On Scale and its Disappearance

A ruler offers a promise. It fixes length, establishes proportion, provides a stable reference against which things can be measured. It anchors the abstract idea of size in something reliable and repeatable. Place it beside an object and a question is answered: how big is it?

That question is now less secure than it used to be.

Consider an image on a screen. A photograph viewed on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop can be enlarged, reduced, stretched to fill a window or shrunk to a thumbnail. Its dimensions change with a pinch or a swipe. Ask how large it is, and no clear answer presents itself. The question no longer attaches cleanly to the image. It depends on the device, the viewing conditions, the moment. This does not mean that scale has disappeared entirely. Screens have size. They display images at measurable dimensions. It is even possible, with some effort, to calibrate images on screen, to make them correspond to a chosen scale. I have, at various times, displayed ruler images along the edge of a laptop screen as an improvised tool, precisely scaled for that purpose. It works. But the fact that it might need to be done at all is telling.

Scale, in the context of screens, is no longer an intrinsic property of images. It does not arrive with them. It is imposed afterwards, managed, adjusted, or simply ignored. The image floats free of any fixed relation to the world of objects. It appears, but it does not declare how it is to be encountered. This marks a shift in the conditions under which images are made and seen.

There was a time, not so long ago, when photographs were usually encountered as physical objects. Prints had size, surface, weight. They occupied space. Their scale was not something to be adjusted in the moment of viewing but something that had been decided in advance. To make a photograph was, among other things, to decide how large it should be. That decision carried consequences. A small print demanded intimacy. A larger one altered the relation between image and body. 

Photobooks and monographs continue to preserve something of this condition. Images are printed at a fixed size, on a chosen surface, arranged within a sequence that determines how they are encountered. Even if compromises are made in production, the work has been tested, adjusted, and resolved within those constraints. The scale at which an image appears is not incidental. It forms part of how it is to be seen, and that is shared, more or less consistently, with the viewer. The image does not float free. It arrives with its dimensions already decided.

Students today often encounter photography under different conditions. Images are viewed on screens, circulated digitally, scaled at will. The question of size recedes. The image is encountered, but its relation to the viewer’s body is seldom fixed or even considered. One works not with objects but with sheer, sterilised appearances that can be resized without resistance. This can be convenient. It allows for rapid production, easy sharing, reduced material cost. But it also removes a set of decisions—about scale, surface and material presence. The work no longer determines its own scale and form in the same way. That determination is deferred to the device, the context, the moment of viewing.

Other media maintain a different relation to scale.

In sculpture, for example, scale is not an optional consideration. A three-dimensional object occupies space in direct proportion to its surroundings and to the human body. A figure modelled at eight inches in height is immediately understood in relation to the human form. It presents itself as scaled. It cannot avoid doing so. This has consequences for how such work is read. Small-scale sculpture, particularly when representational, is often received as a model rather than as a work in its own right. It suggests a larger object, a potential enlargement, a proposal rather than a conclusion. The scale invites that interpretation, whether intended or not. The work sits within a set of expectations more commonly associated with models and maquettes, where objects function more as intermediaries rather than as ends in themselves. A small figure suggests something larger. It appears provisional, preparatory, or subordinate to another, implied form or version. This relation need not be intended, but is difficult to avoid. Scale does the work quietly, before anything else has been established.

Pictorial media are different in this respect.

A photograph, drawing, or print routinely presents objects at multiple implied scales within a single image. Perspective distributes size. A figure may appear large or small depending on its position, not the size of the image itself. An eight-inch figure in a photograph is not taken to be an eight-inch figure. It is simply a figure, shown as it appears within the pictorial space.

The scale of the image and the scale of what it depicts are not the same thing. This difference has always been present. What has changed is the stability of the image as an object. When photographs were consistently encountered as prints, their scale and their material presence formed part of the experience. Now, increasingly, they are encountered as variable displays. Scale becomes fluid, contingent, and often unremarked. What has been lost is not scale itself, but the conditions that made it obvious, and moreover, significant.

In the pursuit of convenience, and in some respects sustainability, images have become easier to produce, circulate and view. They are less tied to specific materials, less constrained by fixed formats. But with that shift comes an attenuation of certain kinds of engagement and appreciation. Scale no longer anchors the image in relation to the body in the same way. It is available, but not insisted upon.

