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perception." These terms refer to the spectator's capacity to perceive an
image or to experience an emotional effect as a result of viewing a marked
surface, whether painting, photograph, or scratched and spotted wall. Such
viewing involves a double recognition (hence, its "twofoldness"): one sees
both the material surface itself and some figure or thing that seems to inhabit
the "space" of that surface; Wollheim's illustration is a photograph of a
stained wall in which the figure of a boy can
be
discerned.
Awareness of the natural phenomenon of seeing-in allows one to set
about to make what (by Wollheim's definition) is properly called a
"representation," a surface that an artist marks with the specific intention
"that a spectator should see something in it." Such representations are not to
be
confused with symbols, maps, or other images that fail to call attention to
or "thematize" their own surfaces. Symbols of the more general type, such as
words, require that the interpreter have a previous knowledge of conven–
tions available to be applied to any statement in the relevant language.
Paintings differ in their specificity and immediacy of access. Most of the
knowledge the spectator requires can be found through the viewing process
itself. Ideally, the spectator's "careful, sensitive, and generally informed
scrutiny of the painting will extract from it the very information that is
needed to understand it.
It
is a kind of bootstrap operation." You look long
and hard and, with the momentum provided by Western culture's investment
in
the painting tradition itself, you pull up the "correct" meaning.
There is a deeply conservative aspect to this mode of seeing and
method of interpretation, a conservatism Wollheim is not afraid to acknowl–
edge. He situates himself as far as possible from currently fashionable con–
cerns for intertextuality and the play of the language of representation. He
presumes that an authoritative, "correct" viewing and meaning is there to be
experienced beyond ambiguity, multiplicity, and indeterminacy. Wollheim
denies that specific instances of artistic expression depend on the preexistence
of some reiterative expressive type (in other words, he is no poststruc–
turalist). Works of art, he believes, are accessible to the evidence of the eye
and can communicate directly because they touch upon a "common human
nature" (and by this concept, incidentally, he links his art criticism to the
concerns ofsocialism).
Accordingly, Wollheim returns to the model of visual inspection pro–
vided by the tradition of connoisseurship, a method that privileges the artist
as a kind of expressive genius as well as identifying the qualified interpreter
with that same privilege. AlI paintings are seen as historical equals, available
to a spectator who sits outside history in the realm of "common human na–
ture." Wollheim shifts back and forth between discussions of Renaissance and
modern masters without regard to their historicity or his own as viewer. The
object ofcriticism, the meaning or content of a work, is simply what the artist
consciously intended (or, in some cases, was unconsciously moved to do); and
