Paper III, Semester I

Palimpsest and Discursivity: An Investigation Of Allegory
Cameron Bennett
Written September 2009

I.

As an artist in the process of creating a series of allegorical works, the question of the precise meaning of allegory is essential, especially as distinct from metaphor and symbol. Hitherto, my use of each of these words was interchangeable and I used any and all of them to describe the same kind of art. The trend in art of using the human figure to represent an aspect of nature, or culture, probably was my clearest conception of allegory, especially as used in the 19th century by artists like Gustave Klimt and Alphonse Mucha. I would have just as easily called the disrobing human figure in a work titled SCIENCE REVEALING ITSELF an allegorical, metaphoric, or symbolic representation of Science.
As I was very surprised to find, however, there exists much complicated philosophical thought on the subject of allegory. So, for practical reasons, I am forced to narrow the scope of this essay and focus on allegory alone.

II.

Interestingly, much of the early influential thought surrounding allegory, comes to us through a German filter. The Romanticist scholars and philosophers Winckelmann (1717-1768), Goethe (1749-1832), and Schelling (1775-1854) all attempted to develop the meaning of allegory. Winckelmann offered an early definition of allegory as every image which contains meaning. His is the simplest and, therefore, seems to lend the most clarity to an understanding allegory. Goethe and Schelling, as philosophers will do, added daunting levels of complexity to the subject. Curiously, they involved themselves in a philosophical pitting of allegory against symbol, ultimately assigning greater importance to symbol. Their influence was so profound that allegory was very little used until the beginning of the 20th century. Walter Benjamin(1892-1940) continued to develop theories about allegory as it manifested itself in German drama, attempted to refute the arguments of the Romanticists, and sought to re-establish its importance. Ultimately, critics such as Paul de Man and Craig Owens wrote about allegory's re-emergence and re-entrenchment in the arts of the later 20th century.

In THE RHETORIC OF PERSPECTIVE, author Hanneke Grootenboer writes:
“Allegory has been defined by Paul de Man, Benjamin, and Owens, among others, as that which emerges under the melancholy gaze, expresses itself in ruins, establishes a distance to its own
origin that it never reaches, and desires to fix the ephemeral in an image.”(136) One key component of allegory as accepted by Owens is the idea of allegory as a reinterpretation of a prior idea, a palimpsest. Another is the discursive quality of allegory, its movement from topic to topic, reference to reference, which often results in the clouding of its meaning. In THE ALLEGORICAL IMPULSE, a highly influential article and the chief source of information on the contemporary use of allegory in this essay, Owens demonstrates that allegory is especially present in postmodern art. According to Owens, allegory occurs anytime an artist appropriates or reinterprets a prior image, physical space, or idea into his or her own work. It is simple to see, then, how much contemporary art could be considered allegorical, especially with the postmodern questioning of the possibility of originality: installation, assemblage, collage, photography, painting, and especially film-making; all require pre-existing phenomena for their own iconography.
Owens writes: “Appropriation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization---these diverse strategies characterize much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its modernist predecessors.”(209) Based on this, Owens considers the site-specific art of Robert Smithson allegorical in its appropriation of the landscape, and also in its transience: “...the site specific work becomes an emblem of transience...the memento mori of the 20th century.”(209)
Interestingly, this idea of allegory as a discursive act is what the German Romanticists saw as a
problem of allegory, that allegory referred to a meaning it did not itself contain, that the origins of its referrals were lost in a mise-en abyme and could never be found or known. Allegory was, therefore, vague. Vagueness of meaning, as I mention in my earlier essay RE-EVALUATING SKILL THROUGH A POSTMODERN LENS, seems to be a desirable quality in contemporary art. Viewers are invited to create their own interpretations of artworks. If vagueness is one of the hallmarks of allegory, one then sees a reason why allegory has returned to popularity in art, as Craig Owens says it has.
Other artists, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and R. B. Kitaj, contribute works
which deliberately operate on a discursive model. The idea of fragment in allegorical theory is very similar to that of ruin; fragments are residual parts of something which may be reinterpreted. Each offers fragments of images or objects, objects which trace their meanings back to a prior origin, which we can or cannot know. Johns used fragments of the human body in his work, casts of body parts, the residual imprint of his own face on paper, his Skin Drawings. With works like Rebus and Allegory, Rauschenberg is credited with transferring the Western experience of art from the visual to the textual. These pieces are syntagmatic, that is, they resemble a narrative sequence, a procession of pictograms, a text more than a picture. Yet, true to the postmodernist allegorist, it is a text which is unreadable, and Owens himself writes: “...it remains impossible to read a Rauschenberg , if by reading we mean the extraction from a text of a coherent , monological message.”(225) Kitaj, working in a quasi-abstract, representational style, creates fragmentary images composed of other images. He also hyperbolizes the allegorical leap from the thing represented to its distant meaning. “Desk Murder” is the title of one of his paintings, one in which there is a desk, but no trace of murder. Kitaj also alludes to a selfconsciousness of allegory in his work, including an obscured portrait of Walter Benjamin in a figure group in one of his paintings.