This is not simply a loss. It’s a change of emphasis. New possibilities emerge as others recede. There is a tendency, however, for what is gained in flexibility to be mistaken for neutrality or advantage. The absence of fixed scale can appear as a kind of freedom, when in fact it is another condition, one that shapes how images are encountered just as surely as any predetermined format.

Scale has not disappeared. It has become less visible and less available as a decision. And where it is not actively considered, it is quietly determined elsewhere.

For MT

In Honour of Donald Brook

From the cover of "Get a Life", Donald Brook, 2014.

The following is from a memorial service held in honour of Donald Brook (1927-2018) held at the Ron Radford Auditorium – Art Gallery of South Australia, Thursday 7 March, 2019.


When invited to give a lecture to accompany a group exhibition in 2015, Donald didn’t attempt to massage any egos or to ingratiate himself by means of praise and adulation for the work presented. Instead he made an important observation about the difference between art on the one hand and works of art on the other; between the discovery of repeatable acts of ingenuity and a particular class of items, only very few of which are the result of such acts. I suspect that this was a great disappointment to his audience. After all, not even the most incorrigible art enthusiast is likely to welcome the suggestion that their favourite works of art are almost certainly bereft of art.

Donald was obviously well aware of “the awful truth about what art is”—of the logical impossibility of our ever deliberately making art. Works of art, on the other hand, are easily contrived, but the discovery of new forms of ingenuity—art in this stricter sense—is not a contrivable circumstance. Donald’s slogan “Art is the driver of cultural evolution” was never about works of art, it was always about innovations that change the face of culture.

He never stated it explicitly, but Donald’s theory of art is a theory of illumination, insight, discovery and revelation. It is a revelation about revelation itself. However, if art has almost nothing to do with works of art and even less to do with the machinations of the artworld, then it follows that art theory is not what we usually take it to be. More to the point—and I’m sure Donald recognised this with more than a pinch of irony—it follows that as an art theorist he really was one of a kind! Had he lost his marbles? Was he playing with words? Or worse still, was he Theorising with a capital T? No. None of these. He was merely following the logic of the most important philosopher of his lifetime: Ludwig Wittgenstein.

For Wittgenstein, as for Donald—indeed for all of us—representational communication is a sociocultural enterprise. It necessarily emerges at the level of communities, not at the level of individuals or their subsystems. In recent years, Donald took this insight a stage further by linking art, cultural evolution, nonverbal representation and purposeful action in what might be regarded as a unified theory of revelation. I realise this may appear grandiose. But put simply, Donald’s work enables us to see that the discovery of new forms of action is only possible in virtue of skills that we first gain as members of a community and moreover as users of representations.

Wittgenstein once famously invoked Goethe by declaring “In the beginning was the deed.” He was referring to the origins of language. Donald long knew, and very frequently argued, that this must necessarily have been a nonverbal deed. But we are now in a position to see that this first deed was in fact art: the first ever discovery of a repeatable act of ingenuity. In the beginning was art! This is a momentous realisation with profound implications.

It wasn’t only Newton who stood on the shoulders of giants. We all do. But Donald stood taller than most, and by standing on his shoulders we have an opportunity to appreciate the intimate relations between art and representation. As the privileged inheritors of everything that comes with our elevated position we owe it not just to Donald’s memory but to one another, in the broadest sense, not to squander his insights or the clarity that comes from his vantage point. We owe it to humankind—to art in fact—to revisit his work, to share it, to discuss it, to make use of his insights and thereby, and most especially, to ensure that his discoveries do not languish in obscurity. Culture flourishes in virtue of the things we repeat, not in virtue of the coruscating flotsam that we leave in our wake. Donald lives on not merely or even mainly in the vividness or vagueness of our memories but in the public sharing of his outstanding contributions to culture.

I miss him dearly, but I never cease to be astounded by the light that Donald’s work continues to shed.

Farewell Donald

Your friend Jim
Glasgow, February, 2019.

"Get a Life" by Donald Brook: A Review

This review was originally published in Artlink Magazine Vol.34 No.3 here.

Get a life is a deceptive book, not because its author seeks to misdirect the reader, nor because he is in any way naive about the implications of his theories, but because the ideas it contains are so entertainingly and unthreateningly presented, yet on close examination they turn out to have teeth — sharp ones.

