WORDS OF ART: THE H

Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College

WORDS OF ART: THE H_LIST

Compiled by Robert J. Belton

If you would like to see something removed, added or corrected, please feel free to contact bbelton@klo1.ouc.bc.ca.

HABITUS: A synonym for social formation.

HAGIOGRAPHY: Writing about saints. Traditionally, saints are not recognized as such until they have been officially canonized (see canon). By extension then, any type of artwriting giving undue praise to an artist or attempting principally to identify an important contribution to an art-historical canon is implicitly a hagiography. In official religious hagiography, certain criteria must be met. The most well-known of these are miracles and martyrdom. The straightforward analogies for these in art history are masterpieces and bohemianism. See also genius.

HAMARTIA: Frequently translated as "tragic flaw," hamartia is simply a mishap or human frailty which leads to someone's reversal of fortune.

HAUTE BOURGEOISIE: See bourgeois.

HEARSAY: A legal term denoting evidence not based on a witness's personal knowledge, but on information reported to him by someone else. As such, in many legal systems, most hearsay is not admissible as evidence without meeting a rigid set of criteria. In some art criticism, hearsay has become so entrenched in interpretive history that facts about an artwork are sometimes obscured (see context [tertiary], King Richard effect). This is a particular problem in popularizing contexts. For instance, general books usually make quite a to-do about Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, but few of them point out that the work was not publicly exhibited for at least a decade after its completion. So assertions that the painting was a direct influence on a host of young artists must be revised to distinguish more clearly between those who had first-hand knowledge of the work and those who either did not know of it or had heard about it only through the grapevine.

HEBRAISM: The subordination of everything to principles of obedient conduct. Matthew Arnold uses the term in Culture and Anarchy to signify "strictness of conscience," in contrast to Hellenism's "spontaneity of conscience." The contrast is thus between duty and curiosity.

HEDONISM: Although it roots are genuinely philosophical, hedonism is now taken to mean sensual gratification as an end in itself. The term pops up in discussions of the work of Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, and other artists who seem to have made a point of avoiding troubling subject matter or politically specific themes.

HEGELIANISM: Generally, anything pertaining to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. More specifically, the notion that history has a rational end -- i.e., history is the manner in which reason realizes itself in human experience. It follows the typical dialectic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. Followers of Hegel disagreed as to what this meant, with the so-called Old Hegelians claiming current political conditions were rational and the Young Hegelians claiming the opposite. The latter preferred to think of philosophy as essentially a call to revolution: one of them, Ludwig Feuerbach, was of particular influence on Karl Marx (see Marxism). See also world-view. Hegel has had considerable influence on art history, especially in his basic distinction between form and content. His idea was that these two could be reconciled in a higher synthesis -- as they are in a different way in a paralinguistic theory of art -- but his application of thesis/antithesis/synthesis to the trio of symbolical (Oriental) art, classical (Greek and Roman) art, and Romantic (Germano-Christian) art misses the mark by a wide margin. See also idealism.

HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY: See new masculinity.

HEGEMONY: Often linked to the writings of Antonio Gramsci, but by no means exclusive to them, "hegemony" means predominant influence, especially when it involves coercion, as in colonialism. One reads frequently of the cultural hegemony of the capital over the provinces, the economic hegemony of the middle class over the working class (see embourgeoisement), etc. The maintenance of hegemony is dependent upon the ideological effect, which makes the power of the dominant class appear desirable and natural. This in turn makes the meanings chosen by the dominant group appear to be universal. The hegemony of the mainstream media is a case in point, creating common sense beliefs that contradict statistical observations: for example, people tend to think the majority of crack cocaine addicts are black inner-city urbanites when in fact they are white suburbanites, and the elderly are the most afraid of experiencing violence even though they are statistically least likely to. Hegemony is, however, not a stable entity but what Gramsci called a "moving equilibrium" in which positions are ceaselessly revised. The seat of power is thus not the exclusive possession of a particular class once and for all but a series of shifts of power, sometimes across alliances. (A troublesome case in point is that well-meaning advertising can give the impression that women are far more likely to suffer violence at the hands of their spouses than men. Recent research indicates this is not true.) Hegemony thus needs continually to be reconfigured and resymbolized.

HEIDEGGERIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of Martin Heidegger. See Dasein, existentialism, ontological difference, open.

HELIOGRAPHY: See photography.

HELLENISM: The subordination of everything to the intellect, even sensual beauty. See Hebraism for Matthew Arnold's application of the term.

