Unobtrusive Visual Metaphors
Visual metaphor is now widely recognized as playing a significant role in many art forms. This recognition seems to have grown after the turn of the millennium, spurred on in part by a renewed interest in aesthetics from analytical perspectives. Some of us working in the arts sensed the importance of visual metaphor as early as the mid 1970s, producing visual art meant to be interpreted in metaphorical and/or symbolic terms. In the early 2000s I began to think more deeply about the cognitive basis of visual metaphor, looking to my visual art as “evidence” of this. My artistic practice was an unexpected guide to a deeper understanding of cognition as it relates to the experience of visual art. That the practice of art making was preceding my burgeoning understanding of cognition beyond its conceptual aspects is critical because when art is used to merely illustrate theory, cognitive or otherwise, a certain spontaneity or imaginative engagement is likely to be lost. I was making art and then reflecting on the results, although, it is possible that at times I was unconsciously influenced by those reflections. However, I did my best when working on the art to remain open to the permutations and unexpected developments presented by the material and techniques employed. This attention to the material and manner of working started me thinking about possible relationships between literal and metaphorical perceptions of things and the role of language in prompting either or both of these perceptions. In 2005 I came across a fascinating article in the fall 2000 volume of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism by Spanish professor of aesthetics and art theory, Francisca Perez-Carreno. Perez-Carreno’s article, “Looking at Metaphors,” introduced a take on visual metaphor that was only beginning to be grasped for its significance in relation to cognition. Her view also went a long way toward furthering understanding of the inconspicuous metaphorical nature of some of my visual art. Carreno notes that the kind of metaphor she has in mind, which she terms “unobtrusive,” is typically found in narrative art forms such as literature, but can also arise in intermedial art forms such as film. Speaking of literature, she says that there are sentences that the reader might interpret literally which can also be understood metaphorically, something that can be extrapolated to include works of visual metaphor. Carreno then adds:
Visual and verbal unobtrusive metaphors may both have an interesting and appealing literal content and may provoke some additional experience. In both cases the metaphorized object is not represented but experienced beyond the literal or recognitional content.” 1
Perez-Carreno’s definition of unobtrusive metaphor hinges on the idea that the metaphorized object is not represented (usually by a composite image of elements signifying disparate concepts or categories) and yet the verbal or visual artwork nevertheless might have, in her words: “an interesting and appealing literal content.” In other words, there is something in addition to the literal understanding of the words or perception of the images that engages the imagination, taking the mind beyond their immediate or initial bearing as straightforward or unvarnished things while never losing track of what is materially present or literally signified. Whether literal and metaphorical perspectives can be simultaneously engaged in an unobtrusive metaphor raises an interesting question about cognition: Just how closely are thinking and seeing intertwined, close enough at times to be indistinguishable? An example of unobtrusive metaphor taken from a famous film should bring this question into focus. There is a powerful scene in the film Shindler’s List portraying the ponderous arrival of an immense black steam engine into the hell of Auschwitz. It is a terrifying scene that initially makes a literal impression, a dark transport that gives the viewer an idea of an historical moment of inhumanity replete with snarling dogs and indifferent S.S. guards. The train pulled by the engine carries a multitude of condemned souls, some already standing dead, a belching black beast that is a visual metaphor, in Hanna Arendt’s words, for “the banality of evil.” This deeply disturbing scene comes into focus metaphorically after the engine has come to a halt under a hiss of steam. The viewer is made painfully aware of the train’s enormous dead weight as it disgorges its human cargo to be separated into those who will live and those who will die. The visual metaphor is unobtrusive in terms of a literal reading of the scene, but hardly remains so given the narrative, which instills strong emotions and is thus all the more frightening. The interesting thing about this scene is that once the visual metaphor is recognized the perception of the scene seems forever altered: Our thoughts, feelings and visual perception combine in an indelible experience.
