ing 
the r ea son for Mer l eau -Pon ty ' s disavowal of pho tography . 2 8 W h e n Bryson 
discovers in a Ch inese l andscape pain t ing the landscape to be the subject 
and, equal ly , the subject to be »the work of the brush in 'real t ime' and (...) 
a[n] ex tens ion of the pa in te r ' s own body«, 2 9 may we not say that something 
similar is t rue of C e z a n n e ' s juxtapos i t ion of individual brush strokes3 0 or 
R o d i n ' s prac t ice of r e n d e r i n g visible the connect ing welds of his sculptures? 
It wou ld seem tha t Mer leau-Pon ty ' s presenta t ion of Cezanne ' s paint ings (as 
well as R o d i n ' s or Giacomet t i ' s sculptures) shows certain similarities with 
tha t which Bryson offers in connec t ion with Chinese paint ing and which he 
s imul taneous ly presen ts as a positive alternative to the stance of tradit ional 
art h is tory and of classical perspect ival paint ing in Europe , an alternative he 
tries to c o m p l e m e n t wi th a d i f ferent reflective vantage point , one which will 
a c c e n t u a t e t h e » d e i c t i c r e f e r e n c e « , a n d t h e r e f o r e t h e b o d y as an 
u n c i r c u m v e n t a b l e theore t ic subject . It would therefore seem that (at least in 
the 1983 book) wha t Bryson a t tempts to propose or defend, is to a large 
ex ten t a l ready p resen t in Mer leau-Ponty ' s own early work. 
It m a y be that a l though Mer leau-Ponty has adumbra t ed many of Lacan 's 
theses in his Seminar XI and elsewhere, his phi losophical stature may have 
b e e n r e d u c e d by the poe t ic ized language (or wha t Bryson called the »heights 
The most explicit disclaimer of Marey's photography as a prototype of photography 
as such is probably that from the »Eye and Mind« essay. It could be argued though 
that Merleau-Ponty does a disservice to photography, for he views it only as an im-
partial (»scientific«) visual recording device, hence ignoring the fact that in his own 
time (the essay was written in August 1960) photography surpassed the perceptual 
(and creative) horizon of Marey's photographic experiments and that it was therefore 
rather simplistic to reduce it to the stature of Descartes's engravings and camera ob-
scura. 
Bryson, op. cit., p. 89. 
3 0 Bryson's accentuation of the traces of the brush strokes perhaps warrants a comment, 
for while in European painting the »deictic markers« may not be as omnipresent as in 
the Chinese one, it is nonetheless true that the artist's style or painterly writing is often 
quite unique. Merleau-Ponty thus mentions that »[t]he writing of Michelangelo is 
attributed to Raphael in 36 cases, but is correctly identified in 221 cases. We therefore 
recognize a certain structure which is common to voice, to physiognomy, to gestures 
and to the walk of each person, each person is for us nothing but this structure or this 
manner of being in the world.« - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, »Le cinéma et la nouvelle 
psychologie«, in Sens et non-sens, Gallimard, Paris 1996, p. 68. 
