A systemic-functional semiotics of art

MICHAEL OTOOLE
The visual arts should be a natural field for the application of semiotic models of analysis; and yet most discourse — whether published, peda- gogical or popular — about art is still stuck in the well-worn grooves of art history, philosophical aesthetics, or attribution and market values. Attempts over the last ten years to invoke semiotics have mainly been confined to applying a raw Saussurean analysis — questionable even for verbal discourse — to visual texts, exploring the ramifications of Peirce's distinction between index, icon, and symbol in visual terms, or arguing about the nature of representation itself. The result has been a lot of theorizing, partial analysis, and a daunting density of new jargon.
A major problem is that semiotic theory itself has not been standing still, and the early 'structuralist' semiotic models have been enriched — but also complicated — by preoccupations with the social status and functioning of the sign and the definition and role of the viewing 'subject' in relation to the artistic text. Semiotics in the late 1980s thus finds itself a battleground for competing theories giving more or less priority to the social, the psychoanalytical, or the descriptive.
Michael Halliday's Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1985) gives its first priority to the adequate description of language texts and the linguistic systems they realize, but his emphasis on function ensures that at every stage of description the social role of the text and the predispositions of addresser and addressee are adequately accounted for. Furthermore, since one of the three macrofunctions governing the choice of grammatical, lexical, and phonological options from the available systems is the Interpersonal Function, the interplay between speaking subject and listening subject has to be included in the analysis. In other words, this appears to be the only semiotic model available that can bring together and theorize the relations between these three dominant concerns of contemporary semiotics.
The question then arises to what extent a model designed for the description of verbal language can be claimed to be a general semiotic
Semiotica 82-3/4 (1990), 185-209 0037-1998/90/0082-0185 $2.00 © Walter de GruyterBrought to you by | Murdoch University Library
Authenticated | 134.115.4.99 Download Date | 1/25/13 5:00 AM
186 M. O'Toole
model — particularly when so much semiotic discussion of other codes (film, fashion, narrative, etc.) has been bedeviled by the 'linguistic imperi- alism' of Saussurean structuralism. Halliday is quite clear about the place of language in the semiotic scheme of things: we are all party to the 'social semiotic' of the time, place, and social group in which we grow up and live, the typical ways in which meanings can be expressed through language and other signifying codes such as flags, photography, dance, and drama. In any definable social situation we have possibilities of action (what we 'can do', as Halliday puts it); one way of acting is to make meaning (and the social semiotic determines what we 'can mean'); one way of making meaning is to use language (and the linguistic system of our speech community determines what we 'can say' — Halliday 1978). But we can make meaning in movements of the body (kinesic, gestural, and proxemic codes), by waving flags (semaphore, nautical codes), by putting up signs or painting lines on roads (highway codes), by building buildings, making films, writing narratives, poems and plays, by painting, sculpting, potting, and embroidering. Each of these semiotic activities has its own systems of meaning potential and consistent patterns of material realization of meaning through bodily gesture, paint and metal, bricks and mortar (or wood and straw), photographic prints, print, paint, ceramic, and thread. They are not 'like language' in their means of expression, or even in the kinds of meaning they express, but a Systemic- Functional approach makes it possible to specify their distinctive semiotic processes and practices. The key to this is the tri-functional structure of Halliday's model: any semiotic text, in whatever medium, will represent some aspect of our experience of the world, the Experiential or Ideational Function; it will manifest certain features of the relationship between the text's producer and its receiver(s) and the producer's attitude to the experiential content, the Interpersonal Function; and it will have the structural characteristics of a well-formed text of the appropriate genre, the Textual Function.
Halliday argues that in any natural language — English, Chinese, Twi, Russian — the options available to speakers and writers for expressing these functions are systemic. That is to say, particular lexicogrammatical systems offer sets of choices for expressing one or other function: degrees of Transitivity realize aspects of the experiential relationships being expressed between processes and participants; the choice of Mood for a clause realizes essential aspects of the relationship between speaker and hearer; the Thematic Structure and cohesive patterning make the utterance a genetically appropriate text. The key word here is realize: every choice — in the phonology and lexis as well as in the grammar — is the realization of a systemic choice relating to the social functioning of the
Brought to you by | Murdoch University Library Authenticated | 134.115.4.99
Download Date | 1/25/13 5:00 AM
Systemic-functional semiotics of art 187
utterance. The chart (Table 1) reproduced from Halliday (1973) displays the typical systems that realize each of the macrofunctions for English. The scale of realization goes further than this, however, since each option chosen from the systems displayed in the boxes on the chart is realized in a particular lexicogrammatical structure, and each such structure is realized in a particular configuration of sounds or marks on paper.