Perez-Carreno advances the work of many other scholars concerned with metaphor in the arts. A principal figure is philosopher Noel Carroll. Carroll was one of the first philosophers to lay the groundwork for the possibility of visual metaphor by penning a seminal work in 1994, primarily on visual metaphor in the arts. In his essay on visual metaphor Carroll presents his basic argument:
The possibility of producing visual metaphors is available in every artistic medium that employs visual images. Furthermore, this is a possibility that has been realized. For there are some visual metaphors in every existing artistic medium that traffics in visual images,including: painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, theater, and dance.2
It is interesting that Carroll neglects to mention collage and assemblage, which is ironic given that these techniques or artforms seem ideally suited for producing visual metaphors. Carroll’s belief in the widespread existence of visual metaphor in the arts nevertheless helped to focus recognition of the central importance of this trope and has spurred further research into the subject. While recognizing Carroll’s important contribution, Perez-Carreno mainly takes issue with his notion of perceptual simultaneity; the requirement that the visual metaphor be made of two or more discrete elements belonging to physically incompatible categories that coexist in the same space. The resulting metaphor is in Carroll’s somewhat awkward term, physically “noncompossible,” in so far as the physically incompatible elements making up the visual metaphor coexist in the same entity. Carroll then contends:
[T]he viewer of such symbols seeks in some way to make the image intelligible apart from resorting to the norms of physical possibility. The viewer explores the possibility that the physically noncompossible elements in the array allude to the categories to which they belong and that those disparate categories (or, more precisely, members thereof) have been elided in a way that defies physical possibility not to represent a state of affairs but to interanimate the categories in question. Specifically, the viewer explores the possibility that those categories have been evoked in order to focus on aspects of one of the categories in terms of aspects of the other category.3
Perez-Carreno maintains that with an unobtrusive metaphor the “noncompossible” requirement is unnecessary. When presented in the right context, the elements of an image might be perceived as physically possible and yet also metaphorically resonate. If visual metaphors, like their verbal counterparts, are ultimately a matter of categories and concepts might there be instances where the metaphorical experience is based on or stems from a literal perception of an image? This seems to raise the issue of “seeing-as,” Richard Wollheim’s idea of shifting perception, which I will touch upon later. Carroll’s signal contribution to our understanding of metaphor is clear in the above passage; that it is essentially a matter of categories and concepts and not just words. He spells out his position:
Metaphors do not essentially involve the interaction of words, though words are one of the means of securing metaphorical interaction. Rather, metaphors mobilize the interaction of categories and concepts that include all sorts of information – including beliefs about the world and systems of commonplaces – some of which may be verbal, some of which may be visual, and some of which may not be easily classifiable as either. Any of this information may be brought into play by a metaphor. Moreover, conceptual systems of commonplaces can be activated by visual juxtapositions as well as verbal juxtapositions. Insofar as metaphors are conceptual and categorical, rather than exclusively verbal, there is no reason to suppose that there are necessarily no visual metaphors.4
This is groundwork for a good theory of visual metaphor. However, Carroll significantly states elsewhere in his study that there is no reason to suppose that visual metaphors cannot develop or evolve over time. And this is where Perez-Carreno’s theory of unobtrusive metaphor comes in. Referencing Carroll’s theory of what constitutes visual metaphor in contemporary art, artist and writer Mark Staff Brandl asserts that Carroll’s examples of artworks that emphasize “clear-cut combinations of the representations of two distinct entities,” can lead to the false assumption that visual metaphor is only possible given this pairing, A view that seems to support Perez-Carreno’s argument. Brandl further states:
Visual metaphor in contemporary art is far more complex than this. It exists in interactions of formal elements, representations, abstraction, presentation, and more.5