HERESY OF PARAPHRASE: The notion that anything -- an artwork, text, utterance, etc. -- means what it means only in its original form, so that any abbreviation, paraphrase, translation, or other form of representation introduces distortions, simplifications, and misunderstandings. When Cleanth Brooks used the phrase in The Well Wrought Urn, he had no idea that the notion would be turned on its head as part of postmodern orthodoxy in the form of mediation. Brooks intended to give priority to the literary work itself, but it is now understood that any act -- even reading -- is a type of mediation, so there is no real "work" without some sort of paraphrase. This realization gives rise to the death of the author, on the one hand, and to reader-response criticism on the other.

HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE: In hermeneutics, the notion that one cannot understand the meaning of a portion of a work until one understands the whole, even though one cannot understand the whole until one understands the parts. It is not simply a paradox, since it indicates that any act of interpretation occurs through time, with adjustments and modifications being made to one's understanding of both the parts and the whole in a circular manner, at least until some sort of resolution is achieved (see closure, sense 2). (There are some similarities to the sorts of adjustments made in Pepper's conception of the consummatory field.) The word "barked" cannot properly be said to mean dog sounds if the sentence in which it appears is "the child barked his shin when climbing the tree." Similarly, this sense of the word "shin" does not operate in a sentence describing the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Accordingly, a reader will not understand the parts until s/he has read the whole, and vice versa. Such examples are far too simple to characterize what happens in full-blown hermeneutics, however. See prejudice for a different type of example. Cf hermeneutic spiral for a related model which tries to sidestep closure.

HERMENEUTIC SPIRAL: In theory, the traditional hermeneutic circle presumes to reach a definitive conclusion as to the meaning of an utterance. Because it invokes closure, it remains open to attack from postmodern writers, who prefer indeterminacy to determinacy. In historical practice, no statement made about a work of art has ever been truly conclusive (cf reception history), but rather than discard the hermeneutic model, we can find ways to spring it open systematically. One such is simply to acknowledge that something else can always be said, however invalid or irrelevant it might be. The adjustments and modifications one makes during the process of coming to understanding never cease and a true closure is never evoked. But we might want to invent a system which also enables us to create relevant and valid responses, despite open-endedness. One such is a hermeneutic spiral equation, which has two advantages: first, it provides a hypothetical space for all future contributions in structurally schematic form and it provides a mechanism for testing their usefulness; and two, its structural holism assures the practitioner will not be subject to interpretive agnosia.

HERMENEUTIC SPIRAL EQUATION: The use of a formal language to produce a scheme of interpetation which tends towards holism without invoking closure and without excluding future interpretive strategies or new evidence. In its open-endedness, it avoids interpetive agnosia. To create one such equation, let "F1" and "F2" represent all primary and secondary aspects of form respectively. Let "C1," "C2," and "C3" represent all primary, secondary and tertiary aspects of content. Let "X1," "X2," and "X3" represent all primary, secondary and tertiary aspects of context. Let the sign of multiplication represent the action of inflection or other forms of mutual influence or interference. Let the sign of division represent the action of tempering, corroborating, substantiating, or other testing. Let "IC" represent intellectual curiosity (thus, by implication, all future contributions) and let "RSVP" represent "relevant, sufficient, valid propositions" (see informal logic). We can then produce the following:

(((F1F2C1)=C2)X1X2)/X3 = C3
_______________________

IC/RSVP

In this instance, primary and secondary form are first described as inflecting the literal content to produce a figurative meaning. As a simplistic illustration, the light (F1) and composition (F2) of Edvard Munch's Puberty push the literal scene of a young girl sitting on the edge of a bed to a figurative scene of a threatened young girl on the threshold of something. That in turn is inflected by circumstantial information -- for example, the deaths of Munch's mother and sister (X1) and the attitudes of his intellectual circle towards gender (X2). These observations are then tested against reflective awareness of our own critical expectations and those of any artwriters whose work may have affected our interpretations (X3). In the case of Munch, for example, the shadow at the rear right has been described as "phallic." We should at least ask ourselves what expectations this reveals. (In other words, does such a statement tell us more about the work or the tertiary context in which the work is interpreted?) All of this produces a final content (C3). If we were to leave it there, we would probably have evoked closure. Instead, we acknowledge that something new can and probably will always be said, signalling new interpretations as a byproduct of intellectual curiosity. These, in turn, can be tested by the principles of informal logic to distinguish interpretations of substance from instances of interpretatio excedens or interpretatio predestinata.

