Visual Perception of Form by Leonard Zusne (review)

Books 213 resemblance, ‘The meaning is the use’), Ayer (analytical and synthetic propositions), Kuhn (paradigms and anomalies), Strawson (sortal universals), Russell (Theory of Descriptions), Hempel, Pap, Reichenbach, Frege, Quine, Pears, Geech, Popper, Urmson, Von Wright, Godel, Carnap, Tarski, Black, Church, Ryle ...interspersed with discussions of art, artists and art critics. But the prose of the discussions is so dense-by comparison Wittgenstein’s suggests the ‘Rupert Annual’-that it is often impossible to say what the writers are trying to establish about what. Indeed, one plausible hypothesis is that the anthology is a put-on or, at least, a happening. Here, for example, are the opening words-the opening ones, mind you-of Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell’s ‘Handbook to “Ingot”’ (Hurrell’s ‘Ingot’ is a work of art made of aluminium ingots): ‘This handbook isn’t very scientific. Nomological/“Synthetic” concepts, operations and commitments are, however, constitutive as terms of the broadly realistic position maintained. ‘Basic “forms” might be regarded as constituting interpretational categories and categories of constituents. Examples of these may be constructed as “nominal”, “adjectival”, “propositional”. The point is that within this context, it is only the “propositional” which is “independent ”; it is obvious that the various other “theoretical”, interpretational constitutional categories are possible constituents of the propositional. ‘Analysis and the “logical grammar” in this context would not only just classify “propositions” but “demonstrate ” the possibility of propositions-as propositions without asking critical questions. This feature is immanent in Ingot’ (p. 108). A thesis that seems to run through much of the anthology is that art is a language and, therefore, that works of art, like sentences, are not physical but conceptual objects. The ‘confused material=character/physical -object paradigm of art’ (p. 226) is rejected. Like the utterance of a sentence, the realization of a work of art is, of course, physical, a ‘physical residue’ (p. 90); but the work itself is not. The propositions that this language expresses are, moreover, analytic, not synthetic; necessarily, not contingently , true. They are so ‘worded‘ that they cannot be false; they are tautologies, true by definition; as not with synthetic propositions, no empirical verification-no confrontation of proposition with fact-is relevant. These analytic propositions are, finally, definitions of art: ‘Art indeed exists for its own sake. ...Art’s only claim is for art. Art is the definition of art’ (p. 96). Regrettably, someworks of art are impure mixtures of the analytic and the synthetic , for they concern themselves with things other than art: visual experience, for example, or philosophy. This theory is hard to evaluate, partly because some statements about it are hard to follow, but also because it is not worked out in detail and not really argued. If art is a language, what is its grammar and where is its dictionary? Just how do works of art express analytic propositions or indeed any propositions at all? If these analytic propositions are definitions of art, do all works of art express the same proposition? If not, are all the different ones valid? At one point (p. 94), interestingly, Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance is invoked. But to accept this notion is not to accept many definitions but to reject all. Nevertheless, the theory somehow separates the sheep (who accept it) from the goats (who do not): not only Lucy Lippard from Michael Fried, Clement Greenberg and Richard Wollheim but also Marcel Duchamp, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella from Anthony Caro, Ron Davis, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. But this is surely to confuse a theory (or, in Kuhn’s sense, a paradigm) with an ideology (or program). A theory may indeed guide art critics in explaining artistic phenomena in the way that a theory guides scientists in explaining molecular or ornithological or ichthyological phenomena. But a theory no more guides artists than a theory guides molecules or birds or fish. Visual Perception of Form. Leonard Zusne. Academic Press, New York, 1970. 547 pp., illus. $19.50. Reviewed by Rudolf Amheim* This most useful handbook, written by an experimental psychologist of the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, surveys the literature on visual ‘form’, which is defined as flat shapes on two...