The experience of unobtrusive visual metaphor by way of an artwork is one indication of that complexity. If the interactions in an artwork that Brandl speaks of can function metaphorically then its potential as such might not be limited to a noncompossible image. Unobtrusive metaphor in this sense is grounded in the concrete particular, something that might be designated or implied in an artwork’s title. It is important to note that an artwork’s title can not only be metaphorical in its own right but might also serve to alert the viewer to the visual metaphor suggested by the formal and/or material properties of the work. What is interesting is that artwork titles can initiate seeing the work as a visual metaphor, and that this might support, as Carroll and others argue, that there is a structural equivalence between visual and verbal metaphor. To return to Richard Wollheim, it is an open question as to whether unobtrusive visual metaphor is a matter of or requires the phenomenon of “seeing-as,” his idea of shifting perception, exemplified by the famous “duck/rabbit” illustration. I suspect that the experience of an unobtrusive visual metaphor mitigates or overcomes the possibility of a perceptual shift by foregrounding an equivalence between the formal and/or material properties of the artwork and an idea or concept that these properties might elicit, often with the help of titles or supplemental material. Unobtrusive metaphor seems to create an opening for the further development or evolution of visual metaphor. While not specifically in these terms, it's an opening that Carroll anticipated at the conclusion of his essay:
[I] do admit that the range of things that my theory counts as visual metaphors is probably much more narrow than the language of art critics and artists would seem to demand. They call more things “visual metaphors” than I do.6
Some of my art might be better understood in relation to the concept of unobtrusive visual metaphor. A work that exemplifies this is Desert Parcel (book fragments) from 2013. Desert Parcel reveals a consciousness of the relation between literal and metaphorical reference mediated by the concept of ground. The title of this work, along with the actual title page of the book used to make the collage, suggests a relation between the physical transformation of the book pages and the geographical content of the book (images and descriptions of the 19th century Middle East). The material comprising Desert Parcel, the dry and brittle crushed pages of an old book, is used to form a literal ground: A base or foundation of sepia-toned particles glued to a rectangular support.
Desert Parcel (book fragments) 2013, collage on canvas mounted on board, 39.75 x 54.75 inches.
As ground in this sense, Desert Parcel can be appreciated in terms of its physical properties, such as its texture or material density, or simply by virtue of the work’s presence as a two-dimensional object: a large swath of crumbled paper that reduces the technique of collage to a bare minimum (or a kind of “minimalist” collage). But as already alluded to, this reduction also involves transforming fragmented book pages into a kind of “picture” (in one sense, a picture of archeological fragments replete with traces of text and images, in another, the surface of a desert landscape). In these senses, the literal nature of the collage is interesting and appealing if not compelling. However, the work acquires cognitive depth when its title is related to its physical properties perceived in the context of the literary source of the material used: Picturesque Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt, published by D. Appleton & Company, New York, 1896. Based upon the use of the crushed pages as an artistic medium, the material can be seen to literally embody the concept of ground while also functioning as an unobtrusive visual metaphor for a patch of desert. The meaning or significance of Desert Parcel as a ground in both a literal and metaphorical sense involves its potential to re-orient cognition by giving material form to an idea. This fundamental reorientation makes its title and description a necessary but not a sufficient condition for an appreciation or understanding of it.
Book title page: Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt, 10 x 12 inches.
This is significant in light of Carreno’s remarks about the viewer or reader’s literal interpretations of images or words without realizing that certain images or words might, given the right context, call or ask for metaphorical interpretations:
The surprise of being faced with something implausible or incoherent is not present in unobtrusive metaphors ...We realize that ‘something else’ is meant by the picture because, along with the recognition of some objects, it produces a certain effect on us. It is not the object represented [the book fragments] that causes the metaphorical insight, but the painting [or the collage] itself. 7
Again, the source material and title also contribute to the metaphorical insight. These things to some extent change how we perceive the physical properties of the artwork, thus enhancing our experience and understanding of it, but only when this supplemental material adequately corresponds to the art in phenomenal terms.
2024
1 Francisca Perez-Carreno, “Looking at Metaphors,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 58, Number 4 Fall 2000. 378
2 Noel Carroll, “Visual Metaphor,” Beyond Aesthetics, Philosophical Issues, Cambridge University Press, 2001. 348
3 Ibid. 355
4 Ibid. 369-360
5 Mark Staff Brandl, A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art, Bloomsbury 2024. 28-29
6 Noel Carroll, Ibid. 368
7 Francisca Perez-Carreno, Ibid. 378