Is portraiture still one of the dumbest art forms there is? As still practised, it tells us more about the mind, way of seeing,  culture and ideology of the artist rather than the sitter, or person portrayed.

The idea behind these four portraits of philosophers by Guillem Ramos-Poquí is first of all to show a new approach to portraiture that expresses in visual form the lives, ideas and socio-cultural context of the person portrayed. This is achieved by the use of innovative/ creative devices which enable the artist to express complex ideas.  Such devices involve different types of metaphor, the use of embedded images, and gestalt processes of rearranging parts into new wholes and transformations.

The other purpose behind this series is to articulate visually basic ideas in philosophical thought in ways that make connections and bring insights to art, politics, science and society. This is in direct contrast with current culture whereby life has become asphyxiated by a flood of empty words, empty images, empty rhetoric.

These works by Guillem Ramos-Poquí are the first four of a series of portraits of philosophers. The portraits stand as a challenge to the logocentricity (word-centredness) of philosophical explanation – explanation which generally has become opaque and hard to understand, as a result of its failure to use images or the visual dimension of  thought to elucidate ideas.  They aim at creating sustained visual narratives, interweaving ideas and insights in philosophy, with comment about society, science, culture and politics.  This sets them apart from the all too easy one-liners of fashionable art (e.g. the YBA’s).

One response to the portraits may be to ask “why bother making them if you can explain them in words?”. The answer to this is that a picture can be worth a thousand words, often explaining itself more clearly and memorably.

The common sense belief is that a person’s character and life is written in their face. However, looking at any official portrait (whether of a tyrant such as Hitler, or Stalin or anyone else) one can never tell what they are really like and what ideas and beliefs they hold. Clearly portraiture has a long way to go from that kind of naive psychologism that believes that faces speak for themselves and are an open book.
As Shakespeare says in Macbeth “There’s no art To find the mind’s construction (i.e. a person’s character and life) in the face”. For this reason, neither can a portrait by Rembrandt, despite the fashionable euphoria for it, tell us anything of any real significance about the person or face depicted. Note how all his sitters are portrayed in the same way – as sensitive, compassionate, deep-thinking characters! (when in fact, at least some, would have cared little for other people, and probably nothing for the peasant and toiling classes).  In other words, the portraits show and explain very little, and this is the same story for most of the history of portraiture.
By contrast, though, there are artists such as Vermeer who depict the lives, ideas and feelings of their sitters through symbols, artefacts and context. There the example also of Bosch. His outstanding “Christ Crowned with Thorns” (National Gallery, London) embodies in its central portrait of Jesus and four surrounding portraits, the cosmological/ metaphysical ideas of his era: e.g.: its psychology and theory of personality and medicine; based on the four “humours” and, in turn, based on the four basic elements that were thought to compose the universe – earth, water, air, and fire. At the same time, this painting is a trenchant socio-political attack on the sources of military, bureaucratic, mercantile and Papal injustice or oppression in this period, and Bosh has woven all these elements into an artistically sensitive and resonant whole.
This contrasts with Rembrandts’ style, especially his later self-portraits, where the person figures like an island, set apart from, and unlinked to, the context of society, philosophy, belief and other people, which together give our lives their meaning, and supply the critical distance to understand and assess those lives. Like Cartesian science, they are the personification (despite their drawing skills) of the very individualism whose cult of unthinking competition and the market, some would say, is destroying our planet’s environment and ecology, and dividing and oppressing society world-wide.

A question may well be asked: why portray philosophers rather than some other profession, e.g. artists, political leaders, scientists? The reason is that philosophy is at the basis of all thinking: At its best, it is the basic field of thinking that examines the beliefs and assumptions in all other fields as well as itself. That is why it should be important to artists.
The tragedy is that it is scarcely being taught in an appropriate or relevant way in art education today. The portraits of these four philosophers aim to show not just their basic ideas but the implications and limitations of their thinking.