HERMENEUTICS: Any of a series of systematic theories of interpretation. Because it originally designated the interpretation of religious texts -- a practice which assumed that every aspect of a Biblical text had to be meaningful because it was divinely inspired -- hermeneutics carries a similar connotation that meaning is to be derived from every conceivable feature of a text that can be construed as a contribution to some sort of organic whole (see holism). In spite of this, there are all sorts of hermeneutic approaches. For Gadamer's special contribution to hermeneutics, see prejudice. Paul Ricoeur's The Conflict of Interpretations distinguished between linguistics, which he saw as a closed system of intrasignificant signs, and the extralinguistic properties of hermeneutics. More recently, the idea that a hermeneutic interpretation must apply in some way to a total meaning has been revised by Peter B�rger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984): formerly, the hermeneutic interpretation had to resolve all traces of contradiction, but B�rger calls for a revised approach replacing the necessary agreement of parts with a stratification of sorts, in which various layers might contradict one another and yet still contribute to the meaning of the whole in their very contradictoriness. See hermeneutic circle, hermeneutic spiral, hermeneutic spiral equation. Cf extralinguistic.

HERSTORY: A neologism invented because of the false peception of affinity (see faux amis) between "history" and "his story." Despite the etymological fallacy, "herstory" is an economical way to describe women's history and the feminist project of dismantling a male-only canon.

HETERODOXY: Ideas not in accordance with or critical of established doctrine or received opinion. See also doxa, orthodoxy.

HETEROGENEITY: The state of being fundamentally different in kind. See heterology.

HETEROGLOSSIA: "Different tongues" or "the speech of others." Mikhail Bakhtin coined the word to describe multiple voices in a text (see dialogism).

HETEROLOGICAL STATEMENTS: A statement which is not true of itself. For example, "Italian," which not an Italian word. See homological statements.

HETEROLOGY: James George Frazer's Golden Bough characterized the primitive mind as incapable of distinguishing between the sacred and the impure or filthy. Building on this, Georges Bataille (see Bataillean) drew from German sociology and theology the sacred notion of the "wholly other" (see ganz Andere). Seeking to fuse these notions, Bataille hit upon the idea that that which is most "other" in the human body and therefore most sacred is that which we have actually ingested but cannot assimilate -- that is, the undigested material which passes through the intestines. Excrement, then, is an example of the completely other -- a heterogeneous " foreign body [Bataille's stress]...that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvelous." Moreover, excrement is a type of expenditure, a basic conception in Emil Durkheim's theory of social exchange. Bataille thus theorized that the surplus value of the vile/sacred had some effect on the social formation, as in such things as potlatches, sacrifice and ritual mutilations. He proposed that the study of such phenomena should be called "heterology." The idea has become influential as a strategy for disruption. The terminology of heterology -- e.g., bassesse -- have started to appear in discussions of disturbing artworks, like those of the Surrealists (Rosalind Krauss) and Jana Sterbak.

HEURISTIC: Stimulating interest in order to make new discoveries and formulations, and/or a teaching method to encourage students to discover for themselves. The term is fairly common in current artwriting. For a specific application, see W. McAllister Johnson, Art History: Its Uses and Abuses.

HIERARCHICAL: The defining characteristic of any system of persons of things given different ranks or statuses, as in a governmental hierarchy.

HIERATIC: Originally, "sacred" or "priestly." The term is routinely used to designate a formal, conventional, and conceptual style like that in the art of ancient Egypt or the Byzantine Empire. Potential antonyms are demotic and perceptual.

HIERONYMY: Originally, "sacred naming." The term now means the granting of special status to some thing by virtue of the way it is named.

HIGH ART (CULTURE): Until recently, there has a distinction between high art (also called "high culture," fine art, or beaux-arts) and low art (also called "mass culture"). Where the former supposedly consisted of the meticulous expression in fine materials of refined or noble sentiment, the latter was the shoddy manufacturing in inferior materials of superficial kitsch. Moreover, the assumption always was that appreciation of the former depended on such things as intelligence, social standing, educated taste, and a willingness to be challenged. In contrast, the latter simply catered to popular taste, unreflective acceptance of realism, and a certain "couch potato" mentality. Although many earlier artists took inspiration from popular and folk art -- e.g., Gustave Courbet's appropriation of woodcuts -- the most systematic approaches towards blurring the differences between high and low art were taken by Cubism, Dada and Surrealism. Pop Art further weakened the distinction, and artists as various as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons and the Guerilla Girls, influenced strongly by the different branches of postmodern thought, seem have dealt it the final blow. We now find that formerly "high" artists are approaching mainstream celebrity status: for example, performance artist Laurie Anderson's song O Superman reached the top ten of the pop charts in England, video and camera artist William Wegman has appeared on The Tonight Show to promote a book of photographs, and both have done segments on Saturday Night Live. In spite of this, one still wonders if the distinction still exists, albeit in a slightly different form. Few would seriously argue that the droves who follow televised wrestling matches and afternoon soap operas have any genuine interest in contemporary art. It is even less likely that the millions who read supermarket tabloids or romance novels would ever choose to read advanced art criticism.

