Art among the Objects

Author(s): Rudolf Arnheim

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer, 1987), pp. 677-685
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Art among the Objects

Rudolf Arnheim

Et l'on trouverait mille intermediaires entre la realite et les symboles

si l'on donnaitaux chosestous les mouvementsqu'ellessuggerent.

-GASTON

BACHELARD, La Poetique de l'espace

With the emergence of man from nature art emerged among the objects.
There was nothing to distinguish or exalt it in the beginning. Art did
not separate one kind of thing from the others but was rather a quality
common to them all. To the extent to which things were made by human
beings, art did not necessarily call for the skill of specialists. All things
took skill, and almost everybody had it.
This is the way an essayist of the eighteenth century might have
begun a treatise on our subject. By now his recourse to a mythical past
would sound naive and misleading, mainly because we have come to
pride ourselves on defining things by what distinguishes them from the
rest of the world. Thus art is laboriously separated from what is supposed
not to be art-a hopeless endeavor, which has more and more disfigured
our image of art by extirpating it from its context. We have been left
with the absurd notion of art as a collection of useless artifacts generating
an unexplainable kind of pleasure.
Rescue from this impasse of our thinking is not likely to come primarily
from those of us who, established on the island of artistic theory and
practice, look around at what else there is in the world to see; rather it
will come from those who are curious about what human beings meet,
make, and use, and who in the course of their explorations run into
Critical Inquiry 13 (Summer 1987)
O 1987 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/87/1304-0001$01.00.

All rights reserved.

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678

Rudolf Arnheim

Art among the Objects

objects prominently displaying the property we call art. Psychologists,

sociologists, and anthropologists have been driven to view art in the
context of nature, ritual, shelter, and the whole furniture of civilization.
As a characteristic recent example I mention a thorough interview study,
The Meaning of Things, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene RochbergHalton, in which three generations of families from the Chicago area
were questioned about their favorite possessions.' Pictures, sculptures,
and all sorts of craft work turned up at a more or less modest place in
the inventory of the home, and the reasons given for their value make
wholesome reading for specialists in aesthetics.
As the subtitle of the Chicago study-Symbols in the Developmentof
theSelf-indicates, its authors were mainly concerned with the psychological
questions of what those cherished objects do for their possessors, what
needs they satisfy, and what traits they acquire by the uses to which they
are put. This leaves room for further studies focusing on the nature of
the objects themselves. Seen in the context of the rest of the world, what
are the characteristics of the objects we single out when we talk about
art? A few observations on this equally psychological aspect of the subject
are offered in what follows.
Art objects like all other physical things are known to us exclusively
as perceptual experiences, that is, as things we see or hear, touch or
smell. In this respect there is no difference between a tree, a chair, and
a painting. There is no difference either as to the two ways we deal with
those experiences. We can handle objects, as when we fell a tree or carve
a block of marble or crate a painting; or we can contemplate them, as
when we admire a waterfall or listen to a concert.
There also is no primary difference between the ways in which we
come to know objects as independent entities in the first place. Although
we can influence percepts by handling them or by changing our position
in relation to them, we learn soon that they have an obstinacy of their
own. They cling to their place or move at their own initiative. It is the
recalcitrance of the perceptual object's behavior that makes us experience
the world as existing independently of our own selves. The psychoanalysts
have taught us that this realization causes a traumatic shock which is
1. See Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, TheMeaning of Things:
Symbolsin the Developmentof the Self (Cambridge, 1981).

Rudolf Arnheim retired from Harvard University as professor

emeritus of the psychology of art. He then taught as a visiting professor
at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 1983. His most recently
published book is New Essays on the Psychologyof Art. At present he is
preparing the new edition of The Power of the Center, a theory of visual
composition first published in 1982.