33 
Aleš Erjavec 
of lyricism«31) of his late writings and, finally, by the w a n i n g of interest in 
phenomenolog ica l aesthetics or ph i lo sophy of ar t in r ecen t decades . A g o o d 
case in poin t may be Lyotard 's early p h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l work Discours, figure 
(1971) whose aim was, as Lyotard expla ins m u c h later, p r imar i ly to cha l lenge 
the onslaught of Lacanian privi leging of the Symbol ic and of re lega t ing all art 
to the doma in of the Imaginary 3 2 and h e n c e ideology. Lyo ta rd later aban-
doned phenomeno logy , obviously sensing that it doesn ' t offer the appropr i -
ate theoretical apparatus for analysis of radical artists of our cen tury , such as 
D u c h a m p . As Forrest Wil l iams writes in 1954, »[d]ue to w h a t e v e r c o m m o n 
cultural format ions that may serve to link ph i losoph ica l t hough t and artistic 
insight, the dominan t phi losophical sys tem in F rance today k n o w n as 'phe-
nomenology ' , and in part icular , that of M a u r i c e Mer l eau -Pon ty , on the o n e 
hand , and the art of Cézanne , on the o the r h a n d , a p p e a r to agree in origin, 
me thod and outcome. The i r c o m m o n origin was a r e sponse to a cer ta in sub-
jectivism of much of n ine teen th-cen tury art and p h i l o s o p h y ; their c o m m o n 
method, to search by minute scrutiny of their own expe r i ence for the out-
wardly g iven, object ively real ; and the i r c o m m o n a c h i e v e m e n t , to h a v e 
avoided the opposi te of ex t reme subject ivism, by d i scover ing the real as the 
invar iant s tructure of a given appea rance .« 3 3 None the les s , whi le C é z a n n e 
retained his place in con tempora ry art his tory, Mer l eau -Pon ty ' s in te rpre ta -
tion of h im, his work, as well as his own ph i lo sophy of the pe rce ived and the 
seen, both appear problemat ic , for they offer an analysis and a p resen ta t ion 
that increasingly appear caught within the conf ines and l imi ta t ions of its own 
( p h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l ) f r a m e w o r k . A f t e r in i t i a l i n g e n i o u s a p p l i c a t i o n s of 
Husser l ' s (and partly Heidegger 's) p h e n o m e n o l o g y to the rea lms of pe rcep-
tion, combined with percept ive insights in to the logic of pa in t ing and the 
gaze, the late Mer leau-Ponty increasingly s t rove to at tain the imposs ib le dis-
cursive art iculation of Being, dr if t ing in this way into the d i rec t ion of a po ten-
tial silence.3 4 His discourse on Cézanne of ten appea r s caught wi thin the rea lm 
of that very same undif ferent ia ted f r a m e w o r k of the Car tes ian subject and , 
consequently, within the discourse on the artistic genius of the first half of this 
31 Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire. From David to Delacroix, Cambridge University 
Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1984, p. 65. 
3 2 Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations. Law, Form, Event, Columbia University Press, 
New York 1988, pp. 10-11. 
3 3 Forrest Williams, »Cézanne, Phenomenology, and Merleau-Ponty«, in The Merleau-
Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 165. 
3 4 For a discussion of this issue in Merleau-Ponty and its relations to Schelling, see Robert 
Burch, op. cit., esp. p. 353 et passim, as well as Slavoj $i#ek, The Indivisible Remainder, 
Verso, London 1996, esp. pp. 50-51. 
34 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
cen tu ry tha t p r e c e d e d psychoanalys is . 3 5 Mer leau-Ponty ' s privileging of the 
b o d y and of the co rpo rea l features of the act of paint ing appears insufficient 
w h e n c o n f r o n t e d with the fo rmidab le task of present ing the absolute, for all 
he seems to have at his disposal - or offers - is a ph i losophy which privileges 
the visual as p r e s e n t e d to us mainly through the pictorial representat ions of a 
mode rn i s t pa in te r . W i t h his late, especially the pos thumous ly publ ished writ-
ings, he f u r t h e r m o r e gives the impression, just as the late Heidegger , of his 
d iscourse closing u p o n itself: his Being is static, his reject ion of science uni-
versal , his d iscourse in tent ional ly more and more ambiguous and cryptic, 
whi le the p rev ious ly conceptua l ly clear not ions related to percept ion, paint-
ing, visibility and the gaze, a l though pe rhaps b u r d e n e d with a »metaphysics 
of p resence« w h e n e n d o w e d with an ontological status and t ransposed into 
ex t ra -pe rcep t iona l rea lms, are replaced by those of the flesh, with phi losophy 
b e c o m i n g »Being speak ing in us«, and l i terature be ing analyzed as an »in-
scr ipt ion of Being«. 3 6 H o w can »a mean ingfu l h u m a n world be consti tuted 
out of p u r e visibil i ty«3 7 and h o w can the quest for the reunif icat ion of the 
subject and object , devo id of an historical perspect ive as it is, transgress the 
limits of existential ly des igna ted artistic and aesthetic exper ience? I shall re-
turn to this topic in the closing par t of this paper . 
