CHAPTER ONE BODY AND IMAGE A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

‘Our perception being a part of things, things participate in the nature of our perception’ (Bergson 1991: 182).

‘The first drawing on a cave wall founded a tradition only because it was the recipient of another: that of perception’ (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 83).

“What do pictures really want?’ (J. Mitchell 1996).

INTRODUCTION

A few years ago I undertook a study of the rock carvings in the Simrishamn area of southeast Sweden. One of the major places with rock carvings, Simris 19 is today a sadly marooned block, quarried away on two sides and cut off from the beach by a modern road. Opposite the carved rock one finds a small car park and a picnic area. A large ‘hällristning’ sign points toward the rock with the carvings. Because of its accessibility there were a fair number of visitors to the site, and because I had a clipboard, scrolls of documentation, and must have looked as if I knew something about the carvings, people would ask me how old they were and what they meant. The first question was easy, the latter much more difficult, since this was precisely what I was attempting to find out! Couples would arrive, or family groups, stay for about ten or fifteen minutes, and then drive off. After a morning I became a little irritated by the constant interruptions to my work and by my new status as unofficial guide who, quite remarkably, spoke broken Swedish with an amusingly thick English accent. Better, I thought, to leave the rock when people came and wait until they went away. This might save a good deal of time.

But my study of the Simrishamn carvings was only partly concerned with what the images might mean. I wanted to experiment with a phenomenologically informed kinaesthetic approach to the rock art. In other words, I was interested in what effects the carvings themselves had on my body as someone looking at them: What did I have to do to see the carvings? How did I have to move? How did the qualities of the stone itself (colour, smoothness, presence or absence of cracks, surface morphology, size, and the like) affect my perception and relate to the positioning of the carvings? How might the location of the rock in the landscape affect my perception of it in relation to its surroundings? These questions were not in any direct way related to the meaning of the images at all. They were concerned with what the rock and its carvings were doing to me: their bodily or kinaesthetic influence on the way I moved and what I perceived.

In relation to Simris 19, I rapidly realized that it was not possible to see the carvings in any way that I might wish, or decide. If I wanted to see them closely, I was forced to move about the rock in a particular manner and in a particular sequence. The carvings were exerting their own power and influence in relation to what I saw and from where I saw it, and how I saw it. I was no longer a free agent who could simply move about and see whatever images I liked from wherever I liked. There was a dialectic at work between the rock itself, and its landscape location, and the positioning of the images carved on it. Even if one had no clue at all about what the images meant, it was still possible to describe bodily movement in relation to them. Furthermore, might not these patterns of bodily movement, dictated by the images themselves, be a fundamental part of the significance of the rock art? Might it not just be an arbitrary intellectual presupposition that meaning is somehow primary in the study of rock art?

Moving off the Simris 19 rock when people arrived, I decided to learn something from watching them observing the carvings. What did they do? What did they look at? How did they move? Where did they go? Were my own bodily movements simply a fickle personal engagement no doubt encouraged and helped by the fact that I had detailed plans of the carvings whereas they did not? People would approach from across the road. They would then stand below the rock and look across at the images on it. Although the total carved area is small enough for most of the images to be seen at once and from off the rock, those farther away are indistinct and difficult to make out. Furthermore, from any particular perspective many of the iconic images—the boats and the axes, and the human figures—appear upside down, while others are right side up. In relation to the perceiving body, this is a bit like displaying a painting upside down on the wall, or even hanging it at an angle—intensely irritating!

In order to see the images more clearly, people would climb onto the rock and walk within the image fields. In so doing, their feet were keeping the rock glassy and shiny. Other rocks with carvings in the area, not now visited, are covered with lichen and vegetation and browned by soil stains. They have lost some of their important experiential qualities. People would typically move around the groups of images in a circular fashion: clockwise or counterclockwise from bottom to top. They would also move around the sides of different groups of images in order to see them from different perspectives. Images that were the wrong way up from one angle righted themselves from another. What I had experienced, they were experiencing. The images themselves were orchestrating a spatial dance: bodies were moving in relation to them. People rarely stood still for any length of time but were moving and twirling and adopting different positions: generally looking down, but sometimes crouching or with their heads to one side, and sometimes it was obviously necessary to touch the carvings as well as to look at them. So these images had a direct influence, agency, and power in themselves: they set people in choreographed motion around them. And this force of the image was quite independent of verbal exegesis—of talking about meaning—although the movement often promoted talk of a rather different kind: ‘Oh, look! There’s a man holding a huge axe. I didn’t see him from over there!’ The main difference between my experience of the carvings and those of other visitors was a matter of knowledge. Having a plan, I knew what I was supposed to be seeing (for anyone unfamiliar with the study of prehistoric rock art, it has to be pointed out that at the wrong time of day and in the wrong kind of light it is often impossible to see anything on a rock that is known to be covered with images, such are the effects of weathering over thousands of years) and where it was, and therefore could see more on different areas of the rock. As a result, my movements were more complexly choreographed, or influenced by the images, and their relationships to each other. But the essentials were the same. The images on the Simris 19 rock prompted a ‘placial’ (I prefer to use this word to the much more abstract and distanced term ‘spatial’) dance around distinct groups of carvings within the overall image field occupied by all the carvings. By means of this extended anecdote I hope to have introduced the reader to some of the essential elements and important differences between iconographic and kinaesthetic approaches to rock art. I now want to discuss this in a more formal way.

THE ICONOGRAPHIC VERSUS THE KINAESTHETIC

I use the term ‘iconographic’ as a shorthand term to refer to the entire tradition of interpreting prehistoric rock art from its nineteenth-century origins to the present day. This approach to rock art has, of course, radically altered over the years, in tandem with wider intellectual trends within archaeological research. In the context of Scandinavian rock art research addressed in Chapters 2 and 4 (for a discussion of research on Irish megalithic art, see Chapter 3), the manner in which the images have been interpreted has altered in relation to the differing perspectives and intellectual agendas of ‘traditional’, ‘new’ or functionalist, and ‘post-processual’ or interpretive archaeology (Mandt 1995). Early work on the southern Scandinavian material attempted to find in it an entire pantheon of Nordic gods and related the carvings to the Nordic sagas. For Almgren (1927) the southern Scandinavian carvings were to be related to fertility cults and sun symbolism in the context of an agricultural economy. The material from northern Scandinavia, mainly depicting game animals, was alternatively understood in terms of hunting magic (Gjessing 1932; Hallström 1938), functionalist ideas that continued to be employed and refined during the 1960s and 1970s in broad comparative analyses (e.g., Hagen 1976; Malmer 1981). ‘Post-processual’ approaches have, alternatively, rigorously pursued a linguistic analogy in which the carvings can be read as texts and as sign systems (e.g., Nordbladh 1980; Tilley 1991). Gender differences and relations and transformative human states have been read into the carvings (e.g., Yates 1993; Tilley 1999; Mandt 2001; Hauptman Wahlgren 2002), and they have been related to totemic systems of social classification and structures of social and political power (Tilley 1991), shamanism (e.g., Helskog 1987; Devlet 2001;Viste 2003), social geographies (e.g., Bertilsson 1987; Mandt 1991), symbolic and experiential qualities of the landscape (e.g., Helskog 1999; Bradley 2000; Goldhahn 2002; Hauptman Wahlgren 2002), or various combinations of all of these. Such a list could go on and on. Despite all these changes, and the recent blossoming of different alternative approaches in a healthy theoretical pluralism (Mandt 1995; Hauptman Wahlgren 2000), there has remained a core concern subscribed to implicitly, and more usually explicitly, by all rock art researchers. The fundamental question and the foundation for all this research has always been: What does it mean? This, whatever the particular answers given or types of analyses undertaken, has been the primary motivation for rock art research, providing both the driving force and the intellectual motivation. Even if the question of meaning has been frequently sidestepped, in favour of an obsession with chronology in older traditional and functionalist studies, it still provided, and provides, the principal justification for empirical documentation: unless and until we have documented this art as precisely and comprehensively as possible, we cannot begin to understand what it means.

The hoped-for outcome of an iconographic approach is to lead us to a better understanding of the images as bearers of meaning, images that necessarily require decoding and interpretation. The potential outcome of a kinaesthetic approach is to tell us something different: about the manner in which the bodily postures and motions of people changed or remained the same in relation to the imagery and the manner in which it was encountered on different rocks.

Iconographic approaches are usually primarily cognitive in nature. They grant primacy to the human mind as a producer of the meaning of the images through sensory perception. It is the mind that responds to that which is seen in a disembodied way. Structuralist studies and, in particular, most semiotic perspectives have nothing to tell us about the role of the body in perception. Of course, they do underscore the structuring and structured qualities of the human mind which produces, or decodes, and thinks through the images. Kinaesthetic approaches, by contrast, stress the role of the carnal human body: perception is regarded as being both afforded and constrained by the sensuous human body. The general claim is that the manner in which we perceive, and therefore relate to visual imagery, is fundamentally related to the kinds of bodies we have. The body both limits and constrains, and enables us to perceive and react to imagery in specific embodied ways.

In iconographic approaches the rock art itself becomes ultimately superficial because it always represents something else, something more fundamental than itself. So, in studying images, we might perhaps hope to reclaim the intentions of the artist. It is these that are primary, and the task is to recover these from their material manifestations. Or the art may be held to be a visual representation of underlying structuring principles generating social practices. These are fundamental, and the aim of analysis is to go beyond the superficiality of the visual image to recover the underlying system. Alternatively, various styles of rock art may be held to objectify or represent particular cosmologies or mythological systems or rites. Again these are primary. The images themselves are simply manifestations of something deeper and more fundamental, something that might also be expressed in words or actions, or in structured systems of ceremonial beliefs and practices. What is common to all iconographic approaches is that they require us to go beyond and beneath the image to explain its meaning. The image itself is never enough. It is a material manifestation of something believed to be much deeper and more fundamental. What is curious about this approach, from a kinaesthetic perspective, is that the power of visual imagery ultimately becomes dematerialised because it is simply an opaque representation of something else: individual intentions, societal culture and values, history, myths and cosmologies, gender relations, or politics and power.

The intellectual background to the traditional iconographic approach to rock art is mainly derived from art historical analysis and developments in that field, and more widely, the analysis of visual culture heavily influenced since the 1970s by linguistics and a textual model, together with limited use of ethnographic analogies. As mentioned earlier, it has been transferred by archaeologists to the study of rock art in one form or another in terms of discussions of genres and styles, traditions and historical horizons, or more recently in the form of various structuralist and semiotic and post-structuralist approaches. It might be suggested that this is the wrong starting point to consider rock art because it ignores the very materiality of the medium, pretending that stone is just another form of canvas or page to be written on.