HIGHLIGHT: The point at which an object reflects the greatest light, or the representation of same in drawing, painting, photography, watercolour, etc. Works which follow the logic of perception tend to orient highlights in such a way that the direction of the light source can be deduced from them, but there is no shortage of examples which ignore this principle and use highlights in a rather more intuitive manner. See also reserve highlight.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM: Any criticism which attempts to describe, explain or recreate the meaning a work had in its original context, rather than what it might mean to later generations. See historical methodologies.

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM: The foundation of Marx's (see Marxism) materialist (see materialism) theory of history: that the consciousness of men does not determine the social formation, but that the social formation -- particularly the economic structure of society -- determines consciousness independent of the will of men.

HISTORICAL METHODOLOGIES: Those types of criticism which foreground context, especially information of the environmental or secondary sort. See especially correlational social history, Geistesgeschichte, iconology, Marxism, new art history, new historicism, patronage, and reception theory. The terms macrohistory, microhistory, and quantohistory are also beginning to appear. Cf perspectivism, visuality.

HISTORICISM: Any of a variety of approaches which give priority to history, specifically with the implications that all of life and reality are historically conditioned and that each historical phenomenon must be interpreted according to its own terms. Historicism appears in many guises in aesthetics and criticism, including the following: Hegelian idealism (that culture in general must be understood in terms of a transcendental progression of historical change); positivism (that a particular artwork must be interpreted in the light of the unique, verifiable circumstances in which it was created); new historicism (the revitalized historicism of the postmodern period, emphasizing economic and ideological circumstances), and perspectivism and/or relativism (that no one point of view is central).

HISTORICITY: The historical actuality of a thing, as opposed to putative timelessness.

HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION: See metafiction.

HISTORIOGRAPHY: The theory and practice of historical writing, especially history about history. In artwriting this usually takes the form of extended historical commentaries on the writings of key art historians, as in Michael Podro's Critical Historians of Art, Michael Baxandall's Patterns of Intention, Mark Roskill's The Interpretation of Pictures, and so on. Most of these feature case-studies of an historiographic nature. For postmodern applications, see Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism.

HISTORY: For "history" as a category of content in art, see genre. For various aspects of "history" as a branch of knowledge or an account that records, analyses and explains past events, see art history, herstory, historical criticism, historical methodologies, historicism, historiographic metafiction, historiography, metafiction, metanarrative, new historicism, postmodernism.

HISTORY PAINTING: See genre.

HOLISM: The philosophical notion that the structure and behaviour of a system or an organism in its entirety cannot be explained solely as the sum of the operations of its parts.

HOLOTROPE: Gerald Visner? Suggestions anyone?

HOMAGE: Reverence or tribute, as a serf might give to his lord, or an apostle to his master. artists throughout history have paid homage in various ways to those who influence them, as in Odilon Redon's � Edgar Poe.

HOMEOSTASIS: The tendency to maintain constant functioning of organic processes or to attempt to restore constancy when one of the processes is disturbed. For a specific application, see jouissance.

HOMO DUPLEX: Man conceived as having two distinct natures, the body and the mind (see Cartesian interactionism, mind-body problem). George Mauner understood �douard Manet's Bar at the Folies-Berg�re, with its impossible mirror reflection of a male viewer, to be a meditation on this theme.

HOMOLOGICAL STATEMENTS: Statements which are true of themselves, as "English" is an English word (compare heterological statements). One of the basic tenets of formalism is that what an artwork symbolizes is external to the work itself and might just as well be discarded in any serious critique of it. In Ways of World-Making, Nelson Goodman uses the notion of homological and heterological statements to undo this assumption. He maintains that what a symbol symbolizes is not necessarily extraneous to itself, since, for example, "word" is a word which applies to itself and to other words, "short" applies to itself among other things, and "having seven syllables" has seven syllables, as do many other phrases. Formalists, he concludes, implicitly and erroneously maintain that the most important characteristic of art is it heterologicality.