Ill 
In M a r c h 1945 Mer leau-Pon ty held a lecture on the »Cinema and the 
N e w Psychology«, wh ich he ended with an observat ion similar to that m a d e 
in 1954 by Forres t Wi l l iams; it conce rned not Cézanne bu t the cinema: »If 
(...) p h i l o s o p h y and the c i n e m a are in agreement , if reflection and technical 
work go in the s ame di rect ion, this is so because the phi losopher and the 
c i n e m a m a k e r share a cer ta in m a n n e r of being, a certain view of the world 
3,1 In Merleau-Ponty's late writings such - and similar - issues appear obfuscated, such 
as in the following note from October 1959: »[T]o paint, draw, is not to produce 
something from nothing, the trace, the touch of the brush, and the visible work are 
but a trace of a total movement of the Speech, which comes from the total Being and 
this movement embraces expression by strokes, as well as expression by colors, as 
well as my expression and that of other painters.« - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible 
et I'invisible, Gallimard, Paris 1964, p. 265. 
36 Ibid., pp. 250-251. 
3 7 Robert Burch, »On the Topic of Art and Truth«, in Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 
367. 
Aleš Erjavec 
which is that of the same genera t ion .« 3 8 T h e »new psychology« f r o m the title 
of the lecture is equal, or essentially re la ted , to Mer l eau -Pon ty ' s own phi lo-
sophical work, for in his early work b o t h psycho logy and ph i l o sophy consti-
tute the same phenomeno logy . T h e »ph i losopher« m e n t i o n e d at the e n d is 
therefore Mer leau-Ponty the phenome-no log i s t w h o f inds congenia l i ty wi th 
Cézanne, Matisse, Paul Klee or Rod in whose works exp l emp l i fy in the high-
est degree his views on percept ion , with this pe r cep t i on b e i n g our v e n u e into 
the lived world of which we are an indissociable organic par t . 
W h a t the art of these artists has in c o m m o n with the c i n e m a is tha t n o w 
they bo th represent traditional art forms. T h e c i n e m a t o d a y is one of the ve ry 
few art fo rms that retains its technical ly and ontological ly dist inct status, jus t 
as does classical sculpture and easel pa in t ing . M u c h of visual art or visual 
culture today is incessantly disrupt ing our es tabl i shed no t ions of art, l imit ing 
the unreserved ascription of the status of »art« p r imar i ly to the art of the pre-
modern is t and modernis t per iod. In such art it is n o t difficult to d iscover the 
existential at tr ibutes perceived and descr ibed by Mer l eau -Pon ty in paint ings , 
sculptures or even c inema. In m o d e r n i s m a n d h igh m o d e r n i s m the seen -
al though in certain cases criticized or o p p o s e d , as in D u c h a m p or concep tua l 
art - is not yet problemat ic . »Anti-ocular« d iscourse is only e m e r g i n g and 
Merleau-Ponty 's »celebration of vision«, suppor ted with concrete psychological 
analyses and exper iments , is a he lpfu l t heo ry which at tracts and inf luences 
aestheticians and phi losophers as well as pa in te rs and sculptors . His theory in 
this respect shares the special place p h e n o m e n o l o g y in genera l and existen-
tial phenomeno logy in part icular occupies unti l the a d v e n t of s t ructura l ism, 
for the existential p h e n o m e n o l o g y in par t icu lar no t only views art as an ex-
emplary but also as a privi leged e rup t ion of au thent ic i ty in the m o d e r n tech-
nological wor ld . 3 9 It hence answers to a d e e p e r n e e d of artists and their pub-
lic for a discourse that pays at tent ion to wha t could be called the »specificity 
of art«: it assigns to art works either a cent ra l ontological posi t ion or an inde-
penden t ontological status - a des ignat ion of a p a r a m o u n t i m p o r t a n c e in a 
century of ideological master narra t ives . P h e n o m e n o l o g y f u r t h e r m o r e ac-
knowledges the in terchanging role of expe r i ence and ta lent , the in te rp lay 
between consciousness and subconsciousness and the dr i f t ings of the m i n d 
between the future, the past, the present and fantasy, the latter be ing conf la ted 
3 8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, »Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie«, Sens et non-sens, p. 
