| 2007-03-13T11:20 by Mark Cousins |
| Philosophers have struggled for over a century with the problem of reference. The work of Frege and Russell is sufficient testimony to that, but for philosophers the problem of reference, of how a formulation or even a word refers to something is not the problem of reference here, nor is it the problem within art history of how a portrait refers to the Duke of Wellington, nor is it about how representations refer to objects in general. Indeed these are rather minor issues within the field of the arts. For here the issue at the most general level is what do paintings or photographs refer to in the most broad sense. The argument here is that paintings and photographs refer above all to other paintings and photographs. |
| The question of reference, and indeed of representation in general, is not primarily a relation between an image and a thing but is a reference to a corpus of paintings and photographs which are relevant to its analysis. Once we give up general doctrines of representation, of how the representation relates to what is represented, then we can see more easily that the art object takes its place in an encompassing array of other art objects. The analysis of the art work is also a claim as to where it belongs in the series or network which help us to identify it. |
| This is a more humble and analytic conception of reference, it does not attempt to divide the world into two classes – representations and things – and to seek to provide a philosophical account of how they are connected. It starts from treating the “representation“ as a thing itself, an object that has its own materiality, its own mode of production and its own system of signification. This last term signification should not be thought of as an alternative to a philosophical notion of reference, still less into an idea of “meaning“. Signification describes an internal dimension of the corpus of an art form. As in the linguistics of Ferdinand De Saussure it has a semiotic form. It works through the idea of a sign which itself is composed of a signifier and a signified. In respect to language De Saussure defines signifier and signified as „an acoustic image and a concept“. [...] |
| Mark Cousins is Director of both graduate and undergraduate Histories and Theories programmes at the Architectural Association School of Architecture; Visiting Professor of Architecture at Columbia University; Visiting Professor designate at the University of Navarre, Pamplona; and a founding member of the London Consortium graduate School. |
Excerpt from '2007-03-13T11:20' by Mark Cousins. All text © Mark Cousins 2007. Full Version can be read in the soon to be released Photography Class Catalogue. |