Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College
WORDS OF ART: THE R_LIST
WORDS OF ART: THE R_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.
RACISM: Systematic discrimination and other
forms of
oppression directed at members of other races. The problem
has appeared in
art and
artwriting in a variety of forms, ranging from descriptions
of simple illustrations of the problem, both pro and con, to
thorough investigations of whether the
canon of mostly
DWMs is part of a larger conspiracy to exclude non-whites.
RADIAL BALANCE: A "pinwheel" balance achieved by contriving parts of an image to spin more or less from a central point. The classic example is Rubens' Rape of the Dauighters of Leucippus.
RANDOMNESS: Under construction.
RATIOCINATION: Under construction.
RATIONAL: Under construction.
RATIONALISM: Under construction.
REACTIVE: See
proactive.
READER-RESPONSE: Under construction.
READING: Under construction.
READ INTO: Colloquial expression referring to the practice of producing meanings in the reverse of what had been thought to be the normal pattern, prior to postmodernism, from artist to work to audience. That is, the viewer tends less to extract what is thought to be "genuine" meaning from the work in favour of pushing meanings of his or her own back into it. While this phrase has most often been used rather dismissively (as in "you're just reading into it what you want it to be"), the practice has become commonplace -- even valorized -- in postmodernism, albeit on a more complex level.
READ OUT OF: Under construction.
REAL:
Lacanian term, originally for what might be expected, the
actual and verifiable, as opposed to the
imaginary and the
symbolic. In later writings, the term has taken on a
slightly more developed sense: since everyone operates
psychologically within the realm of the symbolic, no-one can ever
truely gain access to the real, meaning that it is forever just out
of reach. In that sense, then, it is not "verifiable." Since
art can only deal with the imaginary and the symbolic,
then, the real in this sense has little utility in
artwriting.
REALISM: A highly problematic word with
different connotations in different contexts. 1. In popular
parlance it means a generic species of representation that looks real, in the sense that some
art history uses the word
naturalism. In this sense, realism is the representation of
a putatively unmediated world, by whatever means (see
mediation). One of the common themes of
postmodernism is a challenge of this still-popular notion.
See, for example,
discursive activity, énonciation,
perceptualism. 2. In traditional
art history, Realism (with an upper case "R") denotes the
type of realism practiced in the nineteenth century by Gustave
Courbet and his successors, often involving some sort of
sociopolitical or moral message, if only by virtue of
context. 3. Philosophy provides the third and fourth
senses: in scholastic philosophy, realism means what most people
understand as "idealism," i.e., that (more or less Platonic)
universals have a genuine, tangible existence; 4. in more modern
philosophy, realism is very nearly the exact opposite, the "common
sense" attitude that real objects exist independently of their
being observed. Sometimes called "metaphysical realism," this
latter position is cast in doubt by much postmodernism as well.
Notable examples are Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific
Revolutions and Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature. Both assert that claims to have discovered objective
truth, in science and philosophy respectively, cannot be
substantiated and must be replaced by conceptions akin to
paradigm shift.
REALIST THEORY: Under construction.
REBUS: Under construction.
REBUTTAL: See
evidence.
RECANTATION: Under construction.
RECEIVED OPINION: A relative consensus about
something. Received opinion varies widely, depending upon which
group is being investigated. For example, the received opinion
about Vincent Van Gogh in the popular imagination is that his
art looks the way it does entirely because of (what is
thought to be known of) his state of mind. In such instances,
received opinion usually arises without debate or reflection. This
is less true of special interest groups. For example, within the
art history commmunity, the received opinion about Van Gogh
would be more likely to take into account his artistic influences,
current
art theory, his religious upbringing, etc. Unless qualified
in some way, "received opinion" usually connotes more of the former
than the latter, and thus says something about the attitudes
developed by
posterity.
RECEIVER: In information theory, the audience or target towards which a communication is intended.
RECEPTION THEORY: Under construction.
RECHERCHé: Under construction.
RECOGNITION: Under construction.
RECONSTRUCTION: Under construction.
RECTILINEAR: Under construction.
RECUPERATION: Under construction.
RED HERRING: See
irrelevance.
REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM: Under construction.