HOMOLOGY: A correspondence, relation, or similarity between structures. In sociological writings, the term is likely to refer to a metaphorical match between the values of a group and its lifestyle. Paul Willis's Profane Culture (1978), for example, shows how the hippie subculture's anarchic reputation was a misconception, for the group's values and lifestyle were highly organized along homologous lines. That is, hippies' espousal of certain values like bohemianism agreed with (found a correspondence with, matched, paralleled) their taste in music and recreational drugs. Dick Hebdige's Subculture (1979) does much the same for the punk phenomenon. Similar homologies can be found for most art movements, especially those in which a marked taste for expressionism is also manifest in an artist's rather freewheeling lifestyle (e.g., Jackson Pollock).

HOMOPHOBIC: Irrational fear and/or persecution of homosexuals.

HORIZON: The limit or range of perception, knowledge, etc. See fusion of horizons, horizon of expectations.

HORIZON OF EXPECTATIONS: The range of values -- aesthetic, economic, moral, religious, social, symbolic, etc. -- a given audience anticipates it will encounter in an artwork. The work functions either by meeting those expectations or by challenging them. The idea is central to reception-theory.

HORROR VACUI: A tendency, sometimes characterized as medieval or primitive, to fill all the available pictorial space with decorative or other motifs, as if "afraid of a vacuum."

HUBRIS: Arrogance, insolence, or pride that leads to misfortune.

HUMANISM: Any attitude that gives priority to human endeavours, rather than to those of the gods, the spirits, the animals, or any other non-human thing. The term is frequently qualified, as in "Renaissance humanism," which is characterized by a love of the achievements of the Greco-Roman world, an optimism that humans are inherently endowed with the skills necessary to reshape the world according to their own needs, and a belief in inherent human dignity. While the Renaissance humanists did not see their enlightened self-interest as a contradiction of their Christianity, a few recent demagogues identify "secular humanism" as a tacitly atheistic preoccupation with human affairs.

HUSSERLIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of Edmund Husserl. See existentialism, phenomenology.

HYMEN: The mucous membrane partially enclosing the vagina in a virgin. Jacques Derrida (see Derridean) used this image in "La Double s�ance," in his La Diss�mination as a metaphor to invent a hypothetical space for the operation of diff�rance in a text. He chose a female image to counter the notion of the phallus as the privileged signifier.

HYPERBOLE: Exaggeration, whether used simply for effect or because of linguistic inflation. Some Baroque ceiling paintings are extravagantly hyperbolic, as in Pozzo's Allegory of the Missionary Work of the Jesuits on the vault of S. Ignazio, Rome. Compare bathos, litotes, meiosis.

HYPERETHNICITY: A serious preoccupation with ethnicity. The word should be used with care, since some opponents of political correctness use it in a thinly-veiled contemptuous manner.

HYPHENATION: A common postmodern technique to draw attention to hidden political and other agendas in supposedly apolitical words. Examples include "dis-possessed" (Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology), "photo-graphed" (Jacques Lacan, "What is a Picture?" Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis), etc. Sometimes it is not really necessary, as in "re-vision" or "re-presentation."

HYPOCRISY: Pretending to be what one is not or to believe what one does not. The idea should be discussed with reference to traditional myths about artistic bohemianism and genius, as well as to new ones like anti-intellectualism and political correctness.

HYPOTAXIS: The grammatical arrangement of words in dependent or subordinate relationships of causality, logic, space and time, usually taken as a characteristic of mature, formal or disciplined speech. It is opposed to "parataxis," the grammatical arrangement of words in coordinate relationships where subordinate ones are called for. For example, the statement "You should try and get some sleep" is incorrect because "You should try to get some sleep" properly indicates that the second verb is dependent upon the first. The statement "Although Seurat's intention was to render the canvas more luminous, he failed because the optical mixture was too evenly distributed" is properly hypotactic because the failure is in spite of the stated intention. The statement "Seurat tried to render the canvas more luminous and he failed..." is paratactic because the causal relationship is obscured by "and," which uses coordination. There is an understandable temptation to interpret art paratactically because images appear to be presented in terms of coordination. I.e., Arnolfini and His Bride could be described in a paratactic sequence: "a man and a woman are standing in a room with a bed, and a dog stands at their feet, and there are shoes set to one side, and there is a chandelier with one candle, and there is a convex mirror, etc." As soon as we start to speak of figurative meaning, however, we must use causally subordinating relationships: "The wedding vows are understood to be holy because there are shoes set to one side, which is a conventional act of respect when standing on holy ground." Theorizing a set of criteria for visual hypotaxis and parataxis might provide some useful weapons for the fight against perceptualism. On another level entirely, hypotaxis has occasionally popped up as a metaphor in discussions of political correctness, with white male language construed as a hypotactic grammar of power (i.e., an instrument designed to subordinate those who have not mastered its niceties of expression). This is the ground for the recent debate about Ebonics in California.

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