ABSTRACT
Jonathan Gilmore, “Affect and Artifact: Distinguishing Between Imagination and Inflection in our Feelings for Sculpture”
The standard charge made against sculpture in the paragone or contest of the arts was that, compared to painting and literature, the scope of what it can represent is limited by a too-close dependence on the actual shape of its depicted subject. Armed with this claim, many theorists (as least as early as Pliny) explained sculpture’s capacity to elicit emotional and other responses in audiences as depending on their confusing the sculpture with the real thing it represents.
There are, of course, better ways of accounting for our feelings for sculptures than that we are deluded into thinking they are the real things for which such a response might be appropriate. The familiar framework that I adopt identifies the object of our response as not the physical artifact before us but what that artifact elicits us to represent via the imagination.
In my paper, I lay out some features of that framework that apply more or less generally across our traffic with different kinds of artworks: sculpture, painting, theater, literary fictions, and so on. I then turn to three potential grounds or causes of our responses to sculpture in particular. My question is whether, once we distinguish the imagined object that explains our emotions and other responses from the physical artifact before us that elicits that imagining, does the claim that sculpture is “too close” to its represented subject still hold? When I imagine x in engaging with a sculpture, do I respond just as I would if I were to believe or perceive x, that is, if I were to encounter it as a real thing face to face?
That question can be posed in both descriptive and normative terms. Descriptively, the question is: Are my responses to the contents of my imagining modeled in relevant ways on my responses to what I perceive or believe? My interest is in the normative question: Are what counts as reasons or justifications for our responses invariant across our experience of what a sculpture elicits us to imagine and our experience of an analogous object or state of affairs in real life? I argue against such invariance of justification. That is, I argue that there are features of sculpture that it possesses qua sculpture that can serve as reasons for apt responses that would not serve as reasons for those responses for the real thing the sculpture depicts.