This new ebook by the British-Australian art theorist Donald Brook is a compendium of papers, articles and biographical recollections that trace Brook's developing thought from the mid 1960's to the present day. The various "perls" (a pun on the computer programming language), as he calls them, are strung together with chronological recollections of Brook's many involvements with the Australian artworld during the same period as well as several descriptions of other formative, informative, extraordinary, exasperating and sometimes poignant episodes and encounters.

For the last 50 years Brook has been weaving together various closely interrelated strands of conceptual analysis leading to the formulation of a body of theories with significant implications for our understanding of art, culture and perception — issues that are as relevant today as they ever were. Whether a modest ebook is the most appropriate or impactful means of disseminating these ideas remains to be seen, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the contents of this offering apply merely to the production, theory and consumption or artworks or even to the wider machinations of the artworld. Even a brief scan should be sufficient to persuade even the most skeptical reader that this book is packed with ideas, thought-provoking challenges to orthodoxy and even several powerful conceptual tools that could easily keep a diligent theorist employed for a very long time indeed.

Such glowing remarks beg a glaring question: if Brook has been a prominent and widely published member of the Australian artworld and his ‘perls’ have frequently been dispersed in international waters then why is he almost completely unknown outside Australia? It is tempting to jump to some scathing conclusions here about the narrow focus of the Anglo American outlook but whilst there is probably some truth in this conclusion I suspect that the factors involved are more complex than such a superficial response would suggest. 

The period of Brook's principal activity coincides with one in which Continental philosophy in general and Post-Structuralism in particular have held considerable attractions for many artists and art theorists. The clear reverberations of this cultural trend can still be discerned amongst much contemporary art and art criticism, yet throughout this period Brook's allegiances have remained firmly within the Analytic tradition, a tradition known more for its asceticism and restraint than its ability to enthral, entertain or even to mystify. The artworld isn't exactly renowned for its preoccupation with clarity, conceptual precision and disciplined enquiry and this presents a difficulty for any theorist aligned more with Wittgenstein, Ryle and J. L. Austin than Barthes, Derrida or Merleau-Ponty. This is not to say that Brook's writings are arid tracts with humble ambitions, quite the reverse, but what it does mean is that his rejection of much that is held sacred both within the Continental as well as the Analytic traditions of philosophy leaves him with few allies in the philosophy camp. Little wonder then that he continues to describe himself an artist and art theorist. But this also inevitably puts him into conflict with advocates of the transcendence of art or its intrinsic alterity and ineffability. Brook's claims are at once more substantial and more insightful and by diligent means he takes the careful reader on a journey that leads to some extraordinarily revealing realisations about the intimate and inextricable relations between representation, perception art and culture.

One of the most important additions to the toolkit of any bona fide pearl hunter is a implement for levering apart the two halves of shells that stubbornly conceal their contents. Over the years Brook has developed an uncanny knack of driving a critical wedge between what are commonly regarded as indivisible entities, of making distinctions where only ambiguity reigns. In the 1960’s he began to focus his attention on a curious division commonly encountered in commentaries on sculpture. In the paper "Perception and the Critical Appraisal of Sculpture" (1969) Brook describes how commentators often adopt one of two distinct forms of descriptive strategy that he defines as "Object Accounts" or "Picture Accounts". It turns out that these two approaches are the linguistic face of two radically different procedures of nonverbal representation, procedures that inform our everyday speech to a significant degree. Moreover, Picture Accounts are the result of cultural innovations of the kind exemplified by the 15h Century discovery of perspective and—incidentally—are centrally implicated in the perplexities of many optical illusions. Many such techniques that we now take for granted were completely unknown in ancient times, for example the knack of using blue pigments to depict aerial perspective. Only in recent years has it been confirmed — thus corroborating Brook's thesis — that colour perception for example is significantly informed by the cultural emergence of skills and materials capable of enhancing our genetically inherited capacities.