75. 
3 9 A similar position, but emerging from a very different background, is that of Adorno, 
Marcuse and the line of defenders of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art in post-war 
Germany, who all view art as a unique locus of authenticity in an otherwise 
commodified world. 
36 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
in Mer l eau -Pon ty ' s no t ion of the static »Being«. The locat ion of this »primor-
dial« e x c h a n g e is wha t is n o w usually descr ibed as the doma in of the Imagi-
nary , a d is t inct ion which effectively relegated the whole realm of art to this 
d o m a i n . A good e x a m p l e of percep t ion that Mer leau-Ponty has in mind and 
on which he bases the pr ivi leged status of paint ing, is an example he offers in 
»Eye and Mind« : » W h e n th rough the water 's thickness I see the tiled bo t tom 
of the pool , I do no t see it despite the water and the reflections; I see it th rough 
t h e m and because of t hem. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, 
if it were wi thou t that f lesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would 
cease to see it as it is and whe re it is - which is to say, beyond any identical, 
specific p lace .« 4 0 It is such scenes that the painter paints and unders tands 
b e n e a t h the words depth, space and color, continues Mer leau-Ponty . H o w to 
cap tu re such a vivid p resen ta t ion with theoret ical not ions? It is obvious that 
the only possibil i ty o p e n to us is to emula te the very na ture of such an image, 
that is to say, r ender it poetically, »lyrically«, non-theoretically, in short, proving 
by this very ges ture Mer leau-Ponty ' s thesis about the totalizing nature of our 
expe r i ence and showing tha t the cogito can never exist within the same re-
flective f r a m e w o r k as the perceptual experience just offered by Merleau-Ponty. 
T h e oppos i t ion to a pure ly scientific descr ipt ion of this view draws him into a 
de fense of art and into an at tack on the Cartesian t radi t ion which would see 
in the above scene the re f rac t ion of light as the only re levant aspect. 
It was the adven t of Der r ida ' s criticism of an ahistorical »presence«, on 
w h i c h h i n g e d p h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l t radi t ion, and of psychoanalys is , which 
decons t ruc t ed the rela t ively stable t ranscendenta l na ture of noemat ic reflec-
t ion, which signalled the decl ine of phenomeno logy and its privileging of art, 
b e it p o e t r y or pa in t ing . As men t ioned , Mer leau-Ponty ' s p h e n o m e n o l o g y 
con ta ined an inbui l t self-destruct ing mechan i sm which emerged only slowly 
f r o m his ear ly works wh ich offered an insightful analysis of percept ion and 
def ic iencies of its past theor ies (and somet imes practices). It is only later, and 
especial ly in the p o s t h u m o u s works, that the need of clarifying percept ion 
and the o v e r c o m i n g of Car tes ian dualism is replaced with an explicit aim of 
o v e r c o m i n g the split b e t w e e n the authentical ly exper ienced and its philo-
sophical re f lec t ion - b u t wi thout offer ing any historically, socially, empiri-
cally and the re fo re extra-artist ically de te rmined reality as its final aim and, at 
the same t ime, increas ingly reveal ing itself as a pure fo rm of t ranscendental 
ph i losophy . It is to the discourse of ph i losophy that is assigned the difficult 
and yet l imi ted task of e n d o w i n g the direct and primit ive contact with the 
wor ld (as it exis ted be fo re the split into subject and object) with a philosophi-
4 0 Merleau-Ponty, »Eye and Mind«, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 142. 