REDUNDANCY: In
information theory, the desirable repetition of the same
message in different
codes, so that the receiver can still get the message in spite of
noise. (The same principle is behind the use of
oversampling in compact disc players). In
art, one might argue that
form and
content should harmonize in some way so that, say,
expressive brushwork could convey the sense of unease as
effectively as a particular choice of subject matter -- especially
important in an era when
audiences seem increasingly unlikely to have had the
education or inclination to recognize something specific about the
latter. (For example, how many viewers of Anselm Kiefer's paintings
have really read any epic poetry about Shulamith and Margarethe?
And how many readers of current art magazines have actually read
all of Derrida's Truth in Painting?) However, it is
important not to lose sight of the idea that a lack of redundancy
-- that is, a supposed
failure of form and content to harmonize -- could have a
very desirable effect as well. In many other
contexts, the word simply means an undesirable repetition.
REDWARE: Under construction.
REFERENCE: Words are thought to take on
meaning in a variety of ways. A common sense approach is
that words have some sort of direct relation to the thing they
signify, their referent, but only
onomatopoeia actually has anything like a direct relation.
In
Saussurean
semiotics, all words are thought to have meaning strictly
because of the
paradigms in which they find themselves and not because of
some imagined reference to the world outside
language. Genuine reference, in fact, is denied altogether,
which is what makes it possible for
deconstruction to exist.
Peircean semiotics, in contrast, argues that an
icon and an
index have meanings determined by their relation to their
referents: i.e., if the sign resembles the referent, it is an icon;
if the sign has some existential relationship with the referent, it
is an index. For Peirce, only the
symbol has as purely arbitrary a relationship as that
imagined by Saussure.
REFERENT: The thing (event, object, person,
etc.) to which an
icon,
index,
symbol or other
signifier refers. See reference.
REFUSAL: Occasionally used as a near synonym
of
subversion. See, for example, Dick Hebdige's Subculture:
the Meaning of Style (1979).
REGIONALISM: Under construction.
REGISTRATION: Under construction.
REIFICATION: The act of making something
abstract into something concrete. In
Marxist terminology, reification usually means treating
human actions, characteristics and relations as if they were
objective things with an independent existence. Religion, for
example, is treated as something given to humankind, rather than
created by it. In some Marxist writings, reification also means
treating humans more or less as things without independent will,
responding passively to the dictates of a world of objects. See
false consciousness.
REINFORCEMENT: Under construction.
RELATIONAL PAINTING: Under construction.
RELATIONSHIP: Under construction.
RELATIVE: The opposite of absolute; that
which has a connection to, dependence upon, or relation with
something other than itself. In formal terminology, e.g., "relative
scale" means the apparent size of a thing in a given
context. An awareness of relative scale is especially
important in slide lectures, which show students works of
art as if they were all about the same size as the screen.
RELATIVISM: The philosophical doctrine that
perceptions of things vary with circumstances, especially the
social formation and its hypothetically infinite diversity,
but also embracing most conceptions of
subjectivity. The upshot of the idea is that there are no
universal standards of such things as human nature, for the nature
of the humans of one era or region have differed so fundamentally
from that of another era or region that any attempt to prove human
nature "A" more essential than human nature "B" will be little more
than a statement of preference (see
boo-hooray theory). There are various relativist
approaches:
Marxism, for example, would argue that
meaning is dependent upon the class system at a particular
point in time, whereas
feminism might argue that meaning is dependent upon one's
gender.
Postmodernism in general is relativistic in its denial of
the existence of any standards of objective truth (see
objectivity). Accordingly, some traditional
artwriters see relativism as a threat to the very idea of
humanistic education (see
humanism). One such is E. H. Gombrich, who uses the phrase
"cultural relativism" in Topics of Our Time to describe the danger inherent in, for
example, the assumption that a German physics will differ
inherently from a Jewish physics. His objection, however, simply
indicates that he believes there is still a valid
analogy to be drawn between
artwriting and the hypothetical objectivity of science. See
also
absolutism.
RELATIVITY: Under construction.
RELAY: See
anchorage and relay.
RELEVANCE: 1. Generally used to indicate
practical usefulness and social applicability or responsibility, as
in so-called
politically correct demands for university courses that are
"relevant" to
marginal groups in society. 2. A more specific sense
pertaining to
informal logic, that in an
argument a premise must increase the probability of the
claim it is intended to support. For example, if the goal were only
to demonstrate that Georgia O'Keeffe is internationally famous, it
would be irrelevant to point out that she taught in Texas and
Virginia. The latter point is true, but it contributes nothing to
the claim. A multilingual, multinational bibliography would be
considerably more relevant. See
irrelevance.
