Beyond Like and As in Images:
Metonymy and Metaphor in Some Recent Art
Parallel appreciations can be made of Polke’s, and even more so Lawson’s, choices of images. Lawson’s paintings bringing architecture together with abstraction “feed metaphorically upon his own metonymies,” as Lodge said of D.H. Lawrence. 8 A characteristically inventive work by Lawson is his painting that was realized as a billboard project in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1989. A black and white painted version of the famous photograph of Bernard Berenson admiring a neo-classical sculpture is overlaid with a regularly spaced grid of green disks. These disrupt our vision, perhaps similar to the way the recent revelations concerning Berenson’s questionable dealings behind the scenes disturb our perception of the supposed disinterestedness of his theory of connoisseurship. But besides this metaphor, most importantly these abstract circles, and the two images of a Romantic equestrian statue which frame the central image, are metonymically derived from the context and thereby used to a critical end. The red on blue statue depictions are of pieces Berenson himself would have analyzed, criticized and decried in his capacity of advisor and connoisseur. The green shapes float over the surface marking compositionally significant spots in a dot-to-dot burlesque. They manifest Berenson’s deluded formal, analytical approach that would moor points of interest or lay out how the eye travels through the work, to the exclusion of any larger understanding of the whole.
Salle’s works conform completely to and satisfy the accepted structural criteria of modernism, which he attempts to challenge. Like Schnabel, and unlike Lawson, Salle apes metaphoric patterns, while emptying them. Typically he does not take responsibility for either, as is demonstrated in his video-taped interview “discussion” of his painting Tennyson. The 1983 acrylic The Cruelty of the Father, which includes the attached chair mentioned above, also features his typical hodgepodge of images from How to Draw manuals, soft-porn, disruptive abstract shapes, and more. The “Zeitgeist” paintings of 1982 all sport the Picabiaesque transparencies in their upper half, while mingling diagrammatic forms, truncated human images, and assorted citations or allusions to antecedent abstract art. This patchwork may be discussing contemporary issues such as emptiness, disunity, and absurdity, but more probably it is simply an unconscious result of the same. His art supplies a metaphoric mode that in turn yields nothing more than the clichéd message “Ain’t art idiotic.”
We have briefly examined a small variety of artists in an effort to apply the fruitful possibilities of Jakobson’s metonymy-metaphor distinction. The potency of this notion lies in its applicability to the particular successes or failures of individual artists. By extension also this discovery could furnish much insight when employed in examination of whole periods, movements or an artist’s entire oeuvre.
Additionally, metonymy could be a productive artistic method in the drive to create a post-modernism that is non-“Neo.”
We will end with this point of emphasis. Metonymy as a predominant factor in visual art is a fundamental departure from modernism, and for that matter from most Post-Modernism thus far. While appearing before, notably in versions of realism or naturalism, metonymy was utilized in a severely limited fashion. Metaphor has been far more favored.
As an analytic device the dichotomy presented here gives a window into new possibilities of understanding art. As an artistic device metonymy offers a doorway through which to push beyond the current stasis of reiteration into new art, while constructing an understanding of our framing conception.