37 
Aleš Erjavec 
cal status. »1 found«, writes Mer leau-Ponty in 1952, »in the expe r i ence of the 
perceived wor ld a new type of relat ion b e t w e e n the m i n d [ésprit] a n d t ru th . 
T h e evidence of the perce ived thing lies in its concre te aspect , in the very 
texture of its qualities, and in the equ iva lence a m o n g all its sensible p r o p e r -
ties - which caused Cézanne to say tha t o n e shou ld be able to pa in t even 
odors.«4 1 It appears as if here Mer leau-Pon ty is p r imar i ly c o n c e r n e d with a 
novel app roach to percep t ion . It needs none the les s be m e n t i o n e d tha t this 
pe rcep t ion is first and fo remos t e x p e r i e n c e and tha t t h r o u g h this n o t i o n 
Merleau-Ponty at the same t ime in t roduces p h e n o m e n o l o g y into his d iscourse 
on percept ion, while s imultaneously d is t inguishing himself f r o m Husser l ; for 
the fo rmer exper ience of p h e n o m e n a is an ev ident ly empi r ica l and e m b o d -
ied »experience of the perce ived world« and its p h e n o m e n a , whi le for Husser l 
p h e n o m e n a come »from within the i m m a n e n t h is tory of consc iousness« . 4 2 In 
his late writ ings the phenomenolog ica l analysis of pe rcep t ion , especial ly in 
its relation to painting, is (with a few except ions , such as mos t of the »Eye and 
Mind«, essay) almost wholly replaced by an exis tent ia l p h e n o m e n o l o g y in 
which the author ' s discourse strives to express the unsayab le . 
IV 
Merleau-Ponty ' s p h e n o m e n o l o g y in prac t ice n e v e r d isc la imed the tra-
ditional belief into a unif ied subject; a l though it was n o t cogito, it r e m a i n e d 
t ranscendental ly conceived. T h e p r o b l e m as such could no t really arise wi thin 
such a phi losophical f r amework , since in Mer l eau -Pon ty ' s p h e n o m e n o l o g y 
Husserl 's noemat ic reflect ion, which the f o r m e r who lehea r t ed ly accep ted , 
»remains within the object and, instead of bege t t ing it, br ings to light its fun-
damenta l uni ty«.4 3 T h e p rob l em of the subjec t is h e n c e dissolved in the eter-
nal t ranscendenta l unity of the subject and the object , a uni ty, in Mer leau-
Ponty 's view, so well carried out by pain t ing . It is u p to ph i lo sophy to reveal 
it, br ing this unity to light and continual ly keep our eyes o p e n to it. N o n e t h e -
less, the pe r son perceiving is an empir ica l and an e m b o d i e d subject , w h o 
retains h i s /he r psychological uni ty of the Gestalt. It is h e r e that psychoana ly -
sis s tepped in and deconst ructed the actual t r anscenden ta l ego of Mer leau-
Pontyan p h e n o m e n o l o g y : even if M e r l e a u - P o n t y en thus ias t i ca l ly q u o t e d 
4 1 Quoted in Burch, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 357. 
4 2 Galen A.Johnson, »Introduction to Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Painting«, in The 
Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 8. 
4 3 Merleau-Ponty, »Preface«, Phenomenology of Perception, p. x. 
