WORDS OF ART: THE F

Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College

WORDS OF ART: THE F_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.

FABLE: Any brief tale or fictitious narrative, especially when peopled by talking animals or objects and aimed at teaching a moral lesson. The word is sometimes used as a synonym for plot (see also fabula).

FABULA: Latin for conversation, play, or story. Some writers substitute fabula for plot.

FALLACIES: Most specifically, any of various types of argument in which invalid reasoning is used. See four term fallacy, informal logic, maldistributed middle, post hoc, ergo propter hoc, validity. More loosely, however, the word is used to indicate any error (real or imagined) or wrong-headed belief, as in affective fallacy, biographical fallacy, genetic fallacy, intentional fallacy, pathetic fallacy, stratigraphic fallacy.

FALSE COGNATES: See faux amis.

FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS: A much used term originating with Marx, indicating the failure of the typical human mind to develop any sophisticated awareness of its rooting in historically specific circumstances. Instead of being conscious of how its abilities, contents, habits, and patterns are shaped by circumstances, such a consciouness is not really a material consciousness at all but only conceives of itself as such. Sometimes the term is used as a synonym of ideology, but its origins appear to have been in Marx's conception of "inverted consciousness," which is the result of reification. E.g., religion is produced by society, which promptly forgets the fact, seeing religion as independent and productive of society.

FALSE FRIENDS: See faux amis.

FALSE OBVIOUSNESS OF EVERYDAY LIFE: See masquerade.

FALSIFICATION: According to Karl Popper, a more useful process than verification in distinguishing science from non-science. Universal claims like "all swans are white" cannot be verified because one can never collect all swans to prove to it. However, one can falsify the statement simply by producing one black swan. Science thus can never reach a point at which it can claim, without risk of error, that it has reached the final truth. Of course, the history of science bears out the principle with its frequent revisions, refinements and refutations. By analogy, art history might be profitably considered less as a series of objectively true interpretations than as a series of possibilities which one must eventually subject to falsification. Unfortunately, this only rarely seems to happen. See also corroboration.

FANCY: At one time a synonym of "imagination," fancy was distinguished from it and made subordinate in late eighteenth-century academic thought. Joshua Reynolds, for example, associated imagination with true genius and fancy with mere taste. As a result, where imagination means the power to create something unprecedented, fancy has come to mean a certain resourcefulness in manipulating the already given.

FANTASTIC: There is no unequivocal consensus, but "fantastic" is sometimes used to indicate an imaginative, subjective world of inner expression that transcends mere fantasy or science fiction. One might describe Oskar Kokoschka's The Tempest (Bride of the Wind) in such a term.

FANTASY: Any conscious break with reality, whether in the relatively benign forms of caprices and daydreams, or in the more psychologically charged delusions and hallucinations. In psychological criticism, fantasy can be either creative or adjustive (i.e., compensatory).

FARCE: A narrative depending on improbable situations, outlandish characters, grotesque language and imagery, rather than on well-wrought plot and the like. The term usually carries a spin of "low comedy." When presented in the form "farce-comedy," the term implies high comedy (of serious moral, philosophical or other import) that occasionally makes use of farce elements, as in Woody Allen's later films. Performance and installation artists growing out of the conceptual art of the 1960s and '70s often use farcical elements in their work: examples include Laurie Anderson (sparingly), Blue Man Group, Gilbert and George, General Idea, and Pat Olezko.

FARCE-COMEDY: See farce.

FASCIST FEMINISM: A brand of feminism which is thought by its opponents to be symptomatic of right-wing politics, central dictatorial control, or simply a profound lack of critical self-consciousness. Those who believe affirmative action is reverse discrimination, rather than genuine equal opportunity, would be so inclined. Public policies of hiring only women, as in the instance of the Ontario College of Art in the early 1990s, have been so described. Hannah Wilke seems to have been the first to use the phrase in her art. In the mid 1970s, mainstream feminists disliked her self-portraits with allusions to pin-up girls and she responded with the slogan "Marxism and Art/Beware of Fascist Feminism." More recently, Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae has made similar charges. She even described Gloria Steinem simply as "Stalin" in an interview on 60 Minutes.