The emphasis on cultural innovation in Brook's thought is crucial and leads to several other important insights, perhaps the most prominent of which is a theory of what art actually is: an old canard perhaps but one that finds new life under Brook's discriminating lens. Brook argues that the artworld has a vested interest in claiming that art is a unique commodity that inheres only in works of art, whereas art is in fact the emergence of previously unexpected skills of human ingenuity that, once discovered, can subsequently be repeated and refined. Computer games, perspective, nicotine patches, photographs, particle accelerators, sculptures and even new forms of crime are all products of art. Whether these artefacts of art will be accepted by the artworld as works of art is, of course, a question that actually has very little to do with art. Furthermore, what follows, as Brook is quick to clarify, is the realisation that there is no such thing as art history, only the "construction of a rag-bag of stories about the ways in which certain loosely related cultural kinds have emerged, have changed, and have eventually been superseded."

Inevitably the arguments are more subtly nuanced than a brief summary can possibly elucidate but it should be apparent that this ebook has a lot to offer anyone interested in getting to grips with issues that have stymied philosophers and art theorists for centuries. Theories of all kinds should be measured by their ability to enable insights and to explain puzzles that have so far eluded our best efforts. Ideally they should also be clear and the examples they provide, vividly accessible. Get a Life succeeds admirably in doing so and into the bargain we also get several other gems including one of the most ludicrously funny yet shockingly chilling recollections ever to have graced the pages of a book of theory. "Depravity in Wharfdale" is a masterpiece of storytelling that will leave you breathless with its laughable grotesquery.

Brook can certainly spin a yarn, but even though Get a Life is frequently entertaining his intention is clearly not to regale us nor to showcase his linguistic or critical prowess but to provide an opportunity for close scrutiny of radical ideas that are in genuine need of serious critical attention. Inevitably there are times where the measured discussion betrays a hint of irritation at the paucity of critical reception of his work but it is clear that Brook has more pressing repercussions to explore than to become embroiled in petty bickering or bitterness.

Get a Life is an immensely intelligent book. It is witty but never cocky, eloquent but never showy, insightful but never boastful, and challenging but never laboured. Of course, you will want to draw your own conclusions. I can only recommend that you get a copy (here).

Colour Perception And The Impossibility Of Ever Painting Things Exactly As They Are.

When I was sixteen I had my first serious opportunity to do an oil painting en plein air as it is sometimes referred to, harking back to the French impressionist practice of painting in the open. I had an easel and primed board set in front of a huge field of oilseed rape and the choice of a handsome selection of colours. I also had plenty of time, it being the summer holiday, and my plan was to build up the painting gradually as each successive layer dried. Everything went well enough until I began working on the intense yellow of the oilseed rape. I could mix the colour very convincingly on the palette and for a while there seemed to be little difference between my yellow and the yellow of the field. But as the lighting conditions changed, the difference between painting and field was unmistakable. This was a source of enormous frustration to me since it seemed that either my skills of colour mixing were defective or else the paints were sub-standard. Actually the paints were professional quality oils so it seemed unlikely that they were at fault but what I didn't realise then but is clear to me now is that the paints were indeed defective. All paints are. The reason we don't complain to Windsor and Newton or Rowney is because our perceptual powers are also systematically limited in ways that we do not notice because these flaws are shared and are therefore the perceptual norm. Pictorial representations such as oil paintings or photographs would be impossible without these shared perceptual limitations because pulverised pigments or chemical dyes—even when expertly mixed—would almost never seem to have the same properties as the things they represent. Their chemical structure and therefore their spectral properties under varying lighting conditions would simply be too easily discriminable for use as colour substitutes. If our perceptual capacities were faultless, no two different things would ever seem to be the same.

The issue can be better understood in the case of my struggles with oil painting. The reason the yellow of my painting and the field seemed to be the same for a short time was because under those particular lighting conditions I was incapable of discriminating between them. Other humans would have the same difficulty whereas other perceivers with different perceptual skills probably wouldn't have nearly the same trouble. Tetrachromats who—like many birds, fish and amphibians—possess an extra set of colour-sensitive cones on their retinas, would be unlikely to make the same mistake. When the lighting conditions over the field changed, the differing spectral properties of the paint and oilseed rape absorbed and reflected light in ways that were more easily discriminated (for me with my trichromatic vision) so it was obvious that the paint wasn't the same shade as the oilseed rape. Any hope I had of mixing a perfect spectral match of the crop was doomed before I had even begun. Perhaps if I had known this at the time I wouldn't have mistakenly concluded that the fault was due to a lack of skill on my part, but rather to inherited weaknesses which make all the wonders of pictorial representation possible in the first place.