38 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
C é z a n n e or Klee saying, »Some days I felt that the t rees were looking at me, 
were speak ing to me« , 4 4 J a c q u e s Lacan in terpre ted the relation be tween the 
gaze and the pe rce ived wor ld very differently, arguing in the Four Fundamen-
tal Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI), applying the same Sartre 's meta-
p h o r of the voyeu r wh ich Mer leau-Ponty also used, that the gaze and the 
look are in an incessant exchange , causing the subject to be an unstable and 
cont inuous ly decons t ruc t ed and reconst ructed entity and that it is the medi-
at ing role of language , of the Symbolic , which also de te rmines the visible and 
the gaze . 4 5 
Lacan ' s in te rp re ta t ion of the gaze and the look f r o m this 1964 seminar 
has b e e n sub jec ted to i n n u m e r a b l e and divergent interpretat ions. In it Lacan 
gives his d u e to Mer l eau -Pon ty and to his insistence that objects re turn the 
gaze, b u t he ascribes to the object the funct ion of the »look« which imaginarily 
looks at us f r o m the posi t ion of the Other . Lacan fu r t he rmore points out what 
Mer l eau -Pon ty has also insisted upon , that is, that the geometra l space of our 
pe rcep t ion - no t necessar i ly a visual one - differs f rom that of our gaze which 
conceives its specific visual field on the basis of which we perceive the world 
and objects in it. It is for this reason that, as Merleau-Ponty shows on innu-
m e r a b l e occasions , in paint ings the visual field causes Cézanne ' s tables to 
sp read out or curve , or that the painter shows to us the interior of an ashtray, 
a l though no rma l ly it wou ld be invisible to us, etc. The picture, to represent in 
such a way that our visual pe rcep t ion will abide by percep t ion prof fered by 
language , mus t show p re sence through absence, must represent or render it 
visible indirect ly . Mer leau-Pon ty twice 4 6 approvingly cites Cézanne explain-
ing h o w he mus t pa in t a motif f r o m Balzac's novel: not by showing the most 
eye-ca tch ing e l emen t and its traits, but those that sur round it. The invisibility 
thus r e n d e r e d , will b r ing fo r th the »tablecloth white as a layer of fresh-fallen 
snow«. This m a y be the s ame kind of media t ing visibility as that to which 
François C h e n g was re fe r r ing . 4 7 In other words , and as already observed, 
C é z a n n e ' s or R o d i n ' s works (or those of Francis Bacon, for example), reveal 
s imilar »deictic markers« as those that Bryson pointed to in the case of Chi-
nese b rush pain t ing . This similarity points to a changed relation be tween the 
wor ld and the t r anscenden ta l ego than was the one that existed within the 
Car tes ian t radi t ion. In o the r words , the previously men t ioned similarity be-
4 4 Merleau-Ponty, »Eye and Mind«, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 129. 
45 Cf. also Bryson, Tradition and Desire, pp. 66-67. 
46 Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 197-198; »Cézanne's Doubt«, The Merleau-Ponty Aes-
thetics Reader, p. 66. 
4 7 Cf. above, note 18. 
39 
Aleš Erjavec 
tween Cézanne ' s work and Mer leau-Ponty ' s p h e n o m e n o l o g y reveals a d e e p e r 
similarity be tween the work of some of the key f igures of m o d e r n E u r o p e a n 
art and p h e n o m e n o l o g y to which Bryson ascr ibes »the greates t ma tu r i ty« 4 8 
when it comes to what he calls »the human d imens ion of visuality«. T h e rea-
son for Mer leau-Ponty ' s descript ion of C é z a n n e ' s w o r k in t e rms which so 
much resemble those of Chinese paint ing, is his u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the re la t ion 
between the t ranscendental ego and the wor ld , for they bo th represen t a who le 
which is, at least in this respect , very similar to the Ch inese pe r cep t i on of the 
world and of our own place within it. It t he re fo re appea r s that Bryson could 
well discover examples of art as »material pract ice« a l ready wi th in the m o d -
ern and modern i s t t radi t ion of E u r o p e a n pa in t ing and sculpture . 
