Beyond Like and As in Images:
Metonymy and Metaphor in Some Recent Art
His script is, rather heavy-handedly, saying that fine art is like a corporate product, and so on. While perhaps true, presented in such a typical manner it becomes no more than a truism, devoid of vigor. He accepts in a rather academic way too much of the form of modernism to really question it. His structural device is that of metaphor, but so obviously derivative of Pop Art and Dada that it expresses little.
As an aside, the Jakobson dichotomy of metonymy and metaphor here used, might also offer in principle a fuller explication of staleness in much recent work. If one wanted to pursue this we feel it could be shown that the clinging to older forms of metaphor is the reason why so much of Post-Modernism has resulted so far in bad surrealism in writing and limp Dada in visual art such as Neo-Geo.
In the preceding examples we have surveyed several forms of metonymic and metaphoric processes that were easily illustrated at first from language in simple isolated, single sentences or phrases. Language is not always capable in such a rudimentary form of showing the dynamics of complex, subtle, or pervasive artistic strategies. While of course both language and visual art are systems of conventional signs that are culturally dependent and must be learned, they are not identical. It is necessary to invoke Wittgenstein here as a corrective for the too overt neo-Formalism of the Post-Structuralism of our time. We do this indirectly through anthropologist Alexander Alland, Jr., because of the economy and elegance with which he has expressed an important Wittgensteinian notion. Writing in the Winter 1989 volume of The Journal of Aesthetics Alland says:
... there is no better way of putting things but to say that language and art are both communication games and that they share family resemblances. I am sure that this has occurred to most of you, but it is important to reiterate because, I believe, it is these family resemblances that have led to analytical confusion with regard to the differences between art and language. ... Language and art are siblings, but not twin parts of our species essence. We are thinking creatures whose thoughts can be made up of sensations, images, words and musical sounds. 6
Keeping this in mind a final example of creative exploration and application of metonymy in recent art, and its superiority over metaphor, lies in comparing artists Thomas Lawson and Sigmar Polke with David Salle.
All three are practitioners of a style which brings together disparate images in a seemingly willful or haphazard way. For this critics use, and over-use, the term “juxtaposition.” In these three artists this technique is derived to a greater or lesser extent from the late works of Picabia. Specifically the so-called “transparencies,” primarily of the period around 1930. Works such as the oil on canvas Chloris or the gouache on cardboard Iris display all the formal devices utilized presently by Salle: linear, see-through overlays, borrowed images from various historical periods, and intentionally crude technique. These pieces by Picabia were ripe for the picking as an influence, since they have been and remain among the critically least well accepted paintings by the artist. (Perhaps we will soon see a post-modern rebirth of Magritte’s generally despised “Impressionist” or “Vache” periods.) These transparencies, as well as occasional works employing analogous procedures by other artists such as Franz Kupka, make it necessary to point out that this method has been around longer than recent criticism would lead us to believe, and is usually referred to by the less loaded term “montage.”
Jakobson himself mentions film montage, and categorizes it as completely metaphoric, while situating the close-up as metonymic. 7 Sergei Eisenstein, however, describes montages of both metonymic and metaphoric types. Also Lodge points out that with the techniques of cutting, splicing, and combination being the techniques of editing and hence of all film, both metonymy and metaphor are possible. With such techniques of combination indeed being so central to all the visual arts, it is impossible to locate the work of Lawson, Polke, or Salle as metaphor per se. Cubism itself, while obviously metonymic, is “montaging” or “juxtaposing” viewpoints of the viewed subject. Therefore, in the bringing together of images, context is most important.
It is interesting to compare the art work of the three mentioned artists. Superficially similar, or at least working in linked styles, they produce diverse effects. To our eyes the achievement and quality of Lawson’s and Polke’s work is shadowed interestingly by the unconvincing and minor art of Salle. Examining the dynamics of this art through the conception of metonymy-metaphor reveals that the work of the first two consistently displays metonymic dimensions.
In Polke’s work Can you always believe your eyes? from 1976, there is a crucial structural balance between his use of the randomness with which he brings elements together, and the element’s own actual metonymic derivation. The indeterminacy of the montaging, because it reeks of surrealism, begs a metaphoric reading of the elements — which Polke is confidently alluding to and travestying. It must be kept in mind that he, and to a lesser extent Lawson, travesty but do not truly parody. This is an important distinction that is lost on Salle.
Many of Polke’s works are painted on common fabric — sheets, towels, or the like — stitched together. This is a light-hearted play with the self-importance of the support in “fine art canvases.” But Polke’s supports are metonymically derived from canvas — both are after all only different types of good cloth. There is a feeding upon the mutual reflexivity here that is far beyond the sophomoric attempt at nihilism that Salle’s own alterations of the painting surface yield: a plastic ’60’s chair screwed to the canvas; read: all style, hence art is dated and stupid.