SEMIOTIC ART HISTORY

I don’t want to be cliché, now I will writing about semiotic art history.

Semiotic art history is an approach to art historical analysis that borrows from the established theories of semiology. It seeks to uncover the codified meaning or meanings in an aesthetic object by examining its connectedness to a collective consciousness. Applying a language-based philosophy to visual media is inherently problematic and for that reason, art historians typically supplement its application with other methodologies that allow for political and historical considerations.

Art historians use semiotics in order to subvert the myth of art as an immediate and unmitigated vision of the world, a window through which the object can be viewed without external mediation. In a tradition that assumes that visual meaning can be intuitively uncovered, the complexity of imagery can only be adequately addressed in reading images as text. Standards of styalization and form replace words as signifiers of meaning. Just as dictionaries are inadequate in supplying true meaning to words, nature is insufficient as the ultimate reference for visual signs if the notion of the Platonic ideal is dismissed.

As opposed to iconography which seeks to identify meaning, semiotics is concerned with how meaning is created. Roland Barthes’s connoted and denoted meanings are paramount to this examination. In any particular work of art, an interpretation depends on the identification of denoted meaning—the recognition of a visual sign, and the connoted meaning—the instant cultural associations that come with recognition. The main concern of the semiotic art historian is to come up with ways to navigate and interpret connoted meaning.

Art historians do not commonly commit to any one particular brand of semiotics but rather construct an amalgamated version which they incorporate into their collection of analytical tools. For example, Meyer Shapiro borrowed Saussure’s differential meaning in effort to read signs as they exist within a system. According to Schapiro, to understand the meaning of frontality in a specific pictorial context, it must be differentiated from, or viewed in relation to, alternate possibilities such as a profile, or a three-quarter view. Schapiro combined this method with the work of Charles Sanders Peirce whose object, sign, and interpretant provided a structure for his approach. Alex Potts demonstrates the application of Peirce’s concepts to visual representation by examining them in relation to the Mona Lisa. By seeing the Mona Lisa, for example, as something beyond its materiality is to identify it as a sign. It is then recognized as referring to an object outside of itself, a woman, or Mona Lisa. The image does not seem to denote religious meaning and can therefore be assumed to be a portrait. This interpretation leads to a chain of possible interpretations: who was the sitter in relation to Leonardo? What significance did she have to him? Or, maybe she is an icon for all of womankind. This chain of interpretation, or “unlimited semiosis” is endless; the art historian’s job is to place boundaries on possible interpretations as much as it is to reveal new possibilities.

Semiotics operates under the theory that an image can only be understood from the viewer’s perspective. The artist is supplanted by the viewer as the purveyor of meaning, even to the extent that an interpretation is still valid regardless of whether the creator had intended it. Rosiland Krauss espoused this concept in her essay “In the Name of Picasso.” She denounced the artist’s monopoly on meaning and insisted that meaning can only be derived after the work has been removed from its historical and social context. Mieke Bal argued similarly that meaning does not even exist until the image is observed by the viewer. It is only after acknowledging this that meaning can become opened up to other possibilities such as feminism or psychoanalysis.