It is at this point that I would like to in t roduce the quest ion of authent ic-
ity of seeing. Bryson is correct in stressing the »Wes te rn m y t h of see ing« 4 9 
and its historical construct ion, which were bo th also so forcefu l ly cri t icized 
by Merleau-Ponty. W h a t Bryson finds lacking in Mer l eau -Pon ty is w h a t Lacan 
in t roduced into his analysis of the gaze, n a m e l y the social d i m e n s i o n of see-
ing, the vehicle of which is language. »We can neve r direct ly expe r i ence the 
visual field of another h u m a n being - that m u c h is cer ta in : the only knowl-
edge of ano ther visual field, which we are able to acquire , is that wh ich comes 
th rough description. Such descript ion p roves tha t o thers also see w h a t we see, 
but the defini t ion of what is seen originates, the re fore , no t in the visual field 
itself, but in language: originates outside sight, in the signs of the descr ip t ion 
(...).«so T h e »conscious exper ience ha[s] a strictly individual charac te r , in the 
double sense that it is the exper ience of a s i tuated and da ted individual , and 
that it is itself an exper ience which c a n n o t be r e p r o d u c e d . « 5 1 C o u l d no t the 
desire to achieve a per fec t copy, to ach ieve »the p leasure of recogni t ion« be 
at least par t ly expla ined also by the consc iousness of the impossibi l i ty to 
achieve such an aim? T h e inability to »directly expe r i ence the visual field of 
another h u m a n being« in no way p reven t s ident i f ica t ion and an essential ly 
similar or »shared« exper ience . W h a t I t he re fo re see with m y own eyes is 
even within m y own exper ience a f leet ing event , b u t o n e which can n o n e t h e -
less be, within such an individual or even collective exper i ence , immed ia t e ly 
and eternally recognizable. T h e gaze or the g lance of m y own eyes is deter-
mined by the specific features of sight and our sha red visual history. It is 
within these that our c o m m o n expe r i ence - of pa in t ing , for e x a m p l e - is 
4 8 Bryson, op. cit., p. 65. 
49 Ibid., p. 64. 
50 Ibid., p. 66. 
5 1 Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology, State University of New York Press, Albany 
1991, p. 77. 
40 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
pe rhaps , w h e n it comes to m o r e recent art, no t dissimilar to that offered for 
e x a m p l e by C h i n e s e art. If this is true, this signifies some broader c o m m o n 
d e n o m i n a t o r wh ich t ransgresses culturally de te rmined borders . It may be 
t ime, once again, ins tead of seeing differences, to distinguish certain com-
m o n fea tures in art. 
M e r l e a u - P o n t y ' s a ccoun t of pa in t ing leaves one th ing unaccounted for 
and tha t is h o w to establ ish any qualitative relat ionship within the fine arts or 
pa in t ing as such, even w h e n it comes to an individual painter . Since he ig-
nores the his tor ical and the social d imensions of art, the only aesthetic evalu-
at ion poss ible is o n e that is based on existential exper ience of us being one 
with the wor ld . For this reason , and since in his works he mostly talks about 
art e i ther in very genera l t e rms or comment s upon individual artists, mostly 
w h e n they suppor t his p h e n o m e n o l o g y of percep t ion and related philosophi-
cal theses, it wou ld be actually difficult to call his phenomeno logy aesthetics 
in the t radi t ional sense. W e canno t dispute though, that his presentat ion of 
visual and pictor ia l r ep resen ta t ion and percep t ion strongly influenced artists 
and aes thet ic ians ( f rom early Lyotard to Mikel Dufrenne) and that in spite of 
his t heo ry b e i n g ma in ly c o n c e r n e d with art as a means of accentuat ing his 
ph i losoph ica l theses, and his s ta tements about the un ique place of art within 
the l ived wor ld b e i n g p r imar i ly s tatements to be accepted at their face value, 
his t h e o r y r ema ins s t rongly d e p e n d e n t u p o n percept ion of art as a p a r a m o u n t 
e x a m p l e and v e n u e of bege t t ing the consciousness of our place in the world 
and our e m b o d i m e n t there in . But, again, this is done by hypothesizing the 
exis tence of a un i f ied subject - or t ranscendenta l ego - which perceives art. 