III.

If allegory has developed into something which “...emerges under the melancholy gaze,
expresses itself in ruins, establishes a distance to its own origin that it never reaches, and desires to fix the ephemeral in an image,” my question is: Why? Why are these the accepted qualities of allegory?
My own personal opinion about this definition is that it need not necessarily define all allegory. Why must all allegories represent transience, ephemera? Why must the distance between symbols and their meanings never be reached? If it were so, then we ought to feel pathos, which probably we would not feel, at the allegorical representation of happiness with a smiley yellow happy-face symbol. In our example the allegory actually does reach the distance to its own origin; the meaning is perfectly clear.
As long as symbols are part of the cultural consciousness, the distance between the symbol and its origin will be reached. Why the need to embark on this investigation of allegory in the first place? In my most recent artist statement I mention that there is in me a frustrated symbolist straining to be released and that I hope to have the opportunity to create more images which involve the use of visual metaphor. Some would argue that art which uses any allegory and symbolism will be lost on a general audience. In defense of allegory, however, I argue that the goal of the artist is to produce work which operates on many levels. The meanings behind Klimt's Allegory of Medicine, along with John Singer Sargent's murals, The Triumph of Religion, were almost completely lost to their public. Yet, for me and many others, because of their skillfully-painted representational elements, they are a highly pleasurable experience to look at. We may not understand the symbolism, but we recognize and enjoy the depiction
of the symbols. I would also note in a final observation about allegory that one of its intrinsic qualities not mentioned by Owens, Benjamin, Goethe or Grootenboer is that it provides fertile ground for aesthetic variety, for the unusual, the sensational, for arresting visual arrangement. This, of course, is another attraction for many to the allegories of Klimt, Mucha, and Sargent, but also to contemporary painters like Samuel Bak, Jerome Witkin, and Odd Nerdrum.
In conclusion, I state having a personal preference for Winckelmann's simple definition of
allegory as any image which has meaning. I prefer it to the complex understanding of allegory
accepted and developed by Benjamin and Owens as being subject to melancholy and transience.
Finally, as an artist currently undertaking the creation of a body of allegorical works, any lingering doubts about the relevance of allegorical art in the contemporary art world have been dispelled by the writing of Craig Owens, who has shown that allegory is firmly entrenched in it.

Works Cited

Diefendorf, Jeffrey M. and Mara R. Witzling. The Art of Samuel Bak, Memory and Metaphor,
The Art Gallery, University of NH, 2006

Grootenboer, Hanneke. The Rhetoric of Perspective-Realism and Illusionism in 17th Century Dutch Still-Life Painting. University of Chicago Press, 2005

Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse.”Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation.” Ed. Brian Wallis. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984

Peaker, Giles. “Natural History, Kitaj, Allegory and Memory.” Critical Kitaj. Ed. Aulich, James and John Lynch. Rutgers University Press, 2001

Weiss, Jeffrey. Jasper Johns, An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965. National Gallery of Art,
Washington 2007