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Critical Inquiry

Summer1987

679

overcome only by a considerable cognitive effort. At the very beginning

of life the infant has to cope with the illusion of what D. W. Winnicott
has called the primordial omnipotence of the self.2 Gradually the infant
learns how to come to terms with the other wills, embodied in living and
nonliving things-a task made easier by the assistance of "transitional
objects." The thumb, the teddy bear, and the security blanket are called
transitional by Winnicott because they are more readily at the beck and
call of the child than other things but also begin to acquaint him with
the limits of his power. They will do some things for him but are unable
or unwilling to do others.
The problem survives through everybody's lifetime, and there develops
a scale of compliance, reaching from the most amenable objects to those
hardest to conquer. On this scale, somewhere between a kid glove and
a Tibetan mountain, is the place of works of art. It stands to reason that
manmade things are among the most obedient, but it is also true that
our acquaintance with the nature of physical materials teaches us to be
patient with the limits of the service to be expected from tools and
furniture. Wood will not bend, and water will not stay put.
Here art offers a special difficulty to our thinking because it involves
not only the making of physical objects or the bringing about of physical
performance, but it is also, and perhaps first of all, a projection of our
own mental images upon the world of things. To be sure, such goal
images guide the conception of many objects, but the mental anticipation
of, say, a boat to be built tends to include the image of the wooden object
with its physical virtues and limitations. The goal image of a painting or
musical composition, on the other hand, is much more likely to include
the properties of the medium only "in the pure," that is, as idealized
character traits, fused with the thematic and compositional image of the
work, rather than as agents of explicit material constraints. Now, mental
images are the realm of experience over which the mind rules most
completely; therefore, nowhere does the infant's illusion of omnipotence
survive more effectively in the adult than in the materialization of mental
models. Works of art are the adult's transitional objects par excellence.
Hence the characteristic struggle of the artist with his or her medium,
the exasperating discrepancy between the work as envisioned and its
realization in the "flesh." The sculptor argues with the wood or stone,
the dancer with his or her body. Trying to get around the problem by
contending, as some aestheticians have done, that the mental conception
of the work of art, uncontaminated by its material embodiment, is the
true work, misrepresents the situation seriously, because the incarnation
of the artist's vision, his or her version of the eucharistic miracle, is an
indispensable value of the work.
2. See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York, 1971).

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680

Rudolf Arnheim

Art among the Objects

Through the struggle with their materials, artists come to realize in

a particularly dramatic way that the experiences we call physical objects
are anything but inert matter. They are vehicles of behavior, embodied
initiatives, and only when their dynamic nature confronts us actively are
we likely to notice them explicitly. Martin Heidegger, in his essay "Das
Ding," points out that in the European languages things are closely
related to causes, choseor cosa to causa, and in the same vein Hans-Georg
Gadamer refers to the kinship of Ding and Sache in German.3 Objects
are things that concern us, in the original Latin sense of objectum,that
is, of things thrown into our way as obstacles or signs, forbidding or
inviting, calling for response. And soberingly enough, language defines
the counterparts of objects as subjects, that is, as what is passively subjected
to the things. Language tells us that we are what we are by what we are
subjected to. In the arts, this has been brought home to us by the early
filmmakers, who knew that their medium converted the props of the
setting, immobile on the theater stage, into actors. The film mobilized
the furniture of nature and the manmade environment by singling out
its items, giving them entrances and exits, making them approach or
recede, and varying their appearance as demanded by their roles in the
plot.
What are some of the character traits that enable objects to play
their active part? Remember, first of all, that the isolated object, the
single thing that comes to mind when we think of art nowadays, is a
secondary crystallization, an enfeebled leftover of what is originally an
undivided environment. It is true that within the world of a painting or
film, things derive their meaning from the context in which they are
shown. The work of art as a whole, however, can no longer rely on a
similar support from the outer world in which it dwells. This extirpation
from its space and time is due to special cultural conditions. Just as in
society the group precedes the individual, it takes special conditions to
detach objects from their surroundings.
Primarily there is the total setting of the space in which we operate.
In the practice of daily life this setting is a pattern of constraints and
offerings, the path in the landscape, the streets in the city, the walls and
the doors. Only secondarily is this "life space," as the psychologist Kurt
Lewin has called it, broken down into a configuration of objects, each
endowed with its own messages.4 The art object in particular, the single
sculpture or dance or song or indeed the single building, is only a remnant
of the undiminished cityscape or ceremony or the integrated interior of,
say, a medieval church. By now, the single art object, instead of being
3. See Martin Heidegger, "Das Ding," Vortrageund Aufsatze(Pfullingen, 1954); HansGeorg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics,ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1976), p. 71.
4. See Kurt Lewin, A Dynamic Theoryof Personality: SelectedPapers, trans. Donald K.
Adams and Karl E. Zener (New York, 1935).