In the history of rock art research, the heavy influence of the art historical tradition in which we attempt to decode meaning, a language of pictorial representation, has had two striking and deleterious effects. First, the landscape context of rock carvings has hardly been discussed, or analyzed at all, in relation to the art. It has been peculiarly treated like a backdrop, in many ways equivalent in significance to the whitewashed walls of an art gallery in which paintings are displayed. Second, the material medium of the rock has been reduced in publications documenting the carvings to a white, two-dimensional space. Rock, being regarded as ‘natural’ rather than ‘cultural’, has been effectively eliminated from the documentation. Only the images themselves are regarded as significant. The rock itself is only an interpretive worry: Might the cupmark be simply a hollow caused by erosion? Is this line a crack? Have carvings differentially eroded away? With all the emphasis put on the images themselves, the rock carvings become decontextualised, both from their own landscapes and even from the rocks on which they are found. They become pure images. Because rock carvings have been represented as images on a two-dimensional surface, they become understood and thought of simply as surreal, disembodied images, rather than a physical form and presence on a rock at a particular place and in a particular landscape. It is then perhaps not so surprising that rock art has proved so difficult to understand: half the information has usually been stripped away in the process of documentation before the analysis of that which is left on paper even begins. From a kinaesthetic approach, the material medium—that is, the rock and its landscape context—is as fundamental in understanding the art as the imagery itself. Indeed, the claim is that one cannot be understood except in relation to the other. Thus, rock art is a relational nexus of images, material qualities of rocks, and landscapes.

This chapter attempts to develop such a kinaesthetic perspective on visual imagery. It suggests that a truly phenomenological study of imagery is grounded in the kinaesthetics of bodily movement. It explores the manner in which imagery impacts on and through the body and is understood through the medium of the relationship of the body to the phenomenal world within which it is enveloped. It suggests that an inappropriate ‘gallery view’ of imagery, the dominant perspective of the art historian until very recently, has led us astray in the study of prehistoric rock art (and, indeed, of other non-mobiliary forms of ‘classical’ art such as the paintings in the Sistine Chapel or contemporary earthworks, environmental art, and performance and body art, which have a fundamental carnal as opposed to purely cognitive significance). I argue that imagery works first and foremost through the flesh to influence the embodied mind. In this process cognition is secondary rather than primary. When the question of meaning arises, it works its way through and is distributed in relation to the plural kinaesthetic motions of the sensing and sensed body. What the body does in relation to imagery, its motions, its postures, how that imagery is sensed through the fingers or the ear or the nose, as much as through the organ of the eye, actively constitutes the mute significance of imagery which to have its kinaesthetic impact does not automatically require translation into either thoughts or meanings. The kinaesthetic significance of imagery is thus visceral. It works through the muscles and ligaments, through physical actions and postures which provide affordances for the perceptual apparatus of the body in relation to which meaning may be grafted on, or attached. Meaning is derived from and through the flesh, not a cognitive precipitate of the mind without a body, or a body without organs. However, to pretend that a kinaesthetic approach on its own is all that is required to study rock art would be little more than an exercise in empty rhetoric. There needs to be something more, and this, I argue, is a rejuvenated form of ‘phenomenological semiotics’ approached through the prism of a theory of metaphor and linked to sensory perception in the broadest sense.

The text attempts to develop this general argument for a kinaesthetics of rock art through a series of critical reflections on the work of key thinkers in phenomenological philosophy and anthropological approaches to art, material, and visual culture. I realise that for some readers, especially those with a pragmatic and empirical disposition, much, if not all, of this discussion will appear useless and irrelevant. I, on the other hand, feel it to be both necessary and relevant to develop the position I am advocating within a wider historical, philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual context. The argument begins with a brief discussion of ideas first outlined in Bergson’s Matter and Memory (Bergson [1896] 1991), in which some key aspects of a phenomenological and kinaesthetic approach to images can be found. This serves as an introduction to a more detailed consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s studies of art and aesthetics (collected together in Johnson 1993) and his final work, The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1973). I then critically consider ‘agency’ theories of art currently fashionable in anthropology, principally through the work of Gell (1998; 1999). This leads to the development of a kinaesthetic, as opposed to a cognitive, understanding of the significance of imagery. Finally, the link between a kinaesthetic approach and a traditional ‘iconographic’ perspective concerned with meaning is explored through the notion of a phenomenological semiotics.

BODY, IMAGE, AND MEMORY IN BERGSON

Bergson’s contemporary significance is that he helped to direct philosophical inquiry back to the body, rejecting the dualism of materialism on the one hand—stressing the physical realities of things (and the body as a thing)—and idealist approaches on the other—putting all the emphasis on the mind and, most crucially, on perception as being a product of the operation of that mind which has no bodily basis. The outcome of such dualistic thought is to oppose an inert and objective ‘outside’ world inhabited by the body and a living heterogeneous and subjective ‘inside’ world of the mind, inevitably leading to discussions of the reality or ideality of the sensory perception and recognition of images in the external world. Do we see the ‘real thing’ or only a ‘cognised image of that thing’? Do the things that we perceive exist in themselves or only in our minds?

For Bergson, the carnal body mediates these dualities; it provides the ground for all perception. The problem with standard views of perception, either materialist or idealist, is that perception is regarded as entirely a cognitive act which either reflects the way things really appear in the world or produces a representation of them. The most significant point about Bergson’s conceptualisation of the body is that it is a body in action, a moving body rather than the frozen or static body of the materialist (or empiricist), or idealist, gazing at the world. The moving body experiences a flux of sensations in time, linking matter to memory. That which we perceive is intimately linked to the manner in which we encounter and remember the world through ambient movement in it, and as part of it. The body in motion is always betwixt and between, transitional. Following a path means not being present in a position, but always passing through. Movement relates to a reality that is very different from a divisible and measurable empiricist ‘space’ and an abstracted spatialised and measurable time in which past and present become a dynamic unity and perception is inhabited by temporality. This means that the body itself has to be put at the centre of analysis:

As my body moves in space, all the other images vary, while that image, my body, remains invariable. I must, therefore, make it a centre, to which I refer all the other images. My belief in an external world does not come from, cannot come, from the fact that I project outside myself sensations that are unextended.… My body is that which stands out at the centre of these perceptions; my personality is the being to which these actions must be referred. (Bergson 1991: 46–47, hereafter MM)

The moving body is not for Bergson distinct from ‘personality’—it is that person. It provides perceptions that are also recollections. Memories consist of images that may either be recalled in the mind (voluntary memories) or are a product of an inscribed corporeality, habits that accumulate in the movement of that body (involuntary memories) (MM: 81–82). The former are like pictures in the mind; the latter require no visualisation. Bodily memory, made up of the ‘sensori-motor systems organized by habit, is then a quasi-instantaneous memory to which the true memory of the past serves as base’ (MM: 152). Voluntary or bodily memories are thus not just visual but corporeal, involving the full human range of sensory perception from sight to sound to taste to touch to smell. There is a ‘mental ear’ as much as a ‘mental sight’, an auditory ‘image’ as much as a visual ‘image’ registered in the body (MM: 129). The general tendency is for corporeal memory to take over from voluntary memory in familiar surroundings. In a town unknown to me, I halt at different street corners, deciding where to go. Movement is broken and discontinuous. Later, after a ‘prolonged sojourn in the town, I shall go about it mechanically, without having any distinct perception of the objects which I am passing’ (MM: 93). Perception is an action of the body, and pure perception is a recording of sensations brought about by objects that are external to the mind. But perception is never a mere contact of the mind with an object in the present; it is replete with memory images ‘which complete it as they interpret it’ (MM: 133) so, and as a consequence of this, ‘to picture is not to remember’ (MM: 135). The ‘present’ of the self always has one foot in the past and another in the future, because the present conjoins sensations or perceptions and movements:

My actual sensations occupy definite portions of the surface of my body; pure memory, on the other hand, interests no part of my body. No doubt, it will beget sensations as it materializes, but at that very moment it will cease to be a memory and pass into the state of a present thing, something actually lived. (MM: 139)

So, through the perceiving and moving body, past and present interpenetrate each other. Perception draws the past into the present and reworks it; sense and significance form part of each other through their embodied mediation. Memory may consist of sensory ‘images’ produced in the mind or worked through habitually in the movements of the body which remembers itself without sensory images. The self is a combination of perception and memory, always reworking embodied perception in a creative and generative process, creating at any particular moment a new self in relation to the old selves that preceded it. Merleau-Ponty comments:

He does not at all say that things are, in the restrictive sense, images, mental or otherwise—he says that their fullness under my regard is such that it is as if my vision took place in them rather than in myself.…Never before had anyone established this circuit between being and myself, which has the result that being is ‘for me,’ the spectator, but that in return the spectator is ‘for being’. (Merleau-Ponty 1962a: 138)

In other words, perception involves immersion in a world of duration and simultaneity, which constitutes the self. Our perceptive being is brought about through our involvement in a world of things that participate in the character of our perception. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology expands and develops aspects of Bergson’s conceptualisation of the body in relation to matter and memory, and it is perhaps no coincidence that he was appointed to the same chair of philosophy that Bergson occupied in Paris.

THE FLESHY IMAGE: MERLEAU-PONTY

Merleau-Ponty specifically attempted to develop a genuinely phenomenological perspective on imagery through a consideration of the art of painting. In so doing, he regarded painting as philosophy in action. By thinking through what painters actually do in their practice, one could develop a theory of the embodied significance of imagery. Thus, he did not apply a ready-made theory of imagery in order to understand paintings, but rather built up that theory from a study of the relationship between painters and that which they actually produced. In other words, Merleau-Ponty attempted to construct a thoroughly materialist rather than idealist perspective, and this is the enormous virtue of his effort. His dual interest was both in the images themselves and the processes by means of which those images emerged in paint on canvas through the technique of the painter. What is at stake here is the relationship between the image and reality, that which is beyond and outside the picture itself.

In ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’(Merleau-Ponty 1993a; hereafter CD) this is explored in relation to Cézanne’s attempt to paint what he actually saw rather than follow the Renaissance rules of linear perspective which could only provide a mathematically inspired illusion of reality. While the Renaissance artists created pictures according to rules of outline, composition, and the distribution of light, Cézanne wanted to capture ‘nature’, the world outside on the canvas: ‘It took him one hundred working sessions for a still life, one-hundred fifty sittings for a portrait’ (CD: 59), and he still was not satisfied with the result. The ‘suicidal’ attempt, according to one contemporary critic, to represent reality while abandoning the very means for doing so (linear perspective, attention to composition, outline, light, and shadow) virtually destroyed him and his faith in what he was able to produce. What others saw in his paintings was not ‘nature’ but distortion. Cézanne’s incessant attempt to capture the reality of the distant mountain in his paintings always finally failed. In the end, and as he grew old, he wondered whether he had trouble with his eyes.

Empiricist perspectives on perception, never failing to imply that they represented a truth, had long distinguished between primary and secondary aspects. For Locke the primary aspects of perception were visual, mathematical, and spatial—things that could be measured. Point, line, plane, and ratio were therefore of primary significance in painting. Secondary aspects of perception were ‘subjective’ and therefore insignificant (colour, sound, odour, touch, taste). But to Cézanne’s ‘innocent’ painterly eye, colour was absolutely fundamental to both the world he tried to paint and visual sensation. The significance of things resided as much in the colours they possessed as in their forms. One could not be understood or represented apart from the other. Cézanne did not want to separate thought from feeling, the apparent stability of things seen from the shifting manner in which they appear (CD: 63). He understood that what we actually perceive is neither geometric nor photographic. Objects that are close to us appear smaller, those farther away, bigger than in a photograph. The contour of an object bounded by a line has nothing to do with the visible world (lines do not bound mountains) and everything to do with a geometric perspective: ‘to trace just a single outline sacrifices depth—that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves.…The outline should be a result of colours if the world is to be given its true density’ (CD: 65). This is precisely why Cézanne paid so much attention to colour: the colours on the palette, a material medium, could be articulated so as to provide an echo of the world. Cézanne’s concern with colour was far more than a concern with the visual. He was also trying to portray the depth, smoothness, softness, and hardness of objects and even claimed one could see their odour (CD: 65). He wanted to capture the manner in which the world emerged through colour. In his landscape paintings he was as much interested in their geological foundations and the manner in which they emerged on the surface. The landscape ‘thinks itself in me’ … and ‘I am its consciousness’, he would say (CD:67).

From a phenomenological perspective, what we witness here is Cézanne’s immersion in that which he was painting. It was part of him, and he was part of it. In other words, subject and object are mutually constitutive. There is a clear bracketing of prejudicial assumptions with regard to what is primary versus secondary in human experience, and a rejection of rules for ‘correct’ representation and perspective based on such assumptions. Renaissance perspective painting is the visible manifestation of scientism and technological reductionism. Cézanne reverses the terms of the debate, and colour becomes primary as a means of depicting the density and textures of things and revealing them in their emotional intensity. Perception arises not from a disembodied mind but from a lived relation and bodily presence in the world. Both the painter and the philosopher share the same problem: how to interpret and express through the medium of paint, or words, the observation of lived experience. Cézanne fuses himself with ‘nature’ to reconstruct a view of the world from a lived perspective, a pre-scientific perception of the visible, which is neither a mimetic duplication of the form in which that world actually exists (what he sees) nor solely the product of his subjective imaginative expression (what he thinks). These are all fundamental aspects of a phenomenological approach to visual imagery.

Merleau-Ponty develops these perspectives further in ‘Eye and Mind’ (Merleau-Ponty 1993b; hereafter EM), his last published work prior to his sudden death. In this, and in his unfinished text The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1973), he develops a new ontology of experience articulated in relation to the union of the visible and invisible in human experience. Again painting provides a key to a new understanding, but here Merleau-Ponty is less concerned with the ‘worldly’ landscapes of Cézanne than in the abstractions of Klee and the lapidary remark that became his credo: ‘Art does not represent the visible; rather it makes visible’ (Foster et al. 2004: 141). Basic colour terms such as ‘red’ are merely abstractions in comparison with the precise red of the woollen garment or the metallic surface. The precise red of the thing concretises a field of visibility; it summons up a hidden depth of the thing uniting the visible with the invisible; the sensible thing captures the invisible in the visible (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 132). The invisible provides a depth and richness to the visible world. Imagery brings forth the invisible depth of the world and, however ‘realistic’, is always a translation, simply because a grape on canvas, even in the most figurative style of painting, is not like the grape itself. In this respect, differences between figurative imagery and nonfigurative imagery, ‘classical’ or ‘modern’ art, is undermined. Neither captures reality, but both are similarly mediated through the body of the subject; they involve a relationship between his or her being and the sensible world (EM: 127). The eye of the painter is a ‘thinking eye’, an embodied eye. Painting is a celebration of the enigma of visibility. It gives visible existence to what profane or ordinary thought believes to be invisible. A mind cannot paint, or sculpt—the body does (EM: 123). The body intertwines vision and movement, sight and touch, and sight is like touch:

My body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the “other side” of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. (EM: 124).

The body in the world, with its bilateral symmetry, vertical axis, back and front, is simultaneously an object and a subject, a thing among things, and a subject immersed in relation to things, sensing and sensed. While painters look at the world, the world looks at them; the relations are reversible. Merleau-Ponty reports the comments of Klee: ‘In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt the trees were looking at me’ (EM: 129). Herein resides Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of vision in this thesis of perceptual interchange or reversibility. The painter looks and he is in turn looked at, and this exter nal gaze has a profound effect on the manner in which that vision is made visible within the imagery. In other words, the painter’s vision is indebted to the mute powers or visibility of the sensible. It does not take place in isolation. There is an important relation of reciprocity at work between the flesh of the painter and the flesh of the world in which he or she is immersed (Merleau-Ponty 1973: Chapter 4):

Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings. (EM: 130)

Through depth, space, and colour, the painter represents the visible, and this does not necessarily require any form of iconic or figurative resemblance. One analogy Merleau-Ponty gives is looking at the tiled bottom of a swimming pool. We do not see it despite the ripples of the water and the reflections. We see it through them, through the ‘distortions’ and ripples of sunlight, the ‘aqueous power, the syrupy and shimmering element’ (EM: 142) which are fundamental to the visual experience. It is both specific and placial, related to space and time, materialised, a depth experience of embodied vision, a mixture of the visible and the invisible and the inherent visibility of the invisible in all things. In attempting to describe visual experience through material media, the artist’s vision is touched by the world just as his or her vision touches it. A line on a painting does not represent that which is visible in the world; it rather renders its visibility. Klee wanted to ‘let a line muse’: ‘the beginning of the line’s path establishes or installs a certain level or mode of the linear, a certain manner for the line to be and to make itself a line, “to go line”’ (EM: 143).

Merleau-Ponty, despite emphasizing the synaesthetic nature of human experience throughout his work, involving an intertwining of all the body senses, gives a particular power and importance to vision. An overriding concern and privileging of the visual is manifested in the attention he pays to the visual arts, and vision in general, while ignoring music or cooking and paying rather little attention to odour and sound. In his later work, visual perception provides a new way of thinking through and understanding embodied and fleshy carnal perception in general. It is interesting in this respect to note that in his analysis, the sensation of touch provides the key metaphor for understanding vision, and vision is itself understood through employing the metaphor of flesh. The reversibility thesis is first introduced by considering touch (Merleau-Ponty 1962b: 123; cf. Merleau-Ponty 1973:133), the manner in which my right hand touches my left hand and is simultaneously touched by it, and then extended to objects: I touch a thing and it touches me back. This provides the model for visual ‘touch’ or the manner in which the world touches us even when it is beyond the reach of the body. Touch provides three distinct kinds of experiences: encountering the sleek or the smooth versus the rough; touching a thing and being touched by it; and touching one’s own body where subjective and objective experiences cannot be disentangled, as the body is both subject and object (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 133–34). In an analogous way, vision occurs in the movement of the eyes in relation to the visible world, being seen by that world, and the eyes seeing themselves seeing in the mirror. So touch and vision involve the same sets of embodied relations between the subject and the world—but what of odour, sound, and taste? The general reversibility thesis can easily be extended in relation to auditory experience: we can speak and hear the vibrations of ourselves speaking in our throats in a relation of interiority; we can hear the world outside and it can hear us; we can smell and be smelled, smell ourselves smelling. Beyond this we can see ourselves smelling and touching and anticipate the taste of things before they enter our mouths. Taste is dependent, in part, on touch. All aspects of carnal experience are thoroughly intertwined, inseparable from one another. Sensory experience is a totality.

For Merleau-Ponty, painting is grounded in a visual metaphysics and in an ontological understanding of the human subject as seeing and being seen. In so doing, he raises the invisible to the same ontological status as the visible. An anonymous visual ‘flesh’ of the world grounds subject and object, seer and seen, body and mind:

We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body…. Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh? … The world seen is not ‘in’my body, and my body is not ‘in’ the visible world ultimately: as flesh applied to a flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is surrounded by it. A participation in and kinship with the visible, the vision neither envelops it nor is enveloped by it indefinitely. The superficial pellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my body. But the depth beneath this surface contains my body and hence contains my vision. My body as a visual thing is contained within the full spectacle. (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 138)

This passage says it all: the body as seer and seen is embraced within a field of vision beyond and outside the self, anonymous, all encompassing, in which everything is constituted, a field of worldly visuality that can see the subject from every point of view while he or she has a single, if shifting, visual field within the generalised visuality of the world. The binding visual ‘flesh’ of the world is neither opaque nor transparent; it resides in plays of light and shadow, being and becoming. My vision is an exemplar of a universal visuality existing prior to my being. This visuality is mediational, and it completely explodes any binary opposition between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Painting (understood as an expression of phenomenological observational principles) does not seek to represent things as things but rather seeks to express their carnal essences or the properties (invisible depths) that make them things in the first place. It is not about mimetic imitation, an attempt to produce an exact copy of the world. Vision is presence in absence: we look at things in the world and become fused with them. We become part of them and they become part of us. The painter’s expression of this world, his or her particular interpretive style, is an operation of his or her body, a worldly event. However, in comparison with language, it only produces a ‘voice of silence’, a radically different mode of signification (Merleau-Ponty 1993c). Cézanne performed phenomenological analysis of the world through the medium of paint, while Merleau-Ponty himself uses ‘another less heavy more transparent body’—namely, language (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 153). One is not superior or inferior to the other. They remain incommensurable domains, alternative expressive mediums for thinking through perceptual experience of that world. For Merleau-Ponty, vision was clearly the ‘noblest of the senses’. It is a fleshy, all-encompassing medium within which the subject observer is immersed. None of the other senses are considered in this way, although to do so would fully embrace their synaesthetic entanglement. Jay’s (1993) argument that Merleau-Ponty’s perspective is part of a general trend towards a suspicion or ‘denigration of vision’ in twentieth-century French thought seems to be entirely unfounded. Vision for Merleau-Ponty was co-present with the lived world. Merleau-Ponty provides for us a foundational perspective for the phenomenological understanding of the visual, which will now be explored in relation to Gell.

GELL: IMAGES AS PERSONS

Gell (1992; 1998) argues that much of the anthropological tradition of thinking about art fails to engage with what is really important, the specificity and efficacy of art as a material medium that does something as opposed to being simply considered a bearer of meaning. Gell’s book Art and Agency, subtitled, ‘An Anthropological Theory’ (Gell 1998), could equally well be understood as ‘a phenomenological theory’ of the significance of visual forms. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that there is only one passing mention of the work of Merleau-Ponty in a discussion of Malekulan sand drawings (Gell 1998: 95), and his name does not even appear in the book’s references. Yet he informs us that Merleau-Ponty’s (1962b) The Phenomenology of Perception was one of a few books he took with him to provide inspiration during his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea (Gell 1999: 6), and he cites from it elsewhere in a discussion of language (Gell 1995). He probably knew the major themes of this book inside out, and his work is perhaps best understood as phenomenology under another name, that name being anthropology.

The general approach taken in Art and Agency elaborates on ideas first published in a paper on the ‘enchantment of technology’ (Gell 1992), in which he sets out a captivating thesis with characteristic wit and humour. Why, he asks, does art put us under a spell? What is its magic, its power? Why is it thought to be a ‘good thing’? Why do we persist in having an ‘art cult’ in our own society? In short, wherein resides the value in art? His answer is that an anthropology of art must first challenge that category in order to understand it in the first place. As far as Gell is concerned, and as becomes clear in a passage in which he refers to a matchstick model of Salisbury cathedral, for the term ‘art’ we could easily substitute another—‘material culture’ or ‘visual culture’—although he avoids doing so himself. Studies of art have always been dominated by a concern with aesthetics, providing a kind of ‘theology’ for the subject, and anyone interested in art almost has to ascribe it some kind of aesthetic value. This is what makes an artwork more than a mere variety of thing and makes it valuable to study. Gell’s first manoeuvre, then, is to make a complete break with aesthetics, asserting a ‘methodological philistinism’ (ibid.: 42). Rather than assume that artworks do have some inherent aesthetic value (‘truth’ within them), we have to bracket off these considerations and think about what art does within any particular social context. This is not an art historical concern with symbolic meaning, nor does it concern itself with the manner in which art can be a vehicle of power, marking out social distinctions. The focus of attention is on the artwork, or thing itself, with ‘the fascination which all well-made art objects exert on the mind attuned to their aesthetic properties’ (ibid.: 43).

Art objects have power and significance because of the way they are made; art is an ‘enchantment of technology’. The power that art objects possess stems from the technological processes they embody—in short, the sheer skill and dexterity required to make them. This technological enchantment of the thing puts people under a spell, so that the art object has an inherent power, or aura. Socially it produces the technology of enchantment. Art produces the technological means for persuading people of the necessity and desirability of the social order (ibid.: 44). In other words, its significance is ideological, a means of thought control. The intricately decorated Trobriand prow-boards of the canoes used in kula exchange in the Massim region, Papua New Guinea, function as weapons in psychological warfare. The kula exchange partner, seeing one of these canoes arriving, will be dazzled and give up his shells. The technical difficulty in carving these prow-boards and the magical spells that are bound up with the production process make this an enchanted technology, and the artist is therefore an ‘occult technician’: ‘It is the way an art object is construed as having come into the world which is the source of power such objects have over us—their becoming rather than their being’ (ibid.: 46). Similarly, the power of portraiture or of a landscape painting is derived from the sheer skill required to produce, with pigment, the likeness of a person or a landscape, something beyond the capability of a normal mortal. So this is a processual view of the significance of the aesthetics of the thing. Technological virtuosity is intrinsic to the efficacy of artworks in their particular social contexts. In small-scale societies, the two principal social contexts in which art objects work their technological magic are in political ritual and ceremonial or commercial exchange.

This general argument with reference to the work that art objects do, rather than what they might mean, or symbolise, is greatly expanded in Art and Agency (Gell 1998; hereafter AA). In the opening chapter he argues against trying to develop a specific theory for ‘primitive’ art in colonial and post-colonial societies that anthropologists typically study; nor does he find the notion of anthropology being concerned with developing a cross-cultural aesthetics particularly useful. Many artworks in non-Western societies simply do not generate an aesthetic response in a conventional sense. A warrior on a battlefield is unlikely to find the design on the warshield of his opponent aesthetically interesting! It is designed to induce fear. Gell also rejects structuralist and semiotic approaches which have dominated the anthropology of art since the 1970s. They assume that art is primarily about nonverbal communication and meaning, but in Gell’s position the true significance of art is the work it performs, and this is couched in the emphasis put on agency, intention, causation, result, and transformation (AA: 6). Art is a system of action, and an anthropological theory of art does not try to define its objects in advance: ‘Anything whatsoever could, conceivably, be an art object from an anthropological point of view’ (AA: 7). In other words, by ‘art’ Gell means material culture. These material forms, or art objects, need to be understood in terms of social relations over the time-frames, or biographies, of individuals, which Gell takes to be a distinctively anthropological perspective. Moreover, these things need to be considered from a Maussian or anthropological perspective as being like persons, subjects rather than objects. Simply put, because things are like ‘persons’, they, like persons, can possess agency (AA: 9). This is the central ‘phenomenological’ thesis. The essential difference between Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of the fleshy nature of a field of visuality, discussed earlier, and the notion that the painter is seen by the trees that he is painting, and Gell’s approach is essentially the use of the term ‘agency’, together with Gell’s more restricted range of reference to material forms. For Merleau-Ponty, we can argue, it is not just artefacts that might be said to possess a certain kind of agency, but the entire material world, ‘cultural’ and fabricated or ‘natural’ and unaltered. If Merleau-Ponty provides us with a phenomenological approach to the landscape, then Gell offers one in relation to the artefact.

The crucial part of Gell’s approach is obviously what he means by the agency of things and how this relates to, or differs from, the agency of persons. Agency is a process involving indexes and effects. Things are material indexes producing a cognitive operation, which Gell refers to as the ‘abduction of agency’ (AA: 13). By this term he means drawing inferences from the thing in an analogous manner to the way in which we might think that someone who smiles is friendly. The gesture is indexical of the state of that person. Agency is attributable to both persons and things ‘who/which are seen as initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that is, events caused by acts of mind or will or intention.… An agent is one “who causes events to happen” in their vicinity’ (AA: 16). Agency is a culturally prescribed way of thinking about causality. The ‘intention’ may be lodged either in the mind of a person or in a thing. The agency of things is of a second order from the agency of persons (because they do not have minds), but things acquire agency through becoming enmeshed in human social relationships. This is partly because persons typically form animistic social relationships with things and tend to anthropomorphise or personify them (AA: 18 ff.). More generally, it is because material forms intervene in the world; they have specific effects on persons. While not having a mind, they have palpable influence. Persons, or things, act relationally as agents with regard to other persons or things that are acted on: In Gell’s terminology the agent has agency in relation to a ‘patient’ (recipient), and this, in effect, is his version of Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility thesis. Objects may be ‘caused’ by their makers in an indexical manner, just as smoke implies fire. The technology of their production draws the agency of the maker inside these things. Similarly, the maker or a recipient of the thing may be ‘caused’ (effected, influenced) by that object in either an active or passive manner. The nature of that ‘causation’ or agency of the thing may be crucially related to the process of representation: the thing may look like what it represents—that is, it may be iconic—or it may not, as in aniconic representation (e.g., the stone represents a god, but the god does not ‘look like’ or bear a resemblance to a god; AA: 26). Gell uses the term ‘prototype’ to identify what the index (material form) represents visually or nonvisually. So an anthropology of art is about persons in the vicinity of things and involves the entanglement of indexes, artists, recipients, and prototypes, which Gell sets out in a table of logical possibilities (Table 1.1). While artists may make ‘indexes’, they may themselves be vehicles of the agency of others. In other words, they are not to be considered as the self-sufficient and ‘free’ agents of much Western art theory.

Table 1.1. Gell’s ‘art nexus’

Gell’s usage of the terms ‘icon’ and ‘index’ is drawn more or less directly from the semiotics of Pierce, who distinguished among iconic signs that look like what they represent (a painting of a rose looks like a rose), indexical signs where the relationship is causal or inferential (smoke is a result of fire, footprints in the sand index the movement of a person), and symbols which have a purely arbitrary, conventional, or agreed upon meaning such as the cross as a symbol of Christ (Pierce 1955). He only ascribes the agency of things to iconic or indexical effects and effectively subsumes the former in relation to the latter (i.e., icons are types of indexical signs). He eliminates symbolic signs from his account. This is firstly because he is keen to deny any interpretive role for an anthropological semiotics, regarding objects as visual signifiers, and secondly because the index and the icon have an intrinsic connection with the objects they denote, whereas symbols do not.

Gell’s approach to the agency that things possess in relation to people is entirely cognitive. Abduction is a cognitive operation. Things affect people’s (‘patients’) minds in various ways. The Asmat shield produces terror in the opposing warrior: ‘These designs seem to have been composed in a mood of terror, and we are terrified by them … because submitting to their fascination, we are obliged to share in the emotion which they objectify’ (AA: 31). The captivation or fascination produced by the Trobriand prow-boards ‘ensues from the spectator becoming trapped within the index because the index embodies agency that is essentially indecipherable. Partly this comes from the spectator’s inability mentally to rehearse the origination of the index’ (AA: 71). In relation to pattern, ‘geometric’ or decorative art, Gell suggests that decorative patterns applied to artefacts attach people to things. This is part of the technology of enchantment: ‘The world is filled with decorative objects because decoration is often essential to the psychological functionality of artefacts (AA: 74; my emphasis). A common way of discussing decorated surfaces is to refer to their ‘animation’. Our eyes become lost in their ‘mazy dance’ (AA: 76). Decoration makes objects come alive in a nonrepresentational way. Complex patterns may enthrall the viewer, acting as ‘mind traps’ (AA: 80). This cognitive ‘stickiness’ of patterns is attributed by Gell to a blockage in the ‘cognitive process of reconstructing the intentionality embodied in artefacts’ (AA: 86). How could this have originated? Patterns have an agency that may be agonistic or defensive as well as beneficial. Patterns may be protective devices, trapping evil spirits, defensive screens, or obstacles impeding passage (AA: 83). Mazes present ‘cognitive obstacles’: one knows there is a way through, but the only way to do this is to trace its winding course. In the most general sense the circulation of things, or indexes, transform the conscious experience of agents, so that stylistic traditions chart and manipulate social relationships. Here Gell refers to a ‘structural isomorphy between something “internal” (mind or consciousness) and something “external”—aggregates of artworks’ (AA: 222). Gell conceives the agency of persons as being relational on account of their position within a social network, and ‘mind’ also becomes manifested in style: in the things produced over a lifetime, distributed in the world, by an artist or within a particular culture.

While Gell has a great deal to say about the cognitive agency of ‘art’, he has virtually nothing to say about the manner in which things affect the body of the agent in which the mind is merely a part. Gell’s agents (in the sense of Gell’s people) have minds (individual and personal or mobile and ‘distributed’ through things), but they do not seem to have bodies (AA: Chapter 8). The closest he gets to considering the relationship between art and the body is in his discussion of Malekulan sand drawings. What was important about these sand drawings (executed on the beach and washed away by the sea) was the performative aspect of their execution. Layard (1936) had discussed similarities between the maze-like style of Malekulan graphic art and the complex choreography of their dance. Gell remarks, ‘it is surely useful to consider the act of drawing as akin to dancing, and the design as a kind of frozen residue left by this manual ballet’ (AA: 95).What is fundamental here is the impression of the finger running through the sand, creating a continuous, incredibly involuted line that becomes or emerges as ephemeral figure against the ground of sand, the trace of the body in the medium. But Gell does not consider the implications of this more fully; for him, that which links together Malekulan dancing, drawing, and music is a ‘certain cognitive indecipherability’ manifested in the performance. That indeed may be the case, but the kinaesthetics of the body in movement is surely fundamental to all these cultural forms.

THE REDUCTIVE CONTEMPLATION OF THE VISIBLE IN ART

What links together both Merleau-Ponty’s and Gell’s discussion of art is the almost exclusive attention they pay to vision (tempered in Merleau-Ponty by some consideration of touch). Things are considered to be simply subjects and objects of vision. Their acoustic, olfactory, and tactile qualities are rarely even mentioned. Vision is effectively ennobled and subtracted out of the human sensorium. I want to suggest here that the attention paid to vision detracts from a fuller and more truly phenomenological approach to art. Such a position arises as a direct result of the kinds of artworks that both Merleau-Ponty and Gell were ‘thinking through’ in order to arrive at their own particular perspectives. In ‘Cézanne;s Doubt’, in the illustrations accompanying ‘Eye and Mind’, and in the more general discussions in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty exclusively considers paintings (apart from two sculptures), while making passing references to the work of artists such as Duchamp. The photographs and line drawings of artefacts illustrating Gell’s Art and Agency are almost exclusively of paintings or small portable sculptures, or of objects found in ethnographic museums. The only exceptions are a photograph of part of a Trobriand canoe, a line drawing of a tattooed Marquesan man, drawings of arm, hand, and leg tattoos, and photographs of the exterior and part of the interior of a Maori meeting house. The latter is the only nonportable ‘art’ object that Gell considers in his own art canon.

Precisely because Merleau-Ponty and Gell have a ‘gallery’ notion or view of what art is (both were keen visitors to museums of modern art) and primarily conceive of artworks exclusively in terms of paintings and small-scale sculptural forms that can be placed in a gallery, they reduce the significance of art to vision, and as a result the agency of things is considered almost entirely in terms of a visual consciousness. The title of Merleau-Ponty’s paper ‘Eye and Mind’ says it all—a phenomenological theory becomes reduced to the art and philosophy of looking and the way in which that looking affects the mind. Of course, a fundamental part of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy is precisely to attack any notion of mind being separate from the body. The mind is in the body and cannot be understood apart from that body. It is because of the kind of bodies we have that we think in a distinctively human way. But in considering art, Merleau-Ponty effectively reduces the body to the eye. This is the only sensory organ that is really significant in his analysis, with some mentions of the contact of the hands. But what of the body that smells and tastes and hears and moves, that has different postures and bilateral symmetry? This body provides only a kind of vaguely patterned ground against the dominant figure of the gaze of a penetrating eye. The point is that contemplating a painting or a sculpture, in the Louvre in Paris or the National Gallery in London, is, on the whole, a singularly disembodied experience. The work is separate from the body that created it and is separate from the viewer or ‘recipient’ who receives it. The dictum of the officialdom of the art establishment is that one may not touch. All these works of art are rather small-scale. Even the largest of paintings can be seen, or encompassed, all at once, at a suitable distance in relation to the movements of the eye. Even worse than this is the miniaturisation and contemplation of the art object in the form of photographs and line drawings in texts, which no doubt contribute to their analyses. I strongly suspect that if Merleau-Ponty or Gell had thought through either classical or contemporary art by visiting the Sistine Chapel or through experiencing firsthand ‘earthwork’ or ‘land’ or ‘environmental’ art, they might have had a rather different perspective.

GOING BEYOND THE ALL-ENCOMPASSING EYE: THE TOUCH IN SEEING

In relation to the eye that sees and the mind that thinks, can we posit a more embodied (or bodily) relation? In relation to a discussion of the agency of iconic as opposed to geometric images, Gell discusses Hindu image worship (AA: 116–21). Worshipping images allows one to obtain darshan from the god, a blessing obtained through looking into the eyes of the image. The eye is the medium through which the blessing is transferred. To be in the presence of the image allows one to internalise the blessings and powers conferred by its divine gaze. Sight is conceived as being a kind of touch. Gell cites Kramrisch: ‘Touch is the ultimate connection by which the visible yields to be grasped. While the eye touches the object the vitality that pulsates in it is communicated’ (Kramrisch 1976: 136, cited in AA: 117). Here we have a form of synaesthetic experience, a blending together of the visual and the tactile, precisely the same kind of notion we also find in Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of a visual flesh in general. Except here it is specific to the eyes of the idol and the eyes of the worshipper, between which there radiates a specific connection. Seeing, like touching, is a form of contact. The logic is one of looking and being seen. Sometimes the eyes of the images, as in Jain temples, are set with little mirrors so that the devotee can see himself or herself looking. The devotee looks and simultaneously sees the god looking. Eye contact gives access to a mind (AA: 120).

Consider this Indian calendar image from the 1980s (Figure 1.1). An interpretive understanding of the visual content of such an image is obviously dependent on a prior understanding of Hindu mythology and what such images of the gods mean in that cultural context. Decoding the meaning of the image relies on situating it within the context of the religious and mythological system. The work that the image performs is as a partial representation of a wider underlying mythological system of belief. This particular image is of Ravidas, who cuts open his own chest to reveal his brahmanic sacred thread. If we had no knowledge of Hindu Indian mythology or its cultural context, the possibility of understanding such an image fully would seem remote, and this, of course, is precisely the problem archaeologists encounter in attempting to understand prehistoric imagery. The important point here is that in a traditional iconographic analysis, what such an image means is enough. We apparently know everything important about it.

FIGURE 1.1. A 1980s Indian calendar image of Ravidas who cuts open his chest to reveal his brahmanic sacred thread. Source: Pinney 2004.

Pinney explores this in relation to the contemporary use of inexpensive, mass-produced chromolithographs in a rural Indian village in Madhya Pradesh (Pinney 2004: 182 ff.). These visual forms are valued for the access they give to divine energy, and the villagers are not interested in what the image looks like but in what it can ‘do’ (ibid.: 190). They have absolutely no interest in their production or the artist who created them. The image’s past is quite irrelevant. What is significant is what the image can do in the future, the divine power it might bestow. The image in a pile on the market stall is simply a bit of paper. Taking it into the home, seating or displaying it, transforms it into a divine presence. Pinney argues, in a similar vein to Gell, that such images are not just pale reflections of what really matters and what is more important, in this case, the prior Hindu mythological system. Visual culture is an important domain in its own right, and it works on and through the body. The image of Ravidas is typical of inexpensive, mass-produced chromolithographs popular among rural villagers in India, framed and displayed and worshipped in domestic shrines in their houses. The images provide access to divine energy, and this is mediated through the form of the image itself. Absolutely typical of these images is the gaze. The worshipper looks at the image and the image returns its gaze. One looks and is, in turn, looked upon. The eyes of the devotee, ‘an organ of tactility’, become conjoined with the god, allowing the flow of divine energy and the possibility of physical transformation and intervention in the world. Some of these images are even framed with mirrors so the observer can simultaneously see the image and see him- or herself in the act of seeing. Pinney comments:

Like the vast majority of villagers Pannalal Nai, a retired factory worker, lights incense sticks in front of his images at sunrise and dusk. He asks for the protection of all that is valuable to him: ‘give barkat [divine energy], food, water, children, small children, protect all this.’ As Pannalal performs this puja, appealing for protective plentitude in the face of harsh uncertainties he murmurs to himself, waves his incense sticks, rings a small bell and crumbles whatever marigolds might be lying on the puja shelf in front of his images. As he does this his eyes maintain an intense visual intimacy with the gods and his body describes a gentle swaying, yearning, movement as though caught in the force field around the image. (2004: 191)

The consumption and use of such images by rural Indian villagers is primarily about bodily empowerment. Through the medium of the devotee’s gaze, pieces of paper are transformed into powerful deities. The images enter through the eye and have bodily effects. The image causes the devotee to sway and move, in a whole repertoire of bodily performances involving touch and sound and smell. The power of the image is not simply, or even primarily, a matter of what it means. It arises from what it does, its bodily effects, and in the context of its use, in the process of which the sensory synaesthetic effects of worship arise.

Such an image clearly affects both mind and body. It has cultural meaning but is also about doing: the image impacts on the person. Precisely because this is a small, portable image, its actual effects in relation to the body of the devotee, as opposed to his or her mind, are relatively limited. For example, the devotee could move or sway in front of the image in any appropriate devotional way, and all the image is seen all at once. In this example, the fact that the image is printed on paper does not matter; or if it does, if it should be acknowledged that this is just an image on paper, this constitutes a problem, because for the devotee the image must always be something more than that. The image itself is fundamental, not the medium on which it occurs (paper) or the technique of its mass production (chromolithography). Let us go back again to the Indian calendar image (Figure 1.1). Pinney’s analysis is both very informative and insightful. Those eyes do indeed have power in relation to a Hindu devotee, but they have considerably less power in relation to you and me. We are accustomed to a flood of eyes looking at us all the time in our excessively visualised culture: eyes on the front pages of magazines, newsreaders on TV, celebrities on billboards in the streets. The supposed intimacy of the contact has been drained and has little power in our own culture. The power of the calendar image in relation to the Hindu devotee, however, clearly relates to something beyond the image itself, a belief in the transforming power of images related to a particular system of Hindu mythic and cosmological belief and devotional practice. This provides the wider cultural context by means of which we can understand the inherent power of visual culture in this case.

As Gell (1998; 1999) and Pinney (2004; 2006) demonstrate, art, or material culture more generally, does not necessarily require a process of decoding, or a verbal exegesis of meaning, to have power and significance. It can be argued to possess these qualities in and for itself as a material medium (Tilley 1999). For example, Melanesian anthropologists have noted over and over again a great reluctance of people to talk either about ‘art’ or any other artefacts they invest so much time in making and decorating. Forge (1970; 1979) argues that the Abelam art of Papua New Guinea is so powerful precisely because people don’t talk about it or discuss its meanings. Art in this context derives its significance from the fact that it is experienced while its meaning goes unsaid and is not discussed. It cannot be translated in terms that noninitiates can understand. In a similar vein, Losche (1995) argues that Melanesian art is a structure of sentiment and desire created through experience. The visual imagery has its own irreducibility. If the experience could be decoded, or talked through, it would simply lose its power. Strathern (1990) argues that the power of images resides in the event of their perception. They require no further outside contextualisation beyond themselves and the context of experience. It would seem unwise for us to simply assume that prehistoric rock carvers share our own modern propensity to want to talk about meaning, to translate images into words. Whether or not they shared this desire to chatter, we can at least be certain that they, like us, experienced these carvings through the medium of their bodies.

FROM SENSORY EXPERIENCE TO A KINAESTHETIC PERSPECTIVE ON ROCK ART

A kinaesthetic approach is rooted in a phenomenological tradition of research which, as argued above, must resist the notion that art is strictly a matter of the visual, simply sensing through seeing. It regards vision as only a part, albeit a very important part, of the sensory experience of the body. It provides possibilities for alternative ways of understanding rock art imagery, ways that break with dominant ethnocentric European and American understandings of visual and material culture which, in a consideration of art, effectively sever sight from body and allow that sight is somehow autonomous from embodied material experience. However, if it is possible to argue that even a small portable image has bodily effects, then the implications for the study of rock art are indeed profound. As discussed above, looking at any portable image or painting is usually a relatively passive process. By contrast, seeing rock art frequently requires having to move across an entire landscape, from one rock to another, or one area of the same rock to another. We typically don’t stand on the canvas or walk over the painted surface when we look at paintings. But this, of course, is typical of the way in which we experience rock art. We enter, with our own bodies, into the image fields. The images in this manner become a part of us and we become a part of them, an intimate relationship. The sheer bodily impact of rock art imagery is therefore much more dynamic and powerful than the Hindu calendar example discussed above, or than in any of Gell’s general claims about the agency of either portable artefacts or artworks. The agency he is referring to is solely a matter of mind rather than relating to the physicality of the human body in motion.

We have seen that Bergson developed a bodily perspective on memory, stressing one form of memory orientating the body as being purely habitual. From the phenomenological perspective adopted here, it is assumed that the body is an object and as much a material culture product as any other thing such as a house or an axe. As self-conscious sentient subjects or persons, we are aware of the objectivity of our own bodies, and the body itself plays a fundamental role in our self-conscious awareness and the manner in which we perceive and understand the world around us. The body is both a thing and an image, and our experience of both is mediated through the physicality of the body itself. As Bourdieu (1977) stresses, practical beliefs, actions, and thoughts arise from an embodied mind—or, in other words, a state of the body—rather than from an idealised world of disembodied pure thought.

Over seventy years ago Mauss’s famous essay ‘Techniques of the Body’ (Mauss [1935] 1979) discussed the manner in which the human body itself is a primary object on which cultural and social differences become inscribed. Thus, different societies actively produce different kinds of bodies, and the enculturation of these bodies changes over the life courses of different individuals and is intimately related to gender differences. So Mauss argued that different ways of walking, sitting, or swimming and bodily postures such as the position of the hands and arms while walking or at rest are all culturally learnt and variable. Learning these techniques of the body requires time and becomes engrained habit as culturally enskilled practices. Thus, during the 1914–18 World War, English troops were incapable of using French spades to dig trenches which had to be replaced in their thousands, and their gait was at odds with a French military rhythm (Mauss 1979: 99 ff.). The body is ‘man’s first and most technical object, and at the same time technical means’ (ibid.: 104), and body techniques extend to modes of sex, sleeping, child weaning, modes of resting such as squatting and walking, and so on. Learnt movements of the whole body, rather than of parts of it, include the actions of climbing, trampling, walking, running, and dancing, and cultural codes determine the ‘natural’ manner of the body’s state of existence in different cultures, a product of techniques of socialisation. The gestalt of a walking body is also strongly moulded by cultural artefacts such as shoes versus bare feet or different kinds of shoes producing different kinds of characteristic movements and postures (Falk 1995; Michael 2000; Ingold 2004).

The perception of rock art images is thus as much a matter of the flesh, of sensation, of feeling, of corporeality, as it is a matter of cognition or mental process involving remembering, recognition, and iconic, indexical, and symbolic association, all culturally mediated processes. The body is not just a site inhabited by sensory organs but forms an active part of the entire sensory process. The body as flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the term is sentient and sensible, something that touches and is touched, seer and seen. The manner in which perceptual thought takes place is therefore grounded in the kinaesthetic relationship among person, place, and landscape. All perceptive experience has a bodily basis in movement through and exploration of the landscape, as the site of all the sense organs and the brain, and as a sense organ in itself with the skin as its boundary. The body is both an object and subject of perceptual experience, constituted and constituting, a physical thing with needs and a social being with a biography situated within a particular cultural habitus or disposition to act in the world.

What the body can do in the space-time of landscape and the manner in which it can act have a profound effect on the character of experience and the kinds of meaning that experience affords. The eyes, ears, and nose are all distance receptors. By contrast, the nerves (proprioceptors) keep the body informed of what is taking place as the body moves around, a muscular internal bodily sense of the world intimately connected with the exterioceptors or nerves in the skin informing the body about touch and texture, roughness and smoothness, heat and cold, pleasure and pain. Visual, or any other kind of distance perceptual experience, has a fundamental kinaesthetic basis. The process of walking through a landscape, climbing a mountain, or swimming across a river makes one feel and think differently about them. They are never the same again because of this dynamic interconnection between kinaesthetic and sensory experience. That which is seen expands visually as one moves towards it; that which is continuously smelt or heard increases or decreases in intensity in relation to bodily motion towards or away from the source. In this sense, the body becomes the measure of all things. The experience of movement through a landscape continually inscribes itself within the body, from sweat to heart rate to a straining of the joints, tendons, and muscles. This is an infra-language of movement contributing in a fundamental way to thought, emotions, mood, and feelings. Such a state of awareness is thoroughly embodied. It does not require sight or touch to register that our limbs have moved, nor to register the effort that this has required.

The body can move in and through the world on the basis of its own learned perceptual instincts, which require no active perception or thinking where to go. We can consider here the notion of proprioception. This is not the usual sensitivity of the body to its surroundings but one that has to do with conditions of movement and encounters, resulting in a kind of muscular memory relating to habit and posture, ‘thinking’ in the body rather than in the mind—the coordinated movements of limbs and muscles and ligaments moving the body along in a characteristic manner (Eilan et al. 1995; O’Shaughnessy 1995). Through proprioceptive memory we can get where we are going and have little or no other sensory memory or awareness of the route we have taken, quite literally, for granted. Vision is not here a matter of an eye that sees but more a matter of its retinal musculature in relation to a moving and feeling body (Massumi 2002). Massumi posits that in such movement, sight is turned proprioceptive; the eyes are more part of the flesh than discrete organs of vision. This is the memory of a body without discrete mirroring images. Massumi notes that the memory such a body constitutes ‘could be diagrammed as a superposition of vectorial fields composed of multiple points in varying relations of movement and rest, pressure and resistance, each field corresponding to an action’ (ibid.: 59). There is much scope for experimentation here in the development of quite literally a ‘muscular’ approach to experiencing rock carvings.

Although it has been claimed by some that proprioception can be considered a sixth, specifically bodily sense (Sheringham 1973; and see discussions in Bermudez et al. 1995), here, following Gibson (1968; 1986), it is regarded as a sensory modality intertwined with and underlying all the others in a process in which self and landscape are co-perceived. Gibson argues that the nature and character of the landscape (to him, ‘environment’) has a profound effect on the perceptive process, emphasizing its role in structuring sensory stimulation. Sources of stimulation from the structure of the landscape become encoded within the bodies that move within it in relation to a complex of surfaces, edges, and textures perceived in relation to bodily movement. He considers the different senses not as isolated from each other but as fundamentally interrelated in terms of perceptual systems. Gibson (1968) identifies five basic sense systems: the basic orienting system related to gravity, posture, and motion; the auditory system; the haptic system associated with touch; the systems of taste and smell; and the visual system. While these are distinguished from one another analytically, the whole thrust of Gibson’s analysis is to demonstrate the multisensual character of the interaction among body, landscape, and mind in perception, all of which are regarded as active co-presences in relation to one another, acting in relation to one another rather than being subject to any causal determinacy. The landscape provides a rich and structured sensory domain through which the body moves and thinks, and the manner in which this movement and thought take place is fundamentally influenced by their particular material characteristics. Thus, in visual perception, ambient reflected light in the landscape (as opposed to the blinding pure radiant light of the sun) provides information about the inclination and directionality and edges of rock or other surfaces and about their shapes, arrangements, colours, and textures. Surfaces, according to their direction in relation to one another, inclination, texture, and degree of absorption will structure, reduce, or amplify sound; and auditory perception derives its basis from the flow of sounds through the landscape from one place to another, producing different acoustic properties.

A phenomenological perspective stressing the centrality of embodiment in relation to kinaesthetics rejects any notion of the body as simply a surface in terms of which society constructs itself, because the body is not just a bearer of signs and meanings (a body-text) but is constructed through its relationship to the material and sensory landscape domains that it inhabits. Being in a landscape means that the limits of the space of the body are in the things with which it interacts. The space of the body in motion underpins the perception of things. As Gil has recently put it: ‘Between the body (and the organs in use) and the thing is established a connection that immediately affects the form and space of the body; between the one and the other a privileged spatial relation emerges that defines the space uniting them as “near” or “far”, resistant, thick, wavy, vertiginous, smooth, prickly’ (Gil 1998: 126).

By ‘kinaesthetic’ what is specifically meant here is the study of the active effects of imagery in relation to the human body, its balance, effort, postures, and gestures. The entire process of experiencing rock art demands movement from rock to rock and often from one image on a rock to another. It requires a body in motion, an active body. A body in motion is one endowed with kinaesthesis, derived from the Greek kinein, meaning to move, and aisthesia, to perceive. This involves consideration of bodily positions, postures, and movements in relations to images and their positioning in place, an embodied state of awareness going far beyond the sense of sight in which the outstretched arm or leg or a crouching posture may be a more fundamental part of the experience involving an awareness of both self and locomotion. The primary research questions to ask are: What do these images do to an observer? What effects do they have? What kinds of bodily actions are required to encounter and see or, more widely as discussed below, sensorily experience them?

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

These basic research questions require both the description and analysis of bodily movement in relation to the landscapes in which the images occur. We can ask questions about (1) the body itself; (2) directionality of movement; and (3) relationships to the wider sensory landscape.

The Body

In order to see and encounter the images on any particular rock or rock surface,

  Do we need to move, or can they all be seen at once, requiring only a motion of the head and the eye?

  Is a static body involved or a body in motion?

  Do we need to look up at the images on a rock above us? (Are the images dominant in relation to an observer?)

  Are the images at eye level? Do we need to look down? (Is the observer dominant in relation to the image?)

In movement, what part(s) of the body are involved?

  The body as a whole?

  Movement of the lower or upper limbs?

  The secondary parts (e.g., the hand in climbing)?

What bodily muscular energies, actions, or performances might be involved?

  Rotation? Twisting? Turning? Leaping? Crawling?

  What duration or temporalities are involved in these movements?

  Are the bodily movements required free flowing or disjointed?

  How are our muscles and ligaments involved?

Directionality

  Can we see all the images off the rock standing passively, or do we need to move across it?

  Are particular groups of images concealed in hidden areas such as depressions in the rock, round corners, in places that are easily accessible, or not?

  Do we need to move across the rock in a particular direction—for example, from north to south or east to west?

  Do we need to walk down it, or climb up it, or move in a circular fashion around it? Are we involved in a kind of ballet?

  To experience certain iconic or figural images (e.g., boats, animals, people, artefacts) from a ‘correct’ perspective, rather than seeing them upside down, where do we have to stand?

  What might be implied, in terms of human bodily movement, by images that face, or are oriented, in a particular direction, such as animals with their heads, or boats with their prows, or shoe-soles, facing left or right, or east and west, or pointing up and down the rocks? Where do they lead? What path of movement might they indicate?

  In a wider perspective, how do we have to move from one rock with images on it to another?

  Which direction do we have to take? Do we need to climb, or walk, or crawl from one rock to another? Do we take a meandering route, or must we move in a zigzag fashion?

  Can the images on the next rock, or some of them, be seen from the one before?

  What kinds of relationships exist between rocks with images and rocks without, and how does this relate to material properties of the stone itself (shape, size, colour, texture, sounds in the landscape, etc.)?

  Do we experience different kinds of images on different kinds of rocks at the beginning or end or middle of the journey? What main directions must be taken to encounter the images?

  Might there be intermediate directions?

  How much freedom of choice might be involved?

  Must they be experienced sequentially and, if so, in what manner?

  From where can they be seen and, just as importantly, from where are they hidden?

  How does this directional movement relate to basic body experiential dyads (up/down or above/below; left/right; back/front; near/far; and in reach/out of reach?

  Does one need to walk over the rock itself and enter into the image fields, or move around it and, if so, in what manner?

  Can the images be viewed collectively, or does the type of place in which they occur only permit individual experience or encounter by a few?

Landscape

  What might be the intent of locating the images in one place rather than another in relation to the wider sensory landscapes of vision, sound, touch, taste, and smell (see discussion below)?

  How might the weather and seasonal changes in the climate affect this choice of location? And how might the climate affect the form and character of the images?

  How do the images relate to the form and localised character of the rock itself, such as shape, colour, texture, surface contours, presence of fissures, and the like?

We can thus describe, discuss, and annotate these and many more of the kinaesthetic and sensory effects of the images and their locations in relation both to the form of individual rocks, their relationship to one another, and their positioning in the landscape. We can also investigate how these effects change from one rock to another or from one rock carving locality to another. Some of the image fields on the rocks may permit very little bodily freedom in the manner in which they can be experienced: one must move up or along the rock in a particular direction, and in relation to the wider landscape they must be encountered in a predetermined sequential pattern (for an early study, see Tilley 1999: Chapter 5). Other rocks may permit a considerable degree of latitude of subjective choice: I can move this way and experience those images first, which requires that I turn around in order to move towards and see other images on another part of the rock, or on a different rock, and so on. We can thus begin to comparatively investigate paths of movement and the variable impacts of different rocks or image fields on those rocks in relation to postures of persons: an archaeology of placial embodied multisensory imagery.

A kinaesthetic approach to rock art thus entails trying to describe and discuss these effects of the images in relation to the human body in the landscape as precisely as possible. The primary research tool is the researcher herself or himself, or alternatively, observing the bodies of others in relation to the images. One can attempt to describe these bodily relations in words—the approach adopted in this book—or alternatively, some system of dance notation might be adapted to graphically describe embodied movements (see e.g., Laban 1950; 1966; Gell 1995; Guest 1997; Stewart 1998; Lopez y Royo 2005), an approach for which there is considerable scope for experimentation in the future.

IMAGES IN THE LANDSCAPE

There are two massively obvious characteristics of rock art which nevertheless are absolutely fundamental and whose significance cannot be overemphasized: (1) Rock art is (usually; see Chapters 2 and 3) fixed and immovable, part and parcel of a landscape. It cannot be taken away or decontextualised from this context. A fundamental part of its significance is thus its location. (2) Rock art is created in a durable material medium, engraved or pecked out of stone. We now consider both these aspects in more detail.

Rock art, being located in the landscape, requires movement through and in that landscape in order to experience it. We may be encountering one, or a few, stones in a particular place, or hundreds or thousands spread over many kilometres. The places where the carved rocks are found may be part of everyday lived landscapes, associated with fields, settlements, or hunting grounds, or may be in locations set apart or liminal places. To reach the carvings may require movement on land, or on water, or a combination of the two. So places with rock carvings form part of wider landscapes, and the manner in which they are approached and experienced in those landscapes constitutes part of their significance. The journey contributes to their experiential effects. Rocks in a landscape gain part of their significance through their sensory experience in that landscape. There is a dialectic at work between landscape and rock, or place: seeing—or not being able to see—a striking mountain on the horizon, a cleft in the rocks, a view of the sea.

Light and darkness are fundamental to a visual experience of rock art. Different kinds of light at different times of the day and seasons of the year may radically change the appearance of the images, illuminated (or not) by the rising or setting sun, in shade or direct sunlight, on dry rock or wet rock, at night under artificial illumination, and so on. But because landscapes are not just visual but smellscapes, soundscapes, tastescapes, and touchscapes, the experience of rock art is always multisensory. Thus the odour of flowers or seaweed, pine trees or birch trees, of freshwater or saltwater, or of the stone itself when dry, or after rain, is an integral part of their experience. Painting rocks or infilling carvings with ochre or other media creates its own sound, a different texture and smell, as well as a highlighted visual experience. Sound is doubly significant. First of all, carving or pecking the rocks creates rhythms in the landscape, according to how they were created (see Ouzman 2001 and Goldhahn 2002 for discussions of this). Furthermore, different types of rocks—granite or sandstone or limestone—have their own voices or tonal qualities. Secondly, there are the sounds generated in the vicinity of the rocks, such as the deafening sound of roaring waterfalls (Goldhahn 2002) or the beating of the waves of the sea, the roar of the wind, sounds created by birds and animals and the activities of people, the sounds of drumming and music. Such sounds may be constant or change in relation to the weather. The patterns of the weather and its seasonal changes are part and parcel of the experience of the rocks, and many other sounds are seasonal too: the cries of migrating animals and birds. Some rocks may be in quiet places. In others, the effects of echoes can be quite startling, amplifying sounds and making them bounce back and forth.

Different rocks and their carvings feel very different—rough or smooth, broken or uniform. Some carvings are deep, others very shallow. Tracing the outline of an image with the hands may be as significant as seeing it. Tactile contrasts between carved and uncarved areas are usually very significant. To feel or to stand on a rock is to establish direct bodily contact, to touch and to be touched by it, and looking may stimulate feeling or vice versa. The hammering of stone required to make rock carvings produces a particular burnt smell, and the fiery light of sparks and different kinds of rocks smell differently in this respect. The taste and odour of rocks can also be related to the types of foods and drinks consumed on them or in their vicinity. Thus, rocks might taste or smell of salmon or shellfish, roast pork or game, berries and mushrooms. The same images can have very different sensory experiential effects in relation to where they are found, the time of day, the season of the year, and the patterns of the weather.

Unlike canvas or paper, stone is never blank. It has its own colour, structure, sensory texture, and form or shape. These characteristics of the stone itself may be as significant as the images engraved on it, structuring the manner in which the images are encountered and experienced, or indeed understood as possessing meaning (Tilley 2004; Jones 2006). Once again, we return to the proposition that the material medium of rock art, the rock itself, is as fundamental a part of its significance as whatever it may signify. Whether we fully appreciate it or not, we always experience rock art in multisensory ways through the medium of our embodied experience. To regard rock art as a primarily visual medium is another prejudice that artificially separates out vision from the other senses. Rock art, through its location in the landscape, is generative of a wide range of experiences that extend far beyond both the visual dimension of the imagery and the particular rock on which the images are carved.

When we assign primary significance to meaning, to the images themselves, or to vision, we potentially corrupt a study of rock art by dematerialising the power of the imagery in relation to the material medium in which it is inscribed, and in relation to the landscape. A kinaesthetic approach is one that attempts to restore the power of imagery in relation to human agency. Images are fundamental in society not because they can be verbally described as meaning this or representing that, but because they require different forms of bodily actions in order to encounter and experience them. Experiencing the image through our bodies is powerful because these images alter us in subtle ways that may require no talk of their meaning. Describing the process of their bodily encounter becomes primary. So the significance of the image is not primarily what it stands for, or seeks to represent, but the event of its bodily experience. Understanding rock art thus links event, feeling, and form. It is concerned with human actions in relation to imagery as a multisensorial and synaesthetic (mingling or crossing of the senses) field.

Rock art images are typically multiple and complex, and they may not all be visible all at once. In the Indian calendar example discussed above, we witness the power of the eye. We can, of course, suggest that certain rock art images might also be strikingly powerful, dazzling and beguiling, sucking in the eye of the beholder and captivating him or her, in an analogous manner to Gell’s description of kula canoe prowboards or geometric patterns. Such images might well be understood as cognitively ‘sticky’, acting like traps. But such images are found in particular places on particular rocks in particular landscapes, and the manner in which they are approached and found and experienced is as much a matter of the movements of the body as of a cognitive operation taking place in the mind and goes far beyond vision.

Going beyond such ‘sticky’ images which arrest the eye, the phenomenal experience of any particular rock image, or panel of images, sets it in motion. When we visually focus on a single image, it inevitably becomes foregrounded in our perception, whereas other surrounding images become simultaneously backgrounded. As we look across the rock or walk over it, the image field is thus constantly shifting and changing in terms of figure and ground reversals, producing a shifting frame of reference rather than something static. Experiencing these images may require walking on the rock itself, looking down, and thus becoming an intimate participant within the image fields. It may require walking around, up and down, or moving in a boat. Different images or groups of images may require different forms of moving and ways of perceiving and experiencing. The materiality of the stone itself—its colour, feel, cracks, depressions, contours, and the like—works through and in relation to the body at rest or in motion, as important as the images themselves in creating particular bodily effects. A kinaesthetic approach to the art thus opens up the possibility of an entirely new way of appreciating its significance. We attempt to describe, discuss, and understand the manner in which the postures and movements of the body are generated and constrained by the images themselves in relation to the form and character of the rock.

From a kinaesthetic and sensory perspective, what is being stressed is the autonomy of the imagery. The images themselves are enough. We do not necessarily need to translate them, go beneath them, or worry about what they represent. Instead, we study the direct agency of this imagery, the bodily effects this imagery has on us and others. Images are thus regarded as significant not because they possess meaning but because they produce material sensory effects in relation to the bodies of those who experience them. In studying the imagery in this manner, our contemporary bodies, rather than our contemporary minds, become the primary research tool, together with our shared and distinctively human sensory capacities and dispositions. There is an entirely new methodology to be developed here which will involve a description of the human body and its postures and movements in relation to the imagery as sensed in multiple ways. We can document, one by one, individual carved rocks, or image fields and panels, in terms of their various corporeal powers in relation to the body and the manner in which these bodily effects are produced through a subtle dialectic between the materiality of the stone and the disposition of the images on it. We can compare and contrast what the stones in different rock art localities do to the body, and in what manner they are encountered. This is a project attempted in Chapters 2–4 of this book.

In considering the kinaesthetic effects of rock art, I would wish to claim that this offers the possibility of transforming traditional rock art studies, an opening out of an entirely new interpretive field made possible through escaping the tyranny of the image conceptualised as being simply, and primarily, a bearer of meaning. It creates both a new subject and object of analysis and requires a new methodology of study involving the detailed description of the postures of the body in motion in relation to the images. But on its own I do not believe that it is sufficient and needs to be linked back to a question of meaning, in a rethinking of semiotics and iconography.

KINAESTHETICS AND A PHENOMENOLOGICAL SEMIOTICS

The significance rock art has is intimately related both to meaning and doing. It has an inside and an outside. Kinaesthetic approaches attempt to understand the ‘inside’ elements of the art. These are its intimate relationship to the body and the human sensorium. The ‘outside’ elements relate to social and political beliefs and values, to gender, hierarchy, power, history and tradition, myths and cosmological beliefs, and so on. These are fundamental to any understanding of what it means.

However, what rock art means, I would maintain, cannot be adequately understood without consideration of what it does, the bodily effects that it creates or influences. Questions of meaning and questions of doing are two sides of the same coin which cannot be separated without losing something of essential value in the process. Although a kinaesthetic approach to rock art could be undertaken without reference to meaning, this would be deeply and unacceptably reductive since we would learn rather little about the specific form and nature of the images themselves. The type of result we are left with can be seen quite clearly in Gell’s analysis of kula canoe prow-boards or Asmat war shields. All we are ultimately left with is a notion of visual seduction in the first case or psychologically induced fear in the second. This image agency approach, notwithstanding its brilliant insights for a general understanding of what visual forms do, the kinds of power they possess, is incapable of telling us anything of value about the specificity of the intricate carvings on the canoe prow-boards or the painted designs on the war shields. For example, the former have an extremely complex iconography which is intimately linked to the manner in which people perceive their island environment in the South Pacific in general, and in particular, the role of various bird species within it: the way in which they are symbolically evaluated, understood, and represented in the art through close observation of their phenomenal physical and behavioural characteristics: ‘There are specific qualities thought to be represented by particular “animals” in the Vakutan environment which receives formal representation in the carved lines and embellished surfaces of the board assemblages. Form and colour provide the visual iconography to which body parts and “animal” representations are attached’ (Campbell 2001: 126). Such detail is surely not irrelevant in relation to the agency of these prow-boards.

Almost every critical commentator on Gell’s Art and Agency has been concerned with his apparent total dismissal of the value of symbolic meaning (see Pinney and Thomas eds. 2001). In a very useful recent discussion, Layton has pointed out that iconicity cannot be reduced to the status of an indexical sign, which is at the core of Gell’s argument when he considers the agency of icons such as Hindu representations of the gods (see discussion above). Iconicity cannot be separated from the symbolic, from cultural convention: ‘Representational styles select which aspects of the world they depict according to cultural tradition and the chosen aspects are organized in conventional ways’ (Layton 2003: 453). Gell does, despite his intentions to the contrary, readmit semiotics through the back door when he assesses the significance of style. Considering the relation of individual objects to the overall stylistic tradition of Marquesan art, he comments that ‘any part can stand for the whole as in synecdoche; “representing” in this sense is clearly a semiotic relation in which the object is a sign, and the corpus of stylistically related objects from which it is drawn, is what is signified thereby’ (AA: 166). Layton makes a crucial point in relation to this when he remarks that for art objects to have agency is in part dependent on them being ‘read’ or understood correctly, ‘demanding a semiological approach’ (Layton 2003: 460). For the thing to have power, we need to have an understanding of the kinds of cultural conventions, or symbolism, at work. For icons to be effective, they need to look like, or resemble, that which they represent, even if this is often heavily stylised, as in totemic art in northern Australia (Morphy 1991: 155 ff.) or in the case of split-representation on the American Northwest coast (Boas 1955).

There is precious little value in trying to read Gell’s mind as reflected in his own text. However, going beyond what may be just a point of playful rhetoric, I suggest that the kind of ‘symbolic’ approach that Gell is principally objecting to is that manifested in a particular formalistic ‘linguistic turn’ within anthropological studies of art and aesthetics in which the significance of iconography or pattern becomes reduced to the manifestation of an underlying structure, with rules and grammars communicating meaning like a language; and it is this approach that he particularly singles out for criticism (e.g., Hanson 1983; Faris 1971; Korn 1978). He makes the point that drawing linguistic analogies is misconceived. Lines or circles are not some kind of ‘visual phonemes’ (AA: 164). Visual forms are patently not encrypted messages requiring someone of sufficient analytic brilliance to come along and crack the underlying meaning of their peculiar imagistic codes. Pretending things are like words in the multifarious texts of material culture really doesn’t help. What this entire approach neglects is, of course, precisely the very materiality of things, and of culture.

The hallmark of such an approach, as manifested in Saussure and translated into anthropological discourse by Lévi-Strauss (1966; 1969), is the notion that the signs of language, a relationship between signifier and signified, are arbitrary in a system in which only relational difference counts, a matter of cultural convention. But in Pierce’s semiotic theory, discussed above, iconic and indexical (as opposed to symbolic) signs are non-arbitrary. They either look like what they represent (a deer looks like a deer) or index an action, event, or process (footprints in the sand), and for Gell such icons become indexes of agency. This can be claimed to provide a foundation for a materialist appropriation of semiotics, as Keane has argued (2003; 2005), rather than a reason to reject a semiotic perspective outright, especially as things, or images, may simultaneously possess symbolic, indexical, and iconic qualities. As often as not a ‘symbolic sign’ does not stand on its own, as opposed to an ‘indexical’ sign. In particular, all material ‘signs’ indexing or objectifying the agency and actions of their producers have an irreducible ‘impurity’ (Tilley 2006a). Words may be used to evoke smells or tastes or textures but, unlike things, have none of these material qualities. They only take on a visual form when materially transcribed into texts in which the ink may smell. The sensuous domain of things requires consideration of their carnal relations to persons and their bodies, so that a materialist semiotics is better understood under the rubric of a phenomenological semiotics.

Gell avoids any discussion of metaphor and metonomy in his explicit theoretical arguments for the agency of things, for he assumes ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’ are linguistic terms and are thus best avoided. Yet his entire argument depends upon the skillful employment of metaphors and metonyms to the full. He tells us that Malanggan wooden sculptures from New Ireland are bodies with skins. Similarly, Maori meeting houses are houses for the body. Houses are bodies because, like the human body, they are containers with exits and entrances. He goes on:

Houses are bodies because they have strong bones and armoured shells, because they have gaudy, mesmerizing skins which beguile and terrify; and because they have organs of sense and expression—eyes which peer out through windows and spyholes, voices which reverberate through the night.… To enter a house is to enter the belly of the ancestor and to be overwhelmed by the encompassing ancestral presence; overhead are the ribs of the ancestor in the form of the superbly decorated rafters which converge towards the ancestral backbone, the ridge pole. (Gell 1998: 252–53).

The superb description carries on; one body metaphor is piled on another. The whole point here is that the agency of the house—its mind effects for Gell—are produced through metaphorical means. The Maori house is a powerful material metaphor into the body of which people associate and affiliate. Gell’s text, of course, necessarily must convey all this through linguistic metaphor.

This raises the interesting, and ultimately unanswerable, chicken-or-egg question. Which comes first, the material metaphor, the house, or the linguistic metaphors used to describe it? Did the Maoris think through their originary houses before constructing them, or did the material form think itself through them in the process of building? The assumption, which requires a phenomenological process of bracketing here, is one in which metaphor in language is considered to be primary and material metaphors, because they are silent and do not speak themselves, are somehow considered to be secondary or derivative and definitely less important. Through building the house we can argue that the Maori were thinking through themselves, and their ancestral relations, through the material medium of their bodies. Putting any of this into verbal metaphors was secondary, after the fact, a Derridean ‘supplement’ to the engaging and engaged material form. The house materially inscribed or ‘wrote on the ground’ central symbolic elements of their culture before these were ever spoken or put into words. If we think of the living, breathing, and sensing Maori body politic within the body-house, the manner in which that house was both experienced and understood was part and parcel of its mode of habitation, which only required, or perhaps did not require at all, a secondary verbal metaphorical exegesis.

The position taken here is that ‘metaphor’ is not a linguistic term. It is instead the name (perhaps with an unfortunate linguistic baggage or inheritance, but I see absolutely no point in coining a new term) we give to an analogical process that is manifested in language and in material forms. Elsewhere I have argued at length that metaphors are a primary and irreducible aspect of language and, following Lakoff and others (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; 1999; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Gibbs 1994), that human thought is metaphorical thought. We think ourselves through metaphors. The counterpart to linguistic metaphor is material metaphor, metaphorical material relations between things, or aspects of a thing (Tilley 1999). This provides a fresh way of understanding material culture and visual aspects of material forms. The metaphorical experience both of language and of things is grounded and mediated through the mind situated in and part of the sensing and sensed human body. Our experience of the world, through language or through things, has a metaphorical basis, but each is not a mimetic copy or duplicate of the other because they operate in different linguistic and material domains which do not necessarily require any translation in the terms of the other. Words and things perform different and often incommensurable kinds of social work.

The two most significant points to be made in this context, and in relation to a study of imagery in rock art, are first, that the performative character of this imagery, working its way though the body, may be held to be of the utmost significance because many metaphors are grounded in the human body itself and in human sensory experiences. Second, both metaphor and metonymy are grounded in an analogic style of reasoning and association which is not arbitrary. Metonymy expresses part-whole relations. The metonymic image represents the whole through a part (e.g., hand for body); the metaphoric image is all about establishing linkages and material connections between things or aspects of a thing. So the redness of a thing may evoke the redness of blood (a non-arbitrary sensory and material connection), or the house can be a body because both are forms of containers (again, a non-arbitrary material connection) (see Warnier 2006 for an extended argument with regard to bodies and containers and attributes of containing and being contained). A well-fed body is heavy and weighted down with food, just like a productive garden with its crops. The sea has significant experiential qualities of lightness and buoyancy and movement compared with the static character and heavy qualities typically associated with the land, and so on (Munn 1986; and see the discussion in Tilley 2006a). In relation to Pierce’s trichotomy of signs, considerations of metaphor and metonymy thoroughly blur essentially arbitrary distinctions between different types of signs which may either be claimed to be symbolic, indexical, iconic, or not. Metaphoric representation in rock art plays on similarity and difference through and in material forms, exercising the mind at the same time as it exercises the body; concomitantly, interpretation becomes a multivalent process.

Linguistic or material metaphors, although culturally variable and infinitely creative and generative, do not arise in a disembodied and unconstrained mind able to think whatever it likes and in any way it likes. Both arise in carnal bodies, inhabiting sensuous landscapes, and so provide different experiential affordances and constraints for life and living, and in the practical exigencies of living and relating to others.

CONCLUSIONS

In relation to a study of rock art, I simply want to conclude by making the limited claim that a phenomenological approach that considers both bodily kinaesthetics and sensory synaesthetics offers, first, possibilities for a fuller and closer analysis. Second, it provides us with a new way to think about agency and movement in relation to imagery. Third, by doing so, it may provide a more subtle way to interpret the significance of the imagery and where we encounter it on the rocks. Above all, what a kinaesthetic approach emphasizes is the phenomenological thesis that the body is in the mind. Meaning arises from and through an embodied metaphorical mind which is mediated through very different forms of multisensorial encounter with visual imagery in alternative contexts. A kinaesthetic approach suggests that if we are really serious about understanding what images mean and the histories and social practices that they may be held to create as well as to represent, we need to investigate what these images do, and what they want of us, to adopt Mitchell’s (1996) phrase quoted at the head of this chapter.

The central theme to be investigated in the following three chapters is the performative work that rock art requires of the body in the context of the sensuous landscapes in which it is materially inscribed and embedded. An attempt is made to describe bodily relations with regard to images in three contrasting cases. This perspective leads on to a consideration of the manner in which a kinaesthetic and sensory study feeds into and may inform a metaphorical and interpretive understanding of what meaning and significance those images possessed. This in turn provides a basis for a comparative understanding of the relationship among body, image, and landscape through the medium of what I term (in the concluding chapter) the ‘phenomenological walk’.