Pictorial language and languages of culture
	Peeter Torop

Eesti keeles
	A picture is not merely a picture nowadays. The pictorial grows at the expense of the verbal and even through the verbal. And this means that, in the picture-being, culture-being is reflected and, in the fate of the picture, the fate of culture is shown.
	Referring to a work of art, one philosopher, Martin Heidegger, said: "We ask what the work is as it presents itself in its own Being. The work presents itself in its own Being inasmuch as it - the work - really is. And the work of art is as it really is in setting itself up." Another philosopher, Merab Mamardashvili, speaking about the work as it really is and about the work as it is set up, asks if a Paul Cézanne apple picture is a picture with apples or a picture of apples. He has linked these two questions with the notion that, if we take one picture as a picture of apples, we do not necessarily understand what apples themselves are. Or, it is possible to comprehend through the incomprehensible. The artist Vladimir Favorsky has stressed imagination in the still life: "... when the table is depicted and I put a glass on the table, the table will change [...] This is the basis of all depiction. This is where image starts." According to his logic the essence of the picture is determined by the relations of the depicted objects, so he would regard an apple picture as a picture of apples, i.e. it is about their relations. The semiotician Yuri Lotman has seen the still life as a field of tension between the word and the object; as a result, two types of still life can be distinguished. In one the illusion of objectness is created as a way of approximating it or even as an attempt to replace the object. In the other, allegory is born, and this type of still life should be read rather than viewed. Between these two poles there is the analytical still life with its elementality, with the visibility of its elements, as in Cubism or synthetic still life, in which coherence is created as relations between the objects, although the objects themselves are like words in an unknown language. Cézanne is the representative of this type.
	The Parisian art dealer Père Tanguy must have thought the same while buying the works of this unknown artist. But social reality might transform the work of art as it really is. And thus, Cézanne's apple picture might turn into a picture with apples. Not hoping to make people understand Cézanne's language, he tried to sell his works by cutting off a piece of the canvas with the quantity of apples requested by the buyer. Thus Père Tanguy helped to set up the work of art. We look at a work of art and see the things depicted in it in a certain surrounding. But we can also imagine a work of art looking at us and, in this case, it is we who are on its horizon. The one peering into the picture can see a surrounding environment, while the one looking out of the picture can perceive an outside space, the horizon. Mikhail Bakhtin has called the horizon and the surrounding environment two different sorts of unification of the human being and the world. The spectator and the picture are both in the culture and the difficulties of their self-description are - in Bakhtin's words - the following: "While turning my head in all directions I can get an image of myself as a whole from each side of the surrounding space in the centre of which I am, but I cannot see myself as surrounded by that space." The pictures surround us and we surround the pictures. We surround the pictures with our senses. The pictures surround us as languages, texts, discourses and media. Our communication with pictures starts with our thinking. The inner speech is verbal and pictorial at the same time, just like the language of our dreams. The simplest model of thinking is said to be the relationship between the picture and its title. While viewing the picture, its title comes to mind for the viewer even if it is not there or is not legible from afar. Viewing is accompanied by inner verbal translation. But, with abstract paintings, verbal translation in the form of a title may create a need for back-translation. And the possibilities of back-translation are different for such titles as Opus No. 4, A Black Square Against a White Background, Love or A Tree. Thus the verbal will influence the pictorial in both the inner speech of the spectator as well as in the critic's review.
	Although the picture may be an autonomous text or part of a larger whole that encompasses the wall of the exhibition hall or the closest neighbourhood of the picture or even the entire exhibition as a conceptual whole, the viewing of the picture is not confined to the experience of coming to the exhibition. Culture as a media environment, which surrounds the human being, is largely made up of pictures and the words that accompany them, just as it earlier consisted of words and the pictures accompanying them. This historical tension between the picture and the word has changed both of them. In the field of tension between the picture and the word there are two main strategies of behavior in the picture as it really is or as it sets itself up. The first is characterized by the inclusion of the word in the picture, whereas the dialogue between the picture and its title is integrated into the picture. An appropriate example involves two paintings by René Magritte. In the painting from 1929 there is a pipe and its repetition in the form of the title This Is Not a Pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), and in the painting from 1966 there are two pipes in the picture, a pipe and the 1929 picture on the easel with the title This Is Not a Pipe, but the later picture has the alluring title Two Secrets. The integration of the dialogue between the word and the picture into the picture is also possible without Magritte's alienating effect. It is possible to create a syntactically coherent pictorial language (literally in the sense of the co-existence of the word and the picture) as used by Marko Mäetamm in his series of paintings (The Chemistry of Being, etc.). The other is characterized by the exclusion of the dialogue from the picture, which also means the expansion of the boundaries of the picture. As an example, there is the conventional title of 'one and three' in the series by Joseph Kosuth. The artist has separated the word, the image and the object, but has set them up as one text. The artwork One and Three Boxes consists of a box, a photograph of the box hung on the wall and the image of the verbal definition of the word 'box'. The same principle is applied in One and Three Tables. The work of art is viewable, readable and touchable at the same time.