RELIEF: Under construction.
RELIEVING ARCH: Under construction.
RELIGIOUS PAINTING: Under construction.
REMINDS: A useful metaphor when considering
meaning and
validity of
interpretation. Anyone can say "that person reminds
me of so and so," and the statement cannot be logically evaluated
because reminding is often quite irrational. Moreover, that the
statement is made at all is evidence that it is true, unless the
speaker is deliberately misleading the listener. In contrast, the
statement "this person looks like so and so" can be
evaluated according to relatively objective criteria, like actual
measurements of the features, body types, bone structure, etc. One
measure of an interpretation's validity might be the degree to
which the object "reminds" or "looks like" something for the
artwriter. See
interpretatio excedens,
meaning in and meaning to, read into.
REPETITION: Under construction.
REPLY: See
power.
REPOUSSé: Under construction.
REPOUSSOIR: Under construction.
REPRESENTATION: Under construction. Send suggestions to
bbelton@klo1.ouc.bc.ca.
REREDOS: An altarpiece.
RESERVE: Under construction.
RESERVE HIGHLIGHT: Sometimess also called "reserve light," in watercolour painting, an area of untouched paper, usually white, which functions as a highlight relative to the colour areas around it.
RESIST: Under construction.
RESOLUTION: Under construction.
RETABLE: An altarpiece.
RETARDATAIRE: The perpetuation of styles and
motifs after they have passed out of fashion, often used
pejoratively.
RETINAL: Visual; pertaining to the sensory
membrane in the eye that receives imagery focused by the lens,
communicating with the brain via the optic nerve. Marcel Duchamp's
famous turn to a more conceptual type of art was precipitated by
his resentment of the popular conception of artists as merely
retinal beings (that is, that they were interested only in vision
and not in ideas).
RETINAL LAG: The amount of time required by receptors in the retina to recover from a stimulation. If recovery were instantaneous, motion pictures and the phi phenomenon could not be experienced as continuous movement. See also afterimage, persistence of vision.
REVERSAL: Under construction.
REVIEW: Under construction.
RE-VISION:
Hyphenated word intended to put a
postmodern
spin on the conventional word "revision." Unlike some
hyphenated
neologisms which successfully draw attention to radically
suppressed word origins, this one adds little, raising the question
of whether or not hyphenation is a useful critical tool or a superficial fashion. (It is probably
both.) Adrienne Rich appears to have invented the term, but it is
now used everywhere. See, for example, Howard Smagula's anthology
of theory and criticism entitled Re-Visions.
REWRITE RULES: See
generative-transformational.
RHETORIC: Under construction.
RHETORICAL: Under construction.
RHETORICAL CRITICISM: Under construction.
RHETORICAL GESTURE: Under construction.
RHIZOME: A root-like plant stem that
usually travels horizontally, producing buds above ground and roots
below. In the writings of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, the
term is used as a
metaphor for an
epistemology (and/or simple
intellectual curiosity) that spreads in any number of
directions, without the usual academic or disciplinary
straightjackets requiring it to travel in a pre-ordained direction.
Any truly democratic type of
multiculturalism must involve something along this line.
RIGHT AND WRONG INTERPRETATIONS: See
plausibility,
testability, and
validity.
RISING ACTION: See
complication.
RITUAL: Under construction.
RITUALISTIC: See
mind-set.
ROLE-PLAYING: Increasingly popular approach
to
parody, in which the artist acts out the part of some
cultural
stereotype by mimicking it ironically. Cindy Sherman's work
involves a good deal of this in a generic form. It is much more
specific in Canada, with Vincent Trasov running for mayor of
Vancouver as Mr. Peanut, Tanya Mars portraying Mae West in the
performance video Pure Sin, etc.
ROSIN DUST: Under construction.
ROTULUS: Under construction.
RUBRIC: Under construction.
RUNE: Under construction.
RUSSELL'S PARADOX: Under construction.
RUSTICATION: Under construction.
© Copyright 1996 Robert J. Belton
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