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Critical Inquiry

Summer1987

681

supported in its partial function by its place and time, is expected to

carry a total and complete message against the opposition of an incongruous
neighborhood.
Lewin has defined the behavior of objects as their valence or demand
quality (Aufforderungscharakter).Naturally, in order to call forth human
responses, objects must be known and understood, and the perceiver
must feel the urge to approach or avoid them. Sigmund Freud has
remarked: "But if I have a path open to me, does that fact automatically
decide that I shall take it? I need a motive in addition before I resolve
in favor of it and furthermore a force to propel me along the path."5
Even so, the attractions and repulsions are experienced as issuing from
the objects themselves.
In their most radical social manifestation the motivating forces of
objects are revealed by the pathology of what Karl Marx described as
the fetishism of commodities. Recently, Gaspare Barbiellini Amidei and
Bachisio Bandinu, in what they call "a disquieting investigation of our
captivity among the objects," have derived from the Marxist concept an
analysis of traditional and modern attitudes based on the observation,
"the fact is that the objects speak, and that people speak through the
objects."6 I shall refer later to this study but will cite here a striking
illustration of its thesis in a short novel, Les Choses by Georges Perec,
which describes a group of Parisian students in the 1960s. Employed by
market research agencies to trace the responses of consumers, these
students themselves are hopelessly addicted to the lure of objects offering
comfort and prestige. "In their world it was almost the rule always to
desire more than one could acquire. This was not of their own making,
it was a law of the civilization, a given fact most aptly expressed in
publicity quite in general, the magazines, the art of window display, the
spectacle of street life, and in certain ways even in all of what goes by
the name of cultural products."7 The novel opens with a long, ghostly
panorama of a dream apartment, filled with all the luxury objects of
enviable living, an assembly of silent sirens, each displaying its seductive
charms, but all in the total absence of human beings. Presented here is
valence in the abstract, attractiveness as such.
It is particularly pertinent to the valence of art objects that quite in
general so many of the properties inviting response are directly contained
in perceptual appearance. Lewin speaks of forces going out "from a
sharp edge, from a breakable object, or from the symmetrical or asymmetrical disposition of objects on both sides of the path taken by the
5. Sigmund Freud, A GeneralIntroductionto Psychoanalysis,trans. Joan Riviere (Garden
City, N.Y., 1943), p. 43; translation modified.
6. Gaspare Barbiellini Amidei and Bachisio Bandinu, II re e unfeticcio: romanzodi cose
(Milan, 1976), p. 24; my translation.
7. Georges Perec, Les Choses: une Histoire des Annees soixante (Paris, 1965), p. 44; my
translation.

