Journal ARS 31 (1998) 1-3

Ján BAKOŠ

Od ikonológie k semiotike
[From Iconology to Semiotics]

(Summary)

The present paper does not aim at the history of the 20th Century art history in general. Its ambition is more modest: To reconstruct one of the main streams of the modern art historical writing that conceives of art as a language. It starts with Aby Warburg's rejection of the "border police" in art historical research. His interdisciplinary project of the cultural history of art can be regarded as a parallel to the Avant-garde conception of art as a social communication. Panofsky transformed Warburg's sociological model not only into a metaphysical one but also canonized iconology into a generally valid method. He tried to synthesize Hegelian concept of art as an impersonal expression (document) of the age with neo-Kantian notion of art as a symbolic construction of human world. His combining the rational approach (analysis of conventional subject matters) with the irrational one ("synthetic intuition") as well as preferring the theme in the work of art (identifying the meaning with the subject matter and conceiving of art as a means of the discursive message) resembles to the retrospective tendencies in art of the 30ies (Surrealism, Socialist Realism).

The transfer of iconology to USA had as a consequence its simplification. Under the impact of American pragmatism iconology became a new form of iconography conceiving art, paradoxically, as a communication instrument of an educated elite (work of art regarded as a hidden message or as a vehicle of "disguised meaning"). (As a consequence, later, in 80s iconology started to be replaced by historical anthropology interpreting art as a part of everyday social rituals.) In the post-war period American iconology had to cope with abstract expressionism in art and psychoanalysis in humanities that challenged its authority. Rudolf Wittkower's transformation of the three-level model of art into four-level one supplementing it with the expressional meaning can be regarded as a self-defence act of iconology. After the Second World War, iconology returned to Europe claiming to the universal validity and methodological hegemony. That contrasted with its limitation to the iconographic analysis. Before that antinomy provoked into the critique (i.e. by Otto Pächt) iconology had been accepted even by German art historians as a means of reconciliation: They tried to prove that iconology was deeply rooted in German spiritual tradition. Hans Sedlmayr used it even as a means of his severe conservative critique of the Avant-garde art. Generally speaking the notion of art as communication applied by German art historians was not based on de Saussure's objective but on Vossler's subjective conception of language. The idea of language as an individual creation and subjective expression was mediated to art history by Benedetto Croce. Inspired by Croce's aristocratic and transcendental individualism Julius von Schlosser developed the dualist theory contraposing style versus language and individual creation versus collective communication. Schlosser's pupil Ernst H. Gombrich revised not only his teacher's dualism but also its Hegelian fundament. 1) He rejected the aristocratic hierarchy of values: The history of art is a part of the history of visual communication, according to Gombrich. 2) He replaced dualist theory of art by a monism: Art is conceived of as a language. 3) Within severe critique of Hegel's metaphysical expressionism Gombrich superseded Croce's expressionist notion of language by de Saussurer's idea of language as a conventional system of communication. On the other hand, despite his project of "linguistics of the image" Gombrich kept aloof from Nelson Goodman's extreme conventionalism. He refused to regard images as arbitrary signs insisting on a minimal or functional similarity as the basis of all visual representations. That is why he replaced the term sign by the term substitute (as stressed by David Summers). As a consequence, Gombrich was celebrated as the initiator of semiotics of visual arts (by Jiří Veltruský) on the one hand and criticized as a perceptualist by post-structuralist semioticians (Norman Bryson) on the other. The ambition of semiotics to be accepted as universally valid model resulted in looking for predecessors in particular fields. Consequently, Panofsky was discovered as "de Saussure of art history" and iconological method was regarded as an organic forerunner of semiotic approach. Irrespective of the discussion about the relationship between iconology and semiotics, the application of semiotics to the history of visual arts was launched as a reaction to the overemphasis of subject matters in iconology. Nevertheless the first semiotic model of art drafted by Jan Mukařovský in 1934 can be interpreted as a projection of the Avant-garde concept of art into theory. The dialectical notion of the work of art conceived of as a thing (commodity or an autonomous value) on the one hand and as a communication (social or ideological instrument) on the other was justified by means of the theoretical generalization.

The second part of the paper deals with various semiotic interpretations of visual arts developed since the late sixties by R. Barthes, L. Marin, M. Schapiro, H. Damisch, U. Eco, J. Paris, B. Uspenskij, J. Veltruský, G. Kaufmann or N. Bryson. Not only the different models but also their relationships with the Avant-garde or the Post-Modern art are analyzed there. The applicability of the linguistic model to the history of art or the question "Semiotics or Rhetoric of the image?" is interpreted by the author as an ideological (culture historical) problem rather than an epistemological one.