Recognition

Language has to be learned, but what of images?

In recent decades, research using functional brain imaging techniques has shown conclusively what many people already suspected; namely, that when we re-encounter something, our brain activity corresponds closely to that of earlier encounters of the same kind. There really couldn't be a better word to describe this than "recognition". We also know from related studies that representations also trigger corresponding recognition networks to the things represented, and even linguistic representations—nouns for instance—which bear nothing in common with the things they nominate, activate many portions of the brain associated with the things named, as well as others involved with language processing and conceptual understanding. Image recognition on the other hand, although it may trigger language associations, is not reliant upon language. Pictures, photorealistic pictures especially, are recognised because in certain respects and in certain circumstances they share much in common with the things they depict.

Last week, in a BBC programme devoted to the work of artist Michael Craig-Martin, the artist' final words are:

If you go back to the books that children are taught words in, you will have a picture of a ball and then there's the word "ball". And the reason for the book is to teach the child to know the word ball. But it's based on the idea that they already know what the picture is, because there isn't a ball there. There's a picture of a ball. So the child already has learned how to read pictures of things as though they were the things. Now, we do that so early, we are probably doing that at about two or three months. That's the foundation of language, not the words - it's the pictures of things that are the basis of our understanding.

We could quibble over the finer logic of Craig-Martin's thinking here but the general point is correct: we recognise representations as representations long before we learn to speak or read. What is less clear though, and what research has yet to confirm, is at which developmental period infants and animals become capable of responding differentially to representations as opposed to the things they represent. In other words: we don't yet know at what point infants learn that representations are representations, i.e. when their brain activity switches from the simple recognition of things in depictions to a recognition of depictions as depictions—as tools. It seems likely that this emergence is gradual, as gradual as the emergence of consciousness itself. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the ability to discriminate between a representation and whatever is represented lies at the very heart of consciousness.

The Discovery of Blue

Around a year ago I spoke with several painters about my hunch that it would never have occurred to ancient peoples to say that distant mountains "look blue". They were unconvinced, "Everyone sees distant mountains just like we do," they told me, "so there is no reason why distant mountains wouldn't have been described as looking blue." I argued that, whilst our sensory capacities have indeed remained the same, we can only say that distant mountains look blue because we are acquainted with pictorial techniques (and their associated terminology) that were completely unknown to our distant ancestors and even to recent cultures unfamiliar with these innovations. I had nothing to back up my claims except further argument and the near certain knowledge that there is no evidence anywhere in the world of ancient depictions of hazy blue mountains. 

Last week, with the help of another friend, I came across some very persuasive evidence in support of my claims.

In 2010 the linguist Guy Deutscher, published a book entitled "Through the Language Glass" which discusses the research of W. E. Gladstone, who in 1858, a decade prior to taking up office as British Prime Minister, published a 3 volume study of the work of Homer. Gladstone noted that Homer's entire oeuvre contains not a single mention of the colour blue. Hundreds of references are made to other colours but blue is entirely absent. Soon after the publication of Gladstone's work, a German philologist by the name of Lazarus Geiger, discovered that this absence of blue is characteristic of ancient texts the world over and is a notable instance of many similar cultural variations in the description of colours. Following Geiger's discoveries, the most obvious explanation — that the cause was attributable to colour-blindness — was immediately ruled out. Even Gladstone had initially concluded that this was the case but to his credit he also offered another more insightful explanation:

"The art of painting was wholly, and that dying was almost, unknown...The artificial colours with which the human eye was conversant, were chiefly the ill-defined, and anything but full-bodied, tints of metals. The materials, therefore, for a system of colour did not offer themselves to Homer's vision as they do to ours. Particular colours were indeed exhibited in rare beauty, as the blue of the sea and of the sky. Yet these colours were, so to speak, isolated fragments; and, not entering into a general scheme, they were apparently not conceived with the precision necessary to master them. It seems easy to comprehend that the eye may require familiarity with an ordered system of colours, as the condition of its being able closely to appreciate any one among them."

Deutscher describes several 20th Century anthropological studies in which many indigenous cultures have been found to have similarly limited vocabularies of colour. He discusses the commonplace theoretical explanations for these findings and how that mistakenly assumed various forms of physiological cause. Only very recently has it been confirmed that Gladstone's alternative explanation was correct: differences in the vocabulary of colour across cultures are the result of cultural developments (of acquired skills, tools and materials), not biological changes.