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682

Rudolf Arnheim

Art among the Objects

child."8 Another psychologist, James J. Gibson, has somewhat elaborated

on the description of the perceptual qualities that invite action and has
given them the name "affordances."9
The basic affordance of a work of art is that of being readily perceivable.
Since the human senses are geared biologically to the apprehension of
relevant signals, a bugle tune, a fire alarm, or a piece of music detaches
itself from a background of noises by its definable tones, and this comprehensibility arouses in the hearer the urge to respond. Similarly in
painting, sculpture, or architecture, the orderly visual structure of shape,
size, and color in a well-made work attracts viewers through its immediate
readability. This primary affordance gives access to all the obvious allures
deriving from the subject matter of the work and the various personal
associations that may bind the consumer to it. In the most general sense
it is the very order and harmony of its appearance that distinguishes the
art object as an oasis in a disturbingly chaotic world. And only this organized
perceptual structure enables the art object spontaneously to illustrate
definite constellations of forces that underlie physical and mental functioning in general. The purified experience of such basic dynamic themes
as harmony and discord, balance, hierarchy, parallelism, crescendo, compression, or liberation is an affordance of fundamental cognitive value.
The social history of Western art during the recent few centuries
has shown that art is not necessarily deprived of these values when it is
torn from its moorings in space and time. By now, a Raphael or Picasso
belongs everywhere and nowhere, and the relation of the Acropolis to
modern Athens is essentially geographical. Like watches, barometers, or
books, such art objects perform their service wherever they are put. In
fact, the detachment from their birthplace tends to stress the timeless
wisdom of works of art, overshadowing their more local meaning. At the
same time there can be no question that Michelangelo's David was gravely
impaired when the original of the statue was moved from its politically
defined location in front of the Palazzo Vecchio to the anonymous tribuna
in the Academy. When sculptures and paintings are kidnapped by our
museums they offer a vital gain to the places to which they have been
taken, but they are no longer of and about those places.
This detachment interferes with the symbiotic intimacy tying art to
its users. Heidegger, at the beginning of the essay I cited above, complains
about today's reduction of all distances in space and time. The relation
that used to distinguish between close by and far away, present and past,
has been leveled by modern technology to a uniform optimal distance.
Heidegger asserts that this practical convenience has destroyed true
"nearness" between the viewer and the object viewed. His observation
reminds us that in an undisturbed spatial and temporal context the
variety of distances symbolizes degrees of belonging together or being
8. Lewin, A Dynamic Theoryof Personality, p. 50.
9. See James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approachto Visual Perception (Boston, 1979).

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Critical Inquiry

Summer1987

683

remote. One is close to a lover but distant from a judge, close to one's
workshop or away from home. In the organized architectural environment
of a church, one's distance from the altar or ceiling or the sharing of a
pew with one's neighbors are symbolically defined spatial relations.
Within the pictorial space of a painting the relations between the
objects it represents are similarly defined by meaning. In Seurat's Sunday
Afternoonon the GrandeJatte, chilling gaps keep the figures at a distance
from one another. The distance from the viewer outside the frame is
also determined, but only to the extent of the picture's power. The
location of the viewer is curiously twofold. The situation is similar to that
of reading a novel, which can place the reader at a chosen distance from
what is to be seen or heard in the story while leaving him bodily seated
at a fixed distance from the book. Similarly the painting splits the viewer
into two persons-one
nailed to a fictitious place through the outward
of
the
pictorial space, the other free to move back and forth
projection
before the wall to which the canvas is attached.
The things looked at also lead a double life. As physical objects they
remain unaffected by being viewed. As percepts, however, they are subject
to the idiosyncrasies of the viewer's mind. Furthermore, percepts are
transformed into memory images, and they may assume the material
shape of works of art. Removed from the control of the original stimulus,
they are manipulated even more freely-an exclusively human trick,
which made it possible for Freud to accuse art of serving gratuitous wish
fulfillment. This same distinction between physical things and mental
images, however, suggests that the Freudian approach calls for some
amendments.
First, it seems curious for a psychologist to accept the preeminence
of the world of bodily action to the extent of rejecting imagination as an
escape from reality. Is it not at least equally in keeping with the special
gifts of human nature to acknowledge the alternative standard of value?
Why not anchor true reality in the creations of the mind and treat the
"physical" world as a mere resource supplying the materials for the
exalted and purified images of the artist or thinker? This certainly is the
attitude of many devoted artists, poets, or scientists, even though it puts
them in conflict with almost any civilization.
Freud, of course, came to disapprove of the imagination as a cheap
product of the childish illusion of omnipotence, used by the mind to
shape things at its own selfish pleasure. The defeatist effect of such
daydreams is well illustrated in Perec's novel: "But between those oversized
reveries, to which they abandoned themselves with a strange complacency,
and the nonexistence of their real actions, no rational project that reconciled
the objective necessities with their financial possibilities asserted itself.
The immensity of their wishes paralyzed them."'0
10. Perec, Les Choses,p. 21; my translation.