It is my contention that the semiotic codes of the visual arts also involve these three universal functions, and that they are realized through systems of representational, modal, and compositional choices, which are in turn realized through configurations of paint on canvas; marble, bronze or wood in space; or building materials in the landscape. A provisional chart for the codes of painting derived from Halliday's chart is displayed in Table 2. Hopefully, this will clarify my point about the congruence of semiotic codes when viewed in systemic-functional terms. On the other hand, it makes necessary a number of caveats and reservations. First my chart incorporates on its horizontal axis a rank scale of units: Picture, Episode, Figure, Member, borrowed from Alberti's formulation, but analogous to Halliday's rank scale of linguistic units. As I hope my analyses will show, this is a useful way of distinguishing systems at particular ranks for both painting and architecture, but it is not an essential dimension of the systemic-functional model. In fact, as An Chung has shown for pottery (1987) and Peter Morse for sculpture (1987), it may be far more appropriate for some art forms to highlight the scale of 'workedness' from raw material to finished and decorated product than the scale of units within units. Secondly, it should be stressed that each of the words and phrases in each box of the chart represents a system, a set of systemic options; they are not simply labels to be applied or not. The analysis which follows should make this clear. Thirdly, for the purely aesthetic 'fine art' of painting, I have chosen to label the functions Representational, Modal, and Compositional, thereby con- fronting major areas of debate in art criticism. In analyzing works of architecture, where the use function is dominant (as with language), I have found it more appropriate to preserve Halliday's functional labels: Experiential, Interpersonal, and Textual.
In order to show how productive the Systemic-Functional model can be for the analysis of visual art texts, I propose to analyze one modern painting and one contemporary building. Neither of them are 'master- pieces' hallowed by the art historical tradition or market values, but the descriptive claims of the model extend to all visual texts, and description necessarily precedes evaluation. It has been objected that one of the problems with semiotic approaches to the arts, including literature and film, is that they tend to validate every text they encounter; in other
188 M.O'Toole
?K. Os
"cd3 X D H
(suoi|B|3J {Bjnpnj^s-uou ^aousiuss 3ψ 9AoqB
(U W) ^s ^
l .1 § g . § ·«J i w 3 - ! - i - Z 3 - - W " i 3 > ^ ^ °2 <Λ^-^δ < Λ · § ^ ^ 2 3 'S ^ § -o i^ 'S .1? S i! :§ ! S .2 β, 'S 'ο Ι «S
« « S g b ^ ^ . S g - . B o,-^"^ H*o Q.
? ?Λ '-5 .2 ω G Q. β t2 ® o^ oo S ι *· "c3 0> «-i
lilt! il 111!s B ^ l s £o < i .1 uopisoddB
UOIlBUIpJO OO (S^UBJ \\v) saxsiduioo OIJOBIBJBJ
c n -2
G ^ ·§ 8 o G >, .2 J3 rtl g i| • .2 - 3 -S % CG -3·*"·« ^ Ui UM G C -rH Oc ^ a ·§ I § S ι Λ 18 *O ω ^P cd ω JS 3cd u, (X o oo o oo
pJoM^dnoJ3'3snBIDJos3x3Idu,oo3!,:
s^ . s* § ^s s>|| §1 §Λ t .11 g |-§
1 s 1 1 f 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1? 3 c x , b o , 4 = < r 3 » - ' S S o .ti s> ο *α H § & - S H s> S & g β!
'cd » « §· | o.1 1 i i IU > O Z Sa
90l
.·§ CG
S
)B1(
cο•ζ: 8 §'.2 ε?•ο ο
IE § s; 11;_ ·« o
11 8 <υΤ3
190 M. O'Toole
-^ ^ g 6nhm i & U ffJ
2
I .0
l
o
o B i 3 - £ IΛ l_ _, G•^ ^ ^3 oM cu t5 b o*>> ω 3 αf lli*
192 M. O'Toole
words, in order to prove the value of the model itself, they generate reasons for evaluating positively the work being analyzed. This is certainly a danger that the semiotician must be aware of, and I will be at pains to show that the model can reveal functionally negative features as well as positive ones. This, of course, only goes part of the way toward a fully evaluative art criticism — not the main business of semiotics, which will be as interested in the social grounds for particular evaluations as in evaluation itself.
The painting I want to analyze is an Australian one which hangs in my local gallery, the Art Gallery of Western Australia. It is The Gatekeeper's Wife by Sir Russell Drysdale, painted in 1965 (see Plate 1). The two figures represented here clearly address the viewer directly, though each in a different way, as we shall see; but I want to suggest that any painting that involves an interaction between two figures in any case interpellates the viewer through their points of interaction. This interpellation thus involves the construction of both a social and a psychological 'subject' for the viewer via our relations in the 'social semiotic' and the negotiations with it of our unconscious (O'Toole 1990: Chapters 3 and 4).1
An important feature of the analytical chart is that it does not have to be read from left to right or top to bottom; we can start with any system in any of the boxes as our 'point of entry' to the work and move to
Plate 1. Sir Russell Drysdale, The Gatekeeper's Wife (1965). Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Western Australia
other box where elements of meaning construction relate to the first. In practice, we will tend to work within one given function (the vertical dimension) at a time, since this is often more convenient for expository purposes, but in principle the boundaries between functions are perme- able, and the 'semiotic space' of our interpretation — which is never closed off, but always open to further modification — is created by constant shuttling between the readings within various systemic options.
We may start, then, with the Modal Function (the middle column on the chart). My main reason for doing so is to give priority to our personal engagement with the work, its 'address' to us as viewing subjects. Most discourses abqut art, whether art history or popular criticism, tend to deal first with what is represented (the Representational Function), while academic and practical art teaching understandably starts with observa- tions about the Compositional Function. Meanwhile, the ordinary visitor to an art gallery may lack both the factual knowledge and the technical vocabulary to say anything meaningful about either of these, and is discouraged from articulating how she or he relates to the work's visual impact.