In order to elucidate the issues Deutscher invents a brilliant fantasy that deserves to be quoted at length:

"Imagine we are sometime in the distant future when every home is equipped with a machine that looks a bit like a microwave but in fact does far more than merely warm food up. It creates food out of thin air-or rather out of frozen stock cubes it teleports directly from the supermarket. Put a cube of fruit stock in the machine, for example, and at the touch of a few buttons you can conjure up any imaginable fruit: one button gives you a perfectly ripe avocado, another button a juicy grapefruit.
      But this is an entirely inadequate way to describe what this wonderful machine can do, because it is by no means limited to the few “legacy fruits” that were available in the early twenty-first century. The machine can create thousands of different fruits by manipulating the taste and the consistency on many different axes, such as firmness, juiciness, creaminess, airiness, sliminess, sweetness, tanginess, and many others that we don’t have precise words to describe. Press a button, and you’ll get a fruit that’s a bit like an avocado in its oily consistency, but with a taste halfway between a carrot and a mango. Twiddle a knob, and you’ll get a slimy lychee-like fruit with a taste somewhere between peach and watermelon.
      In fact, even coarse approximations like “a bit like X” or “halfway between Y and Z” do not do justice to the wealth of different flavors that will be available. Instead, our successors will have developed a rich and refined vocabulary to cover the whole space of possible tastes and consistencies. They will have specific names for hundreds of distinct areas in this space and will not be bound by the few particular tastes of the fruit we happen to be familiar with today.
      Now imagine that an anthropologist specializing in primitive cultures beams herself down to the natives in Silicon Valley, whose way of life has not advanced a kilobyte beyond the Google age and whose tools have remained just as primitive as they were in the twenty-first century. She brings along with her a tray of taste samples called the Munsell Taste System. On it are representative samples of the whole taste space, 1,024 little fruit cubes that automatically reconstitute themselves on the tray the moment one picks them up. She asks the natives to try each of these and tell her the name of the taste in their language, and she is astonished at the abject poverty of their fructiferous vocabulary. She cannot comprehend why they are struggling to describe the taste samples, why their only abstract taste concepts are limited to the crudest oppositions such as “sweet” and “sour,” and why the only other descriptions they manage to come up with are “it’s a bit like an X,” where X is the name of a certain legacy fruit. She begins to suspect that their taste buds have not yet fully evolved. But when she tests the natives, she establishes that they are fully capable of telling the difference between any two cubes in her sample. There is obviously nothing wrong with their tongue, but why then is their langue so defective?
      Let’s try to help her. Suppose you are one of those natives and she has just given you a cube that tastes like nothing you’ve ever tried before. Still, it vaguely reminds you of something. For a while you struggle to remember, then it dawns on you that this taste is slightly similar to those wild strawberries you had in a Parisian restaurant once, only this taste seems ten times more pronounced and is blended with a few other things that you can’t identify. So finally you say, very hesitantly, that “it’s a bit like wild strawberries.” Since you look like a particularly intelligent and articulate native, the anthropologist cannot resist posing a meta-question: doesn’t it feel odd and limiting, she asks, not to have precise vocabulary to describe tastes in the region of wild strawberries? You tell her that the only things “in the region of wild strawberry” that you’ve ever tasted before were wild strawberries, and that it has never crossed your mind that the taste of wild strawberries should need any more general or abstract description than “the taste of wild strawberries.” She smiles with baffled incomprehension.
      If all this sounds absurd, then just replace “taste” with “color” and you’ll see that the parallel is quite close. We do not have the occasion to manipulate the taste and consistency of fruit, and we are not exposed to a systematic array of highly “saturated” (that is, pure) tastes, only to a few random tastes that occur in the fruit we happen to know. So we have not developed a refined vocabulary to describe different ranges of fruity flavor in abstraction from a particular fruit. Likewise, people in primitive cultures-as Gladstone had observed at the very beginning of the color debate-have no occasion to manipulate colors artificially and are not exposed to a systematic array of highly saturated colors, only to the haphazard and often unsaturated colors presented by nature. So they have not developed a refined vocabulary to describe fine shades of hue. We don’t see the need to talk about the taste of a peach in abstraction from the particular object, namely a peach. They don’t see the need to talk about the color of a particular fish or bird or leaf in abstraction from the particular fish or bird or leaf. When we do talk about taste in abstraction from a particular fruit, we rely on the vaguest of opposites, such as “sweet” and “sour.” When they talk about color in abstraction from an object, they rely on the vague opposites “white/light” and “black/dark.” We find nothing strange in using “sweet” for a wide range of different tastes, and we are happy to say “sweet a bit like a mango,” or “sweet like a banana,” or “sweet like a watermelon.” They find nothing strange in using “black” for a wide range of colors and are happy to say “black like a leaf” or “black like the sea beyond the reef area.”
      In short, we have a refined vocabulary of color but a vague vocabulary of taste. We find the refinement of the former and vagueness of the latter equally natural, but this is only because of the cultural conventions we happen to have been born into. One day, others, who have been reared in different circumstances, may judge our vocabulary of taste to be just as unnatural and just as perplexingly deficient as the color system of Homer seems to us."