John Locke (1632-1704) 

was an “empiricist”. This means he believed that experience is the primary source of knowledge. That is to say, objects (e.g. an orange) are built up out of the basic sensations of light, colour, touch and temperature. These can be developed  into more complex forms or ideas by associating one sensation with another through principles of similarity and difference etc. Hence the abstract idea of power will arise from associating a gun with a crown. Locke believed that the mind, from birth, was like a “blank slate”, or sponge, onto which nature and reality can be truthfully inscribed. This passive approach to perception, which is at the heart of empirical psychology, especially behaviourism, ignores perception’s active, constructive and circular character. Locke’s ideas were also influential in the formulations of the USA Constitution. He was opposed to the idea of the Divine right of Kings, because unlike the rationalists and neo-Platonists, promoting this view, his empiricism did not accept such things as innate (in-born) ideas or rights. For Locke, everything could only be a product of experience, and in this respect he echoes the ancient idea that “what is in the intellect was first in the senses”.
A main problem with empiricism is its claim that the “primary” qualities of shape, size, motion etc., resemble and correspond with reality as it is in itself – something we could never actually check, becouse we can’t  step outside our minds to compare their contents with a supposed reality beyond the mind: all we have access to is what is in our minds.
By contrast, Locke sees sensations or “secondary” qualities of colour, taste, touch, temperature and hence art, as resembling no such reality:  they are products only of the mind and so are entirely subjective lacking (controversially) any testable basis for judgement. However, the philosopher (Bishop) George Berkeley (1685-1753), showed the error of this (Cartesian) division between objective and subjective. He pointed out that knowledge of primary qualities (of shape, size, motion etc) can only be acquired through knowledge of secondary qualities – i.e. our sensations of light and colour, etc.  It should also be clear that through art and images we can make public the sensations of form and colour which arise in our minds. These can then be examined and analysed via reason, observation and evidence on an intersubjective or shared basis.

Rene Descartes(1596-1650) 

is seen as the founder of modern philosophy, leading into the Enlightenment. He is known as a “rationalist” -  that is, someone who believes reason, not experience, is the primary source, and basis for knowledge. Even so, he shared with John Locke many ideas: e.g. the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and an  “atomistic” approach to science and nature. He is most famous for his (“substance”) dualism which distinguishes two kinds of separate substance: matter or body; and mind, consciousness. Descartes (like Kant) believed that whereas body or matter is subject to deterministic laws of nature, the mind or soul, by contrast, is entirely free, independent of nature thus creating the problem of dividing human freedom (and culture) from nature, which, it can justifiably be said, has been a main factor in society’s blindness to the ecological conditions and character of existence.  Thus, like the problem of politics and society, the environmental crisis has roots in philosophy, and a particualr way of seeing or ideology.
For Descartes, we can never be sure that the senses and appearances are not the product of illusion and deception; only reason escapes this problem – as in maths or logic: one plus one always equals two. Therefore, in his rationalism there is the idea that the senses are continually clouded and never to be trusted. This dualism or contrast held by Descartes and the Cartesian tradition between the senses and reason is far too simple, however. It cannot explain the complexities of perception, science, art, politics and judgement. Moreover, from the viewpoint of critical philosophy, the Cartesian and Enlightenment issue as to which comes first and is most basic -  reason or experience? -  is a “chicken – egg” question. It is unanswerable, and rather meaningless. What matters is the role or function each has in life, and the
fact that knowledge and judgement (and their development) depend – as in the anti-Cartesian, ecological paradigm – on their interdependence, not their separation.

The Enlightenment tradition in philosophy, which consists of both empiricism and rationalism, is often referred to as “Cartesian” -  Cartesius being the Latin name for Descartes. This is becouse it shares the same way of seeing as its founder Descartes and his search for certain (i.e. sure, indubitable) foundations for knowledge and science, based (as in his Meditations) on stripping away anything that could be doubted… Fundamental to this traditon are the “property” (or quality) dualisms (divisions) of reason (or logic) and experience, nature and culture, science and art, facts and values, means and ends, part and whole, verbal and visual. Whether or not one subscribes to Descartes “substance” dualism of
mind and body, these other dualisms still prevail with detrimental effects in mainstream academic philosophy, and are reproduced throughout society and culture.