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684

Rudolf Arnheim

Art among the Objects

True imagination, however, is quite another matter, and in fact we

have noted that psychoanalysis has come to recognize "transitionalobjects"
as ways of introducing the immature mind to a world in which each
component displays a character of its own to be coped with during the
adventures of living. In this perspective, art must be recognized as a
prime instrument for weaning the mind at the adult level.
An impressively large service is thereby demanded of art objects,
and indeed of objects in general. Heidegger makes this request most
radically when he expects a humble waterjug to reflect nothing less than
the cosmic quaternion of heaven and earth, the divine and the mortal.
More modestly we may be willing to limit the symbolism of the jug to
the humanly relevant activities of receiving, containing, and giving."
But even this smaller request insists on "making the objects speak." Gadamer
has observed that talk of respect for things has become more and more
unintelligible in an ever more technological world. Things, he says, "are
simply vanishing, and only the poet still remains true to them. But we
can still speak of a language of things when we remember what things
really are, namely, not a material that is used and consumed, not a tool
that is used and set aside, but something instead that has existence in
itself."'2
Understanding the language of things is not a privilege of the sophisticated. On the contrary, nonverbal language speaks most loudly
where the original rapport between man and his tools is still preserved.
Barbiellini Amidei and Bandinu, in the treatise I mentioned earlier, offer
a moving description of one of the most primitive populations left in
Europe, the shepherds of the Barbagia plains on Sardinia. Their simple
huts are equipped with two kinds of objects. A few are gotten in town
and have to be paid for. "Not being natural objects, they are not protected
by nature: they are always in possible danger and may suddenly refuse
to function." All the other objects are made by the shepherd himself of
granite, wood, hide, bone, or cork. "They don't cost money nor can their
price be translated into working hours." Making them emerge from
nature "is never a chore, even though they serve practical needs; in
making them there is always an element of playfulness. They are essential
but replaceable, and their presence can be invented at any time. The
things of nature offer themselves as materials. Therefore the attitude is
not one of anxiety but of trust, almost an affectionate carelessness. [The
shepherd] treats them as he pleases because they are his, and he understands
their course from life to death."'3
All those tools and implements are carved and kept in good shape
with the knife the shepherd always carries in his pocket. There is a
11. See Rudolf Arnheim, Towarda Psychologyof Art: CollectedEssays (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1966), p. 192.
12. Gadamer, PhilosophicalHermeneutics,p. 71.
13. Barbiellini Amidei and Bandinu, II re e unfeticcio, p. 68; my translation.

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CriticalInquiry

Summer1987

685

closeness between making and consuming that by now we rarely enjoy.

There are no paintings on the walls of the shepherd's home, no objects
that specialize in providing images of distant worlds, but there is a family
resemblance between the utensils and their makers by which the objects
reflect the style of life of their users. Having been made the right way
from the right materials, the objects reflect standards of honesty and
solidity for human conduct. They are guiding images, leading the
thoughtful mind by the symbolism of their appearance to the foundations
of life and behavior. They do so without giving up their primary location
as tangible agents in the world of bodily action. Their intimacy with the
setting in which they operate as companions of their users makes it easier
for them to be not only handled but also seen and heard.
In a world like ours in which objects, limited to practical function
and endowed with artificial values, no longer speak, works of art need
a special dispensation to do their duty, and their users need to be awakened
for a couple of hours at a time to be able to look and listen. And whereas
more normally it is the eloquence of the objects that makes art possible,
our hope for reviving the objects now comes from the arts.

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