Eugene Kaelin’s essay “The Visibility of Things Seen: A Phenomenological View of Painting.” is an investigation into the phenomenological system of paintings: how the consciousness is guided in the viewing of an aesthetic object by the intentional visual structure of the object’s “universe” (55). He begins with a critique of Roman Ingarden’s Das Literarische Kunstwerk, in which he describes literature as a phenomenological experience constituted by the way a literary work shows itself: “in a polyphonic harmony of sounds and sense.” In other words, the work is composed of firstly, a sensuous surface, and then into units of meaning contained in sentences, then into a structure of relationship which constitute and idea, and finally an order of schematized images. According to Kaelin, these elements are mistakenly viewed as heteronymous. Kaelin finds this description to be wholly insufficient and via Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological treatise on the work of art, Kaelin approaches Sarte’s and Merleau-Ponty’s respective aesthetic theories.
Sarte’s work on the visual arts was dominated by the problem of imaginary entities—the aesthetic object being intended to by the artist but distinguished by its non-existence. The resemblance perceived between a representation and plenary reality exemplifies imagination, or intentionality. The problem with this approach arises when the art object contains no figurative elements, as in “modern” art. Kaelin sees Sarte as mistaken, too, in his reduction to the function of imagination, for the artists goal is to “fix”
(43) the imagination and create an object out of absence.
Merleau-Ponty sees the conflict in representation between “realistic” painters (rationalists) and impressionists (empiricists) as originating in the mistaken shared belief of the “primacy of the objective world.”(39) Realistic painters, since the Renaissance have used the convention of perspective to register the world in illusionistic real space. Impressionists use pointalism to depict the sensuous experience of light reflected off real objects. For Merleau Ponty, it is Cezanne who revives painting in an investigation of how objects come appear in our perceptual field in the first place, a project that is surely phenomenological in nature. Cezanne’s objects are pre-rational—they are objects of intention, objects of bodily tension. “When a painter is successful, whether figurative or not, he succeeds in presenting on the sensuous surface of his work the same kind of tension produced in the organism’s phenomenal field when it first becomes aware that an object exists.”
(40)
For Merleau-Ponty the sense of touch is a model for the visual act. Therefore the conflict between figurative and abstract painting is badly put: the object is merely that which is perceived in space and felt by the body as space tension, equally felt in color relationships as well as the anticipation of objects. Therefore all visual elements represent Being, and each one exists in a field of Being.
Kaelin sees both Sarte’s and Merleau Ponty’s theory as bereft in their respective reductions to “the representation of objects, real or otherwise,” (44) and the presentation of a sensuous surface, that ignores the represented objects. In a phenomenological analysis of ten painting, figurative and not figurative, expressive of depth, and surface expressions, Kaelin hopes to surpass these two reductive summaries of aesthetic experience. In his description of these ten works, he explains how all of the elements in the painting have their inherent qualities changed in relationship to the other elements of the painting. All meaning, then is dependent upon the relationships of the elements in the work which Kaelin structures into a hierarchy of phenomena from color space to the depiction of objects in which “real space” can be intuited, and finally the self-contained “idea” in the painting. For Kaelin, it makes no difference whether the object has a natural world correlate or not. “The gamut of visibility may thus be conceived as a series of emergent strands of experience.” (56) Kaelin concludes that the viewer’s aesthetic intuition is completely contained in the “visibility of the things seen,”
(57) the elements of the painting that lend each other meaning in their very appearance.
Kaelin, Eugene, “The Visibility of Things Seen: A Phenomenological View of Painting.” pp 30-59. James M. Edie, “An Invitation to Phenomenology.” Quadrangle. 1965.