The central point about the Cartesian way of seeing  is that the way it divides, relates, or conflates the two categories in each of the above dualisms (e.g. reason-experience, or culture-nature) leads either to scientism (the view that science is a pure, neutral, disembodied form of knowledge, independent of society and culture); or to radical relativism, which by privileging difference over similarity (or commonality) lacks the intersubjective basis on which to assess science, art, and society. For an answer to the serious shortcomings of this tradition for understanding and explaining the world it is necessary to turn to critical approaches in the hermeneutic tradition of philosophy, in the Frankfurt School and the pragmatism of the
American philosopher John Dewey.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

is a XX C. philosopher who developed in the Cartesian and Positivistic legacy of the Enlightenment under the influence of Bertrand Russell. He articulated an atomistic and scientistic approach to science, nature and language based on a rather dry and rigid use of logic – logic as something entirely separate from experience and the phenomenal world of feelings and values.  His later work in his “Philosophical Investigations” renounced this earlier approach in favour of the idea that philosophy was primarily a form of therapy, and a “struggle against the bewitchment of the intelligence by means of language” - in other words,  language misleads us, as in a labyrinth. He was a critic of Descartes’ ego-centred approach which he rejected with the idea of  analysing problems from the starting point of the community and its form of life, not from the position of the isolated individual. In contrast to his previous emphasis on logic as the basis of knowledge, he coined the idea that every field of enquiry is an activity which has its own rules or conventions and, despite family resemblances between them, could not be compared and judged. This idea that each field is subject to its own “language game” has relativistic implications and has been very influential in art. For Wittgenstein, problems in philosophy  (e.g: clarifying the nature of perception, language, science, religion and behaviour) were not problems to be solved.  These were pseudo-problems that should be dissolved by clarifying language. Hence, the buzzing fly should be allowed to fly free, not trapped in the fly bottle.
None of this however escapes the accusation that Wittgenstein’s legacy in art and culture was a radically relativistic one; e.g. he denied the possibility of a basis or criteria for judgement. I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions as to the implications of this for culture, politics and ideology.

The contemporary French philosopher 
Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) 

is revered by some philosophers and decried by others. He is the founder of the movement known as Deconstruction, which developed from the French structuralist movement in anthropology, linguistics and philosophy and forms an influential axis in what is called post-structuralism, or more loosely called post-modernism. The main sources of his thought are the intellectual tradition of phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics, in which thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx and Freud have been the main influence. He writes in a very dense, difficult, elusive and playful style as a way of challenging the idea in the Anglo-American approach to philosophy which believes that language and reason can act as a clear window to reality.
For Derrida we are always trapped within words and there is no direct path through reason and experience to truth. All meanings are unstable, forever changing, and entirely relative to the individual interpreter and their cultural context: there is no basis for inter-subjective or cross-cultural judgement in matters of art and ideology. In this respect Derrida perpetuates the radical relativism about values that is also at the heart of the Cartesian tradition. Another problem in Derrida’s thinking is that language and art often treated as autonomous and “free floating”. That means he offers no way of linking them to nature, and the ecological realities of our existence. Also, another basic way in which Derrida is
surely Cartesian (like so many other philosophers) is that he theorises a lot about art (as in his book “Truth in Painting”) without any practical insight about the way perception applies to this field.

Underlying this series of works is the issue of perception (ie. the processes of attention, selection, interpretation and judgement)  as a self-sealing hall of mirrors, and the kind of interdisciplinary, non-Cartresian, ecological or wholistic way of seeing needed to transform it from a closed, unreceptive phenomenon to a more open and virtuous one. This is an idea addressed by the Frankfurt School of critical theorists and others (e.g. Theodor Adorno, 1903-1969); and it is echoed in the concept of  “identity thinking” and “non-identity thinking”.

Broadly speaking,“identity-thinking”  can be understood as a mirroring which occurs when one is trapped in a closed circle of perception where our beliefs, ideas and judgements exactly mirror or are identical with received belief, and what is fashionable and there is no “critical distance” or framework of criteria to question and test them with.

 “Non-identity thinking”, on the other hand, recognises all perception is inherently circular in the sense that attention, selection, interpretation and judgement depend not only on the assumptions, beliefs, interests, values, way of seeing and ideology we bring with us (which may be concious or not) but also on the (unwitting) oversights and ignorance we bring.  This means we need a framework of testable criteria that gives us a critical distance on what we are looking at: art, society, politics, etc. Such a framework takes the form of a theory of the human Good and flourishing (as Aristotle called it).