Quite often, this impact is due to aspects of the system I have labeled 'Gaze' (top box in the Modal Function). This system incorporates a number of sub-systems, any or all of which may be working to draw us into the world of the painting. They could, of course, be working equally to exclude us from it, and this will be part of the Modal meaning of the painting. 'Gaze', as the chart shows, includes the system of 'Eye- work' (as students of body language call it) — that is, the engagement through the gaze itself. In this painting only the child seems to be looking at us directly. This also involves her in the sub-system of 'Intermediary' (children, servants, dogs, horses, and other 'inferior' creatures) included in the foreground of a painting to draw us into the world of the main characters. The woman's eyework is ambiguous: she seems to be gazing past us, deliberately not engaging with our eye, in a line with where the road she is guarding seems to have come from. An absence of gaze is also an option in this system. Here, we might read the shuttered windows of the houses in the relentless midday heat as a trope for blind, ungazing eyes. Another subsystem of Gaze which is very common in landscapes is the 'Path' — an actual road or path, or a path of light, water, color, etc. — which serves to draw the viewer into the depths of the painting, beyond the foreground. In this case the space between the feet and bodies of the woman and child draw us onto the road — which is presumably where we are aiming for once we get beyond the gate. But the gatekeeper's wife blocks this path both visually and physically; this is her major role, which we will see reflected in
194 M.O'Toole
many of the other choices Drysdale has made in the Modal, Composi- tional, and Representational functions.
Eyework, Intermediaries, and Paths are systems which use some aspect of the represented world to draw us into the painting. However, their primary function is still Modal, to establish the relation between the viewer and that world. The systems I have grouped under the heading of Focus will involve compositional devices, but they too have a predomi- nantly Modal function. The system of Perspective has served, since it was articulated by the Renaissance theorists, to make us feel involved with the depicted world in depth, to enable us to penetrate beyond the plane surface of the foreground. When we follow the perspective of The Gate- keeper's Wife, what do we find? That the lines of perspective pass around and through her body and end in a vanishing point we cannot see because of her. Similarly with Light: there appear to be two sources of illumination in the painting — one behind us, lighting up the woman's face and hands, the gate, the end wall of the house; and another, no less bright, illuminat- ing the landscape beyond the settlement. The source of this second light seems to be at the vanishing point of the road and the perspective, blocked from our vision at the midpoint of the picture vertically and the Golden Section horizontally by the woman's 'center of gravity' (her belly? her womb?). The gatekeeping is not merely an institutional function (to be discussed in terms of the Representational systems), but an intensely moral-aesthetic one involving the way the painting constructs us as viewing subjects through the systems of the Modal function.
Color, Scale, and Volume — other sub-systems of Focus — also seem to emphasize the woman's dominance. The pinks and oranges in the road and landscape seem to come to a focus in the strong red of her cardigan. Her scale is constructed to dominate everything else in the picture — the child, the pub or house, the fence, and even the telegraph pole. The fullness and three-dimensionality of her figure makes everything else look as flat as a stage setting (partly, of course, because of the incompleteness of the perspective, which we noted earlier).
Another aspect of the Modal function is the range of systems listed on the right-hand side of the top Modal box in Table 2; these are more akin to the concept of 'modality' as understood by literary critics since Uspen- sky (1973).2 These systems manifest, or realize, the artist's attitude to the reality he is depicting. This is not something we can establish with any objective certainty — unless we have biographical evidence, or the artist's word for it (and we don't always take the artist's word for it!). It is something we reconstruct from observing the choices the artist had made from a number of specific systems. The virtue of specifying these systems and giving our reading of each is that this provides us with arguable
evidence for an interpretation. Art criticism is full of interpretations of artists' intentions, what they 'meant' by depicting things as they did, but critics rarely bother to articulate how they reach the conclusions they propound with such confidence. Presumably, their training and the constant practice they get at making these kinds of judgment are important factors, but we should recognize that to a considerable extent their prestige as critics depends on keeping us in the dark about how they know so much about what the artist meant with such certainty. Because semiotics requires a certain explicitness of description, and in the case of this model requires the explication of what the artist 'can mean', it opens up discussion to a range of possible interpretations which can be debated because the grounds for each interpretation are available. Interpretation becomes a more democratic activity, to be enjoyed by the average gallery visitor or art student, because it no longer depends on the mystique of authority but applies a consistent set of analytical techniques whose findings can be coherently articulated and debated.
The system of Frame concerns what the artist has chosen to include within the frame of the picture and what to exclude, and the orientation of the represented elements to the picture's edges. It is thus related to the systematic Omissions (trees, other inhabitants) that we may observe at the rank…

A systemic-functional semiotics of art

Documents

semiotics

art

abstract paintings

visual arts

semiotic models