Cyanometer, 1789, for measuring the colour of the sky by Swiss physicist
 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt

In Direct Realism

An indirect portrait

An oil painting of the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid looks down from the wall of the room at Glasgow University that carries his name. Ask any member of the philosophy staff, as I did a couple of weeks ago, whether the painting is the original and you may well get the same answer: “I’m not sure… I think so”.  

Thomas Reid held the title of Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University from 1764 – 81 and is renowned for his disagreement with David Hume over the question of whether we experience reality directly or only as ideas in the mind, as Hume claimed.

By 1940 the British Analytic philosopher J. L. Austin outlined several significant misgivings with the linguistic snake in the grass known to philosophers as "indirect” perception.  He remarks: "The expression can cover too many rather different cases to be just what is wanted in any particular case."

When viewing a painted portrait, nobody would ever seriously argue that we see the sitter directly. But if Reid's stuffed head hung on the wall of Glasgow University, like a trophy stag in a Scottish baronial house, there would be little doubt (excepting the Hume’s of this world) about whether we saw the philosopher (or at least his remains) directly.

To receive something directly is usually for it to be available without delay or mediation. Face to face communication is direct in a way that letters and emails are not. But what about video phone technologies? Are Skype or FaceTime more direct than a letter? Austin would probably be quick to warn that individual cases are unlikely to help us in elucidating the broader question.

Perhaps the most important factor in any evaluation of directness is the degree to which something is mediated. The more mediation involved, the more opportunity there is for uncertainty about the nature of the mediation. Mediation opens the door to influence and this enables distortion and - most notably where human agency is involved - the possibility of manipulation and deceit.

Perhaps one of the principal reasons anyone might be interested in an original object as opposed its reproduction is because originals are valued for their directness, for their irreducible proximity to their point of origin. All forms of human intervention or technical reproduction are thought to contaminate or dilute this directness and to devalue the result. It should be noted though that this ‘sense’ of directness is in many ways a notional one. Without doubt there are numerous objects in the world that are believed to be originals but which are in fact copies, replicas or fakes. No doubt there are also originals in circulation that are believed to be of uncertain origin. Directness is something we attribute to artefacts and is not always – or even often - something that is borne upon their face, as the portrait hanging in the Reid room of Glasgow University clearly attests.

Sir Henry Raeburn's original

What better place for a portrait of a well known and respected philosopher than a university philosophy department? But then again, if the staff and students are unconcerned about its provenance then perhaps a reproduction is a perfect substitute. When I saw the painting hanging in the Reid room it just didn’t seem likely that it could be the original. The lack of security or attribution, the poor lighting, tatty décor and my vague suspicion that the original had been painted by one of Scotland’s most venerated painters, Sir Henry Raeburn, all suggested that this must be a copy. A little online detective work confirmed my suspicions. The painting hanging in the Reid room is a skilful copy attributed to the English painter James Cranke Jr. Even more interesting is the fact that the ‘original’, held by the Hunterian Art Gallery (part of Glasgow University), was painted in the year of Reid’s death from a preparatory portrait that is now in the ownership of the National Trust for Scotland, Fyvie Castle, Aberdeenshire.  Some would say, this preparatory study, also created by Raeburn, is the much better - and certainly the more direct - of the three portraits.

Sir Henry Raeburn's "summary" portrait, 1796