The important point here is that all views – and all art - have such a theory, and this theory entails a theory of perception (epistemology), a theory of reality (ontology) and a theory of human nature, freedom, creativity and “ends”. These theories form a web – or as the Aristotelian tradition suggests: an organic whole. The huge flaw, in liberal individualism and capitalism, is their failure to recognise such a web and to see how all such theories or parts are essentially interdependent and linked. The result is that the artists and critics treat art as a separate activity from the study of perception and ideology. Indeed, liberal individualism thinks that any positive theory of the human Good is judgmental or authoritarian, imposing particular beliefs and values rather than letting us find these out for ourselves. But the problem with this is that liberal individualism too, imposes its beliefs through its Cartesian way of seeing, and these are
reproduced and reinforced through our economic, social, political, educational and cultural institutions. In reality, it gives very little choice - except the choice, that is, to dissent from its norms, become unemployed and join the marginalised and dispossessed.

The concepts of “identity thinking “ and “non-identity thinking” (used by critical theory) are the same as “closed mirror” (or closed circle) and “open mirror” (or “open circle”) perception. Even so, when it came to art, Adorno (like Post-structuralism now) actually believed that art defies conceptualisation or definition. He thought that art, or aesthetics, is inherently a natural cite of resistance and autonomy against the oppressive and delusory impact of authority and power. This is really unjustifiable. The fact is that art and the “aesthetic” are as vulnerable to manipulation, indoctrination and false consciousness as any other field or activity – unless informed by a critical  non-Cartesian theory of perception and the human Good. That means an interdisciplinary approach to art, science, politics and philosophy, not the divided and fragmented one we have today.

There are two other important issues in art and art criticism: the “psycho-genetic” fallacy, and the problem of intuition.

In art and science, the “psycho-genetic” fallacy  is the assumption that it is sufficient to understand something by knowing its psychological and biographical origins, sources or causes, and citing its styles or references. This however still leaves entirely open whether that something is “true”, and worthy of attention and significance in a world deluged in competing trivia and artefacts, whose sole justification seems to be the ego and self-obsession of their producer. No causal account by itself of something can tell you whether is “true”, false, good, bad, perceptive or shallow.  Judgement and justification by independent reason are also necessary. This is the issue at the heart of Plato’s question in his
famous Dialogue “The Euthyphro”: is something good or true because God (authority) or the Tate Gallery, or Charles Saatchi, or Matthew Collings, says so? Or does authority commend it because it is good or true (i.e:  has independent support in reason, analysis and evidence?).
Possibly the strongest obstacle to any progress in art practice and art education today is the belief that art and criticism can rely on personal intuition and have no need for theory, philosophy, and a knowledge of perception -  even when these are made accessible and easily intelligible. Indeed, a main assumption in art practice and judgement today is that the value of art is to give full expression to our intuitions; that somehow they are, a pathway to truth  -  and that they are worthy of consideration in themselves. What this ignores is first of all what we mean by intuition and, secondly, the fact that intuitions can be easily misled or deceived by  fashion and false belief. All “intuition” can only be a product of our social, cultural, experiential milieu. From the vewpoint of sociology, it arises, whether we are aware of it or not, from
our complex web of beliefs, assumptions, values and acculturation – ie. from our social and cultural background, conditioning and experience. By itself, and without a framework of judgement, it is empty.
Just doing art, therefore should not be confused with knowing how to think about it and the concepts, reasoning and perceptual skills needed to do so. This means critical theory and practice are interdependent: one without the other is blind.

In our century, the visual use of different kinds of metaphor and trope, of embedded images and “gestalt” processes of transformation by artists such as John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann, anticipates the direction of portraiture pioneered by Bosh and Vermeer and developed in this philosophy series.

One of the messages of these works by Guillem Ramos-Poquí is that we need  to redefine the genre of portraiture since contemporary art fashions have entirely failed to envisage and realise its creative potential. This new definition is one that expresses, and gives artistic voice to the emergent ecological and wholistic paradigm in art, science, politics and philosophy. Without this paradigm, human existence remains a dangerous, closed hall of mirrors, and we can’t ensure the well being, sustainability and survival of our planet.

Unless artists start to examine their assumptions on an informed and critical basis, they will continue to be a part of the world's ills, not their solution. There can not be advance in art, philosophy and politics, till the ideology of Cartesianism is abandoned.

Text by David Rodway © London 1999
 

Portraits of Philosophers is a project which contextualizes the thinker portrayed in the framework of the ideas which characterise his vision from the hindsight of today’s critical perspective.