Whi le Mer l eau -Pon ty s t rongly admonishes the thesis of classical perspective 
b e i n g the mos t a p p r o p r i a t e one , 5 2 he never theless puts for th the claim that it 
»is none the l e s s poss ible that Cézanne conceived a f o r m of art which, while 
occas ioned by his n e r v o u s condi t ion , is valid for everyone«. 5 3 It remains open 
w h a t weight this s t a t emen t carries and in which ways can it be universalized 
as I suggested above , bu t it does reveal that Mer leau-Ponty had in mind a 
un i f ied subject as a p r o t o t y p e of the perceiving t ranscendenta l ego. Lacanian 
psychoana lys i s t ho rough ly deconst ructs the not ion of such a unified subject. 
O r as J e a n H y p p o l i t e has c o m m e n t e d in Lacan 's seminar in 1954/55 about 
the Gesta l t w h e n discussing Mer leau-Ponty , this is, »basically a phenomenol -
ogy of the imag ina ry in the sense in which we employ the term.« 5 4 No won-
5 2 Cf. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 86 and above, note 21. 
5 3 »Cezanne's Doubt«, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 61. 
5 4 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire II. Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la 
psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris 1978, p. 100. 
41 
Aleš Erjavec 
der, therefore, that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological interpretat ion of the 
transcendental ego, in spite of it being conflated with the world in its different 
guises, suffered the same destiny as the notion of art itself, i.e., being pro-
claimed to be a remnant of humanist (and basically ideological - or »ideal-
ist«) way of thinking. 
Does the fact that Merleau-Ponty never at tempted to establish any nor-
mative hierarchy within art which would exceed that which is common to 
existential phenomenology as a whole, represent a deficiency of his philoso-
phy or, to the contrary, a consciousness of the impossibility or obsoleteness 
of such an endeavor? Or does his incessant linkage of the perceptual and the 
artistic (the visually perceived and painting) simply show that art is but a 
special or privileged aspect of the lived world as such? Does the fact that 
Lyotard in his 1971 book Discours, figure at tempted to continue Merleau-Ponty's 
phenomenological presentation of art and of the visible, so as to counter 
Lacan's privileging of the Symbolic at the expense of the Imaginary, but then 
gave up such an endeavor, witness to its impossibility? 
All of these questions require complex answers, all of which are crucial 
not only for a theory of perception, but especially for any contemporary dis-
cussion of art. Authors in other areas have come to the conclusion that some 
of the traditionally »unscientific« and disregarded notions, similar to those of 
art, not only deserve but warrant scrutiny. O n e such notion is that of »love« 
which Kaja Silverman has recently put forth as a notion worth revisiting f rom 
a new perspective, that of idealization. Although art falls within a very differ-
ent category from love, they both are related to the Imaginary and to ideali-
zation. Love has been declared, in various moments of history, to be defunct 
or to be a transient category. It has fur thermore »always seemed to lack re-
spectability as an object of intellectual inquiry - to represent the very quintes-
sence of kitsch.«55 
From our contemporary perspective it may be theoretically valid and 
practically relevant to reexamine the notions of aesthetic and artistic experi-
ence and to reevaluate the notion of art - not as an ontological entity but as a 
part of continued human practice and need. By arguing for such a reintro-
duction of a rather traditional notion I don ' t intend to disclaim distinctions 
and notions introduced primarily by psychoanalysis (and then applied or 
transposed into other realms mainly by various theories of ideology), but 
would like instead to point out that art, and the experience it offers, possess 
an important place in our lived world. While their continuous emergence 
may be contingent, this contingency in no way diminishes their relevance, as 
5 5 Silverman, op. cit., pp. 1-2. 
42 
Seeing, Painting and Art 
the aforement ioned comparisons of Chinese art and that championed by 
Merleau-Ponty show. From this perspective (and this is a perspective deter-
m i n e d also by the »pos tmodern« turn toward art which excludes the 
premodernis t as well as modernist belief into a unified subject) the need to 
reevaluate the Imaginary and reevaluate art as a crucial human activity and 
value appears increasingly warranted. 
43