FAUX AMIS: False cognates, as in the French "assister à" (to attend) versus the English "assist" (to give aid). For an example specific to artwriting, see herstory.

FEELING: See meaning (sense 1).

FEELING-ORIENTED: See personality types.

FEMICIDE: Title of a 1992 book by Jill Radford describing the misogynous killing of women by men. See feminism, misogyny.

FEMI-NAZI: Derogatory term for fascist feminism, popularized by abrasive radio personality Rush Limbaugh.

FEMINISM: Although some dictionaries define "feminism" simply as the advocacy of the rights and equality of women in economic, political, and social contexts, there are actually all sorts of feminisms and feminist practices. Moreover, some feminists disagree profoundly with others. Where Heidi Göttner-Abendroth calls for a matriarchal aesthetic that transcends historical specifics, for example, Linda Nochlin once wrote that such a feminism was essentialist and the antithesis of historical action. The two basic types of feminist interpretation are what Elaine Showalter called feminist criticism and gynocriticism (works about women versus works by women). Deeply affecting the forms these approaches take is a wide variety of responses to Freudian and/or Lacanian thought, hermeneutics, linguistics, and Marxism, among others. Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler's Feminist Dictionary (1985) gives a thorough picture of the myriad possibilities. Feminisms have become very nearly the dominant orthodoxy in certain circles, prompting a controversial critique of some feminist strategies as pseudoscientific propaganda. See, for example, Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? See also backlash, bi-sexism, l' écriture féminine, fleshless academicism, hymen, masculism, matriarchy, new masculinity, patriarchy, sexism, subject presumed to know, victimarchy, woman as the not-yet, etc.

FEMINIST CRITICISM: Showalter's term for criticism of the artistic productions of male authors, especially (but not necessarily) in their treatment of the image of women and in their relations to a female audience. See also feminism, gynocriticism.

FETISHISM: 1. Originally, a fetish was an object in which a spirit was embodied or which had magical power. The term was adapted by anthropologist E. B. Tylor (in Primitive Culture) to mean a veneration or near-idolatrous worship of such objects. (For a related but specialized use of the term, see commodity fetishism.) 2. In psychoanalytical theories, fetishism is a pathological condition in which the fetishist, unable to acknowledge an attraction for some threatening or forbidden object of desire, finds gratification by displacing the impulse onto the object's possessions or nonsexual body parts. A frequently repeated illustration is the case of a young boy who sees a nude woman for the first time, only to be shocked by the absence of a phallus. Castration anxiety traumatizes him to the extent that he will "provide" the woman with a symbolic phallus, which is typically the first more or less phallic shape he sees when he averts his eyes -- her foot or a shoe. Both sense of fetishism appear in art: for sense 1, some connoisseurship certainly entails the fetishism of artworks; for sense 2, one need look no further than Surrealism, which frequently capitalized on fetish objects like shoes (Salvador Dalí's hat designs), carpet beaters (Hans Bellmer's Doll photographs), feet (Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'or), and so on.

FICTION: Under construction. In his Gospel Fictions, Randel Helms characterizes fiction as "a story written to affect the present, rather than to describe the past."

FIELD: A physical plane; a sphere of activity; a context; a discourse; the totality of an individual's perceptions in a given period or the psychological representation in consciousness of same; and so on. See also consummatory field, discursive practices, expanded field, field dependent, field independent, field theory.

FIELD DEPENDENT: One who cannot ignore irrelevant data in a perceptual field is said to be field dependent. When one uses the idea in a critique of artwriting, one must be careful to ascertain that the data are genuinely irrelevant to a particular task. (How one defines "task" here is crucial.) A person who is constantly reminded of, say, William S. Burroughs by some feature of a Die Brücke woodcut is clearly field dependent because of the anachronism involved (Die Brücke preceding Burroughs by decades). The situation would not be so clear cut if the same person were reminded of Burroughs by Laurie Anderson, whose debt to Burroughs she has acknowledged.

FIELD INDEPENDENT: One who can ignore irrelevant data in a perceptual field is said to be field independent. Field theory argues that such a person is behaviourally normal, whereas a field dependent person is not.

FIELD THEORY: In Principles of Topological Psychology, Kurt Lewin tried to alter Gestalt theory in a manner that would account for individual motivations. He argued that because an individual lives in a personal field, parts of which are of no use or interest (see field independent), experience is highly selective and much perceptual data is simply ignored. To account for why a given thing will be of interest to person X but not to person Y, Lewin invented positive and negative valences -- the former indicating importance and attractiveness, the latter the absence of same -- and vectors - - inducements toward or away from some object. With these basically linear concepts, Lewin mapped out human behaviour. Marxist theory argues that the circumstances of production impinge upon the mind of an artist, but it rarely articulates why two artists in roughly similar circumstances often produce fundamentally dissimilar works. Field theory might provide an alternate explanation.

FIGURATION: An act of representation in figures.

FIGURATIVE: 1. Any expression of one thing in terms of another thing, by means of language that rejects the literal in favour of a figure of speech or a trope. Strangely, audiences often forget to consider the figurative in visual images -- particularly photography -- even though they readily recognize that common speech is riddled with figurative expressions like "she was on cloud nine." Visual images are no less figurative, ranging from pure conventions like personifications to more imaginative tropes. 2. Artwriters sometimes use "figurative" simply to mean that an image contains recognizable images (i.e., that it is not abstract or non-objective). Since this usage does not distinguish between literal and figurative in the sense given above, it is considerably less precise.

FIGURE: A numerical or other symbol; a written or printed character; a graphic representation of a form; a figure of speech; etc. See also figurative.

FIGURE POEM: Another name for carmen figuratum.

FIGURE OF SIGHT: See figure of speech.

FIGURE OF SPEECH: Any use of language that replaces a literal expression (e.g., "he was angry") with an indirect one, like the conventional statement "he was beside himself." Tropes are generally more inventive and individual figures of speech. (They were once called "figures of thought" to distinguish them from more conventional expressions, but that usage is outdated.) Some literary critics have argued that there are "figures of sound," meaning such things as alliteration, poetic repetition and rhythm. A hypothetical "figure of sight" could go either way, being either a matter of formal repetition or figurative language in visual imagery. (I hesitate to imagine what a "figure of smell" might be.)

FIGURE OF THOUGHT: See figure of speech.

FILIOPIETISTIC: Pertaining to an excessive reverence of ancestors or tradition. Some coffee-table type books which praise artists unreservedly as geniuses could be described as filiopietistic.

FINE ART: Visual art considered primarily for its aesthetic or theoretical character, including its meaning and significance independent of practical application, as opposed to commercial art. See also high art (culture).

FIXATION PAUSE: Brief moments between saccades during which the eyeball is not moving and something comes into focus. The meaning of a printed word is conveyed during such a moment, giving some idea of the rapidity with which meaning is constructed by a succession of perceptual instants. Saint-Martin's conception of the coloreme exploits the phenomenon in an attempt to contruct a uniquely visual semiotics.

FLAT: Although it is an oversimplification of Clement Greenberg's position, artists and artwriters of the 1960s and early 1970s agreed with his assertion that the essential characteristic of painting was its flatness. This led to post-painterly abstraction on the one hand and to minimalism on the other. See formalism, modernism.

FLAVOUR: A predominant quality or characteristic, as in the exotic flavour of a Delacroix painting.

FLESHLESS ACADEMICISM: Under construction. Basically the notion that a critical method (i.e., academicism) can be objective and rational (i .e., fleshless), instead of driven by desire (i.e., by the body, or flesh). Certain feminist writers (e.g., Chantal Chawaf) believe this to be impossible.

FLOATING: Barthesian term for the slipping away from significance into signifiance (sic).

FLYING BUTTRESS: See buttress.

FOIL: Originally, a slip of shiny metal placed under a translucent jewel to increase the amount of light it reflects. By extension, the term is commonly used in literary criticism to refer to characters whose personalities contrast those of the protagonist in order to show the latter in a better light. Similar examples can be found in art. For instance, David's Death of Socrates includes a number of men barely able to contain their grief; they serve in part as foils to the stoic resolution of Socrates to put himself to death. The term works for formal analysis as well: Brancusi often designed bases for his sculptures which functioned very much as foils for the forms they supported (e.g., Bird in Space).

FOLK ART: Traditional representations, usually bound by conventions in both form and content, of a folkloric character (see folklore) and usually made by persons without institutionalized training.

FOLK ETYMOLOGY: Where etymology, deriving from the Greek etymon (true), is the study of the literal meanings of words according to their origins (or first recorded usage), folk etymology is the unsystematic application of similar principles, sometimes leading to errors, faux amis, and fanciful connections where there are none. One might make the mistake, for example, of assuming that "doxy" in "orthodoxy" (literally, "straight opinion," implying correctness and goodness) is related to "doxy" ("woman of loose morals"). The assumption of relation ignores the words' different origins (the Greek "doxa" and the Middle Dutch "docke"). Related abuses of word origins can be found in deconstruction (for example, dissemination), hyphenation and certain neologisms (for example, herstory). Cf confabulation.

FOLKLORE: Traditional customs, fables, legends, myths, proverbs, sayings, tales, and the like. Folklore has had a direct influence on literature and art. Examples of the latter range from the illustration of Dutch proverbs by Terbruggen to Kandinksy's veiled Russian folktales in his early abstract art.

FOREGROUND: 1. Noun. The part of a field of vision that is closest to the audience. 2. Verb. To give priority to one aspect of a thing over another. See also baring the device.

FORENSIC: Aristotelian term for that type of rhetoric used chiefly to condemn the actions of others. See also deliberative, epideictic.

FORE-PLEASURE: In "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming," Freud argued that writers convert their fantasies into literature by softening their egostistical character and "bribing" the reader with aesthetic pleasure. Indirectly autobiographical, literature is desirable because it serves to release "yet greater pleasure arising from deeper sources in the mind..., putting us in a position in which we can enjoy our own day-dreams without reproach or shame." He called this mechanism fore-pleasure or the incitement premium.

FORGERY: The direct imitation of another artist's manner for the purpose of defrauding an audience. Because fraud is involved, foregry is not to be confused with appropriation. Cf source analysis.

FORM: The constituent elements of a work of art independent of their meaning (e.g., the colour, composition, medium or size of a flag, rather than its emotional or national significance). Formal elements are primary features which are not a matter of semantic significance -- including colour, dimensions, line, mass, medium, scale, shape, space, texture, value, and their corollaries -- and secondary features which are the relations of the primary features with one another -- including balance, contrast, dominance, harmony, movement, proportion, proximity, rhythm, similarity, unity, and variety. See formal, formalism.

FORMAL: Pertaining to the form of a work; not to be confused with "ceremonial" or "stately," since formal elements can be quite informal in character.

FORMAL ANALYSIS: The study of a work of art with reference to its form, rather than to its content or context. See formalism, new criticism.

FORMALISM: Any of several types of art-making or criticism which foreground form. Because generic formalism was once institutionally entrenched as the most powerful critical approach, artists frequently produced works which catered specifically to it, rather than to self-expression (foregrounding content) or social responsibility (foregrounding context). Particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s, art-making was often discussed purely as solutions to formal problems. This explains why some writers see modernism as more or less synonymous with formalism. Critic Clement Greenberg (see flat) is frequently cited as a prime mover, but formalism can be traced back through Clive Bell (see significant form) and J. A. M. Whistler (see art for art's sake) to Immanuel Kant (see autonomy). See also baring the device, defamiliarization, taxonomy.

FORMAL LANGUAGE: Any uninterpreted system of signs, as in formal logic. For an example, see hermeneutic spiral equation.

FORMLESS: See informe.

FORMULA: A cliché in narrative form; any immediately recognizable sequence of events, particularly common in romance novels, televisions sitcoms, and the like. The same principle applies in visual art exploiting similarly unchallenging narratives, like Paul Delaroche's Tudor history paintings.

FORMULAIC: An adjective describing anything prepared to formula.

FOUCAULDIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of Michel Foucault. See death of the author, discourse, discursive practices, episteme, gender, order, politics, power.

FOUR MASTER TROPES: See trope.

FOUR TERM FALLACY: Informal logic that is defective because the middle term of a syllogism shifts sense in such a way as to introduce an irrelevant element. For example, "all battle-axes are shiny; Picasso's mother-in-law was a battle-axe; therefore, Picasso's mother-in-law was shiny." (Here, the so-called fourth term is the pun or double significance of the concept "battle-axe.) Some of the tactics of deconstruction are founded upon similar fallacies. Derrida's Truth in Painting, for example, manipulates the gait implied by Van Gogh's painting of old boots until it becomes both a sign of what it is (a step, a stride; pas in French) and what it is not (also pas). Some will protest that Derrida's text is not about logic, which simply underlines that it is not effective argument. It would be interesting to consider what alternatives are left. Is it simply creative writing (and therefore a revitalized type of subjective impressionism) with a pronounced existentialist motivation?

FRAGMENTATION: Postmodern discourse, because it lacks uniformity, is often said to be fragmented -- i.e., broken, discontinuous, incomplete, open-ended, etc. Fragmentation is thus desirable because it avoids closure.

FRAME: Although a frame can be anything composed of parts fitting together (like the physical frame of an athlete or a building), the term most often indicates an enclosing border or boundary, both literally and figuratively (see figurative, literal). In literary studies, it is common to find the idea applied in the frame-tale or framework story, both of which refer to a story told within another story, as in Shelley's Frankenstein, which is told via the letters of a northern explorer. The most important application of the basic principle in artwriting is in "Passe-Partout" in Derrida's Truth in Painting. There the frame is used as a metaphor to explore questions of mediation and meaning. Who is telling what within what? Another sort of frame is the passe-partout itself -- i.e., a matte within another, larger frame -- whose bevelled edge metaphorically facilitates turning from one level of meaning to another.

FRAME-TALE: See frame.

FRAMEWORK STORY: See frame.

FRAMING: See frame.

FRANKFURT SCHOOL: A mix of Marxist approaches to economics, philosophy, politics and sociology that has exerted various wide-ranging influences on modern thought and aesthetics. The school is so named for the Institute for Social Research founded in the University of Frankfurt in 1923. The main participants were Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin (see aura), Jürgen Habermas (see postmodernism), Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse (see desublimation).

FREUDIAN: Pertaining to the psychoanalytical studies of Sigmund Freud, usually with a heavy emphasis on the roles played by childhood trauma, the development of sexuality, and the putative existence of essentialist symbolic forms. The latter is a commonplace in most (if not all) psychoanalytical criticism. See also anxiety of influence, castration, cathexis, condensation, date stamp, day-dreaming, displacement, doubling, dream-work, ego, fore-pleasure, hysteria, id, latent content, manifest content, oedipus complex, pathography, presentiment, secondary elaboration, sublimation, superego.

FREUDIAN CRITICISM: Criticism emphasizing orthodox Freudian ideas. There are other sorts of psychological criticism which make use of Freudian ideas but for reasons that Freud had not foreseen. See, for example, erotics of engagement.

FUNCTIONS OF ART: Introductory books and study guides on art history usually give a variation of the following as the basic functions of art: to adorn, to beautify, to express, to illustrate, to mediate, to persuade, to record, to redefine reality, and to redefine art. Ellen Dissanayake (see ethology) adds that art serves as therapy, gives meaning to life, gives unselfconscious experience, provides paradigms of order and/or disorder, and trains perception of reality. See also art, definitions of art.

FUNDAMENTAL IMAGE: A predominant image, aspect or unifying characteristic of a text, apart from a distinct and repeated metaphor or other trope, which would be called a controlling image.

FUSION OF HORIZONS: Gadamer's term in Truth and Method for the fundamental differences (and/or the reconciliation of same) between the perspectives of author and audience. Cf horizon of expectations.

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