A crucial aspect of this project is the view that when we think about the world, whether it is a memory or engaging in critical reflection about it, images and words are interwoven in the process. To dry academic “ivory tower” philosophers this is alien territory. They believe that we only think through words or text and visual representation is irrelevant and this is, essentially, their limitation. They are trapped within word-centred thinking, which does not represent the only way our capacity to undestand the world operates. Artists and art critics will only begin to see the relevance of philosophy once we start to explain it visually.

Our knowledge and experience is determined by both the visual and the verbal. Indeed, when we reflect on something in our minds, we use both: words and visual images, both being inseparable and are the product of the ideology which determines or conditions our thought process (whether we are aware of it or not). In this context our relative autonomy or freedom rests in our capacities to interpret and think critically (visually and verbally) about the shortcomings of our immediate socio-cultural environment.

Artists have often tried to justify their work by making visual artefacts without any need of explanation, believing that images alone speak for themselves. Well, this is not so. If we are to be critical about our output as artists, we have to consider how the two interrelated aspects of our thought process are depicted both through images and ideas or assumptions, and we should engage in the dialectic of the image-thought process. An artist’s work will reveal his/her vision of the world. We should therefore be aware of what this means.  All art embodies a world view,  and this is defined not just by the issues or the content addressed, but by the issues or content which the artist has excluded or turned his/her back to.

When artists tell us about their work (or their work is described by critics) they often fail to distinguish between its “causal explanation” and its “critical evaluation”. A causal explanation may inform us about the biographical details of the artist and his/her sources, but does not tell us in which way an artist’s work may enlarge our awareness and is worthy of our attention: in which way the work is truly creative, may contribute to a progressive understanding of art, perception, and creativity; and what criteria of interpretation and judgement we need to bring to understand the work better.

It is also important to distinguish here between the “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions regarding the definiton of art, or anything else.  It is common belief today that it is impossible to establish any criteria for evaluating art due to its heterogenous nature; that is because it is believed there are no common principles which all visual art shares -  art is therefore is thought to be impossible to define or conceptualise.  This belief, however, fails to distinguish between “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions. “Necessary conditions” are both knowable and enabling, they go beyond the transient or ephemeral character of a particular moment of culture and time, building upon accumulated knowledge and experience. By contrast, “sufficient conditons” are unknowable because our minds and experience are
finite: we can never envisage what new insights or discoveries will be made in the future e.g. about perception, creativity and society. Artists often take the favourite feature of their art and assume that is a necessary condition (which may not be the case, because of being too general, vague or irrelevant to perception and creativity); they assume too that it is also a sufficient condition (which can never be the case). The interdependence of the formal; perceptual and critical; conceptual dimensions of art is one of the necessary conditions and form the basis from which creativity develops.  A necessary condition (contrary to relativism) is that there is a basic intersubjective structure to perception and appearances (whether figurative or abstract). Without it, there can be no coherent perception of space-depth, differentiation of form and pattern, no science, and the construction of metaphors will be impossible.  Some people think that giving such a criteria or conditions may be prescriptive, without realising that it is not necessarily so. Giving no testable criteria at all, as in the case of  “anything goes” relativism, in fact becomes prescriptive by the back door. Under relativism,  there is the illusion of being liberal and open minded, becouse those in power, who then impose their taste by deciding what is fashionable and should receive support and resources, without reason, evidence and coherent theory to justify their views.

The Portraits of Philosophers’ project addresses the issue of the future of portraiture through narrative relevant to the context of each philosopher’s ideas. The visual narrative is constructed by a combination of creative formal devices and poetic tropes. In doing so, I hope, the main issues pertaining to each philosopher portrayed are revealed in a way that opens the door to critical enquiry about their thinking, and about the possibilities of doing so through art today in innovative and significant ways.

Guillem Ramos-Poquí

 (“The Visual Dimension of Thought. Thinking Through the Senses”, 1999)

The four "Portraits of Philosophers and Thinkers" have been exhibited at the
Caligrama Art Gallery, Barcelona (22 April - 20 May 1999) and at
Hortensia Art Gallery (Kensington and Chelsea College), London ( 23 September- 5 October 1999).
They can also be seen on the Web at  http://freespace.virgin.net/g.ramos-poqui/Portraits/