	The example of Joseph Kosuth illustrates a more general trend. One and Three Boxes presents the unity of our senses or of the processes of perception. But it does so analytically. Presentation is, however, an inseparable part of culture. Kosuth's pictures are examples of static presentation. Film and television have introduced the principles of dynamic presentation into fine art. The video installation FF/REW (1998) by Ene-Liis Semper dealing with suicide is a good example of making the frame of an artwork dynamic - the picture as a story rewinds itself, and thus annuls the story and restores its pictorial quality. It does this through mythologization, because the possibility of rewinding transforms the story and the linearity of time into mythical repetition and the work acquires a symbolic dimension. Favorsky has aptly called the transcendence of the narrative in fine art a plastic event. On the one hand, thematic works of art participate in large narratives, becoming - at worst - agitprop art or surrogate art, and - at best - balancing the narrative through presentation. Presentations in different parts of culture create symbolic environments, mythologize narratives and offer - through symbols - an opportunity to create depth or ambivalence. As a random example, I'll mention Ott Kangilaski's print Linda's Stone*, which is presented as a stone seen through torrents of rain; the rain and the tears create a telling symbol, in which there is also an ideological aspect. Linda's weeping is also the weeping for Linda. Thus in painting the distinction can be made between symbols born in single pictures, epic style created in cycles or themes (such as the Kalevipoeg-series by Kristjan Raud) or a general mythophile style (Jüri Arrak). Painting is only part of the pictorial that relates to the narrative, alongside the presentation possibilities of theatre, film or verbal texts. On the other hand, art in its own Being needs to engage in a dialogue with the spectator and, through the spectator, with the entire culture. The picture, just as any other cultural text, is an integral whole that aims to be part of culture and its ability to communicate depends on the preparedness of culture, the comprehensibility of cultural languages. The spectator requires both pictorial competence and general cultural competence. Their cultivation is often linked to presentation, ranging from art albums, Internet art galleries and style books to the analyses of an artist or a picture.
	Pictorial competence relies on analytical art and visual semiotical traditions and is related to the structure of the natural perception of the picture. This is closely connected with empathy, as very often it is the picture itself that says what language it speaks. The entrance into pictorial language is like a multiple and multilingual translation. The spectator sees one and the same picture at the exhibition through his/her previous experience (as presented by the artist), through the critic's presentation and through its translation into another medium. Examples are the documentary Konrad Mägi by Andres Sööt and the animated prints by Rein Raamat**, which can be seen as the analysis or the setting forth of Eduard Wiiralt's work. The picture might also be presented by changing its context, as Mark Soosaar did with Wiiralt's Oak-Tree, by making it meet reality in his film, and not by using montage, but within one frame, within one picture. In fact, film can be seen as a moving illustration, which has developed to the extent that it has given birth to a new hybrid language in culture, which Lev Manovich, who has studied new media, calls cinegratography. It is based on the separation of photographic and graphic representations as a result of different developments in film and animation and their new encounter on the computer screen. The multimediality that accompanies this process is an environment conducive to the emergence of new art, but it is also a mediating language for presenting more traditional art forms, alienating them and, in this sense, setting them forth for the spectator. When Andy Warhol composed his picture of thirty Mona Lisas, giving it the title Thirty Is Better Than One, he referred to one essential characteristic of the being of cultural texts: multiplication, repetition in a similar form. Thus, the serigraphs of Raul Meel can be assembled under the motto 'Repetition is More Significant Than Singularity'. While Ene-Liis Semper, with her rewinding video, creates endlessness, she replaces simultaneity with symbolism. The photographic principle of the former has been replaced by the video principle of the latter. Rein Raamat, with his animated Wiiralt, arranges a multimedia performance in which the presentation of the picture through motion is also the exposition of the anatomy of the picture and its analysis. And it is also a work of art itself. The translation of the picture into modern cinematographic, video or multimedia language is part of the self-communication of culture, its dialogue with itself. One of the principles of cultural development is the refreshing of textual perception and the enhancing of the dialogic possibility of current texts. Art is as it really is through its dialogue between texts and ages, works of art and spectators. This is the dynamics and identity of its being as it really is. That is why the question of pictorial language and the language of culture is an eternal question. Each age will try and find its own answers to this question. * The Estonian epic heroine, giant woman Linda sat on a stone and wept a lakeful of tears after her husband Kalev's death. Linda's stone can be seen in Lake Ülemiste to this day [Ed.] ** Artist and film-maker Rein Raamat made the cartoon Hell (1983) on the basis of Estonian graphic artist Eduard Wiiralt's (1898-1954) prints [Ed.]
	| Estonian Art 1/03 (12) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2003 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |