But where's the Danish?

Let's play word association: "conference." What springs to mind? People in tight suits trying to impress each other over bad coffee? A weekend in Columbus, Ohio? Well, no doubt many more dubious predicates could be mustered. But, I'm here to tell you about an event I recently attended here in London-town.



Laden with the rather ponderous title "Beyond Mimesis and Nominalism: Representation in Art and Science," Old Ken had pencilled in this as a two-day slot in which to catch up on some zz's. Despite the fact that I was attending in my official capacity as Dean of the School of Serious Studies, I made sure I was comfortably attired. I donned my favorite Garfield sweatshirt (the one with the motto "I don't do Mondays"); some zebra-striped zubas (not unlike those worn by the gent in the photograph above); my elven sleeping cap; and packed my most comfortable lawn chair.



Well, things got underway at about 9:45 when we got little introductions from the goofy conference organizers, which explained to us why we should putatively care about these terms "mimesis" and "nominalism," what they might have to do with art and science and so on. Thankfully, reprieve came fairly quickly in the form of coffee, which had been delayed as the courier had tripped coming up the stairs. While thankfully he was okay, his pratfall was only appropriate: the coffee was about as weak as he was!

With this introduction finished, participants were then free to choose which of the parallel sessions to attend next. Being an experimentalist by trade, I figured I'd have more to learn from the art-inclined session on offer (called "Architecture and Space"). As such, I heard papers on how analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman claimed that architectural drawings were less like a painter's sketches than a musical composer's score and why a stange collage by Louis Kahn can tell us about visual languages used by architects to communicate with their publics in post-War America. The most interesting paper in the session, though, charted the relationships between so-called "light and space" artists such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin and the practices of psychological testing with which they were involved in the 1960s.



In the afternoon, I heard two really interesting papers on "chronophotography"—one which examined how Minimalist artist Sol Lewitt appropriated and re-interpreted the famous "stop-action" imagery of Eadward Muybridge (see above), the second pursuing a conceptual relation between the similar photographic efforts of Etienne-Jules Marey and the model of scientific activity advocated by Pierre Duhem.



Time for a break? Nap time? No time for that now, as we were then whisked off to the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre at the Courtauld Institute of Art for the conference's first plenary lecture. There, eminent art historian and theorist James Elkins gave a talk called "Report on the Book 'Visual Practices Across the University.'" An apt title. Basically, Elkins has been involved in staging first an exhibition and now a book that had explored how visual materials are used in various different disciplines within a given university. The "case study" university used by Elkins was University College in Cork, Ireland, where he has held a position for the past two years. And, admittedly, the examples in the book are somewhat self-selecting; he had solicited contributions from the university's departments and had received most response from the sciences.

Nonetheless, what the book tries to do is not compress all the different disciplinary strategies (thirty departments are represented in the book) into the singular or binary "scopic regimes" favored by art historians. Rather, the idea is that these visual practices can more or less be considered on their own terms, compared with one another and, as such, used as a basis for doing a kind of image-analysis that moves away from the narrow, humanities-based "ghetto" that Elkins sees supposedly interdisciplinary fields like "visual culture" as increasingly relegated. Whether or not Elkins' solutions to this problem are really that helpful, I think this is a provocative diagnosis of the place of visual studies and the images he showed from the exhibition were pretty amazing.



Well, after all that, we were ready for some dinner. And how! While an account of the conference dinner would take me a bit too far afield, I'll just throw down a few quick notes about the second day of the event. The morning of the second day began with a pleanry lecture by James Hyman, a philosophy professor at Oxford. This talk was basically a critique of the ideas of Vilayanur Ramachandran and Semir Zeki—two contemporary neuro-scientists who have claimed to have "solved" essential questions of art through new technologies of neural imaging. I've heard that most people in the artistic community find these claims of "neuro-aesthetics" about as convincing as Kevin Costner's English accent in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and about as relevant to the study of art as "The da Vinci Code." So—what a shock!—Hyman took it upon himself to debunk them yet again.



Far more interesting was the plenary session that closed the talk. This was given by Catherine Elgin, a philosopher based at Harvard. Elgin was a student of and collaborator with the late Nelson Goodman. Developing some of Goodman's crucial insights, she gave a paper in which she proposed a schematic account of representation wherein exemplification plays a crucial role. Like Goodman, Elgin began with the base-line assertion that resemblance is a useless basis for understanding representation. Resemblance possesses different formal properties from representation. That is, resemblance is reflexive and symmetric; in other words, an object resembles itself to a maximum degree while the statement "Object A resembles Object B" also allows for the inference that "Object B resembles Object A." However, a representation is neither reflexive nor symmetric. While a painting likely resembles itself, it is nonsensical to say that it represents itself. Similarly, while we can say that the painting represents Al Gore, a symmetrical relation does not thereby hold: Al Gore does not represent the painting.



While all of this sounds straightforward, the implications of Goodman's assertions chafe against much conventional wisdom. That is, a supposedly realistic still life painting (such as we see above) doesn't represent because it resembles the depicted objects. Rather, this is a "fruit-picture" that denotes fruit, because this is the kind of picture we viewers agree represents fruit. This sounds slightly convoluted, but in the second formulation resemblance is at most an incidental by-product of representation, but is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of it. What follows from this is that we need not be surprised by those traditions of visual representation (whether "non-Western", Cubist or otherwise) that depart from the kind of still-life painting above. Building from this, what Elgin claims is that we need to pay attention to exemplification—how works of art represent by instantiating (either literally or metaphorically). I would explain this, but Old Ken's getting tired so perhaps we can learn more later. Whee!