Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College
WORDS OF ART: THE G_LIST

WORDS OF ART: THE G_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.

GADAMERIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer. See fusion of horizons, hermeneutics, prejudice, timelessness.

GANZ ANDERE, DAS: The "wholly other," which Georges Bataille developed into his theory of heterology. The phrase occurs in the religious writings of Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, but it is most intimately associated with the theologian Rudolph Otto, whose The Idea of the Holy describes it is as the inexplicable otherness of God.

GAZE: See gaze and glance.

GAZE AND GLANCE: Norman Bryson's Vision and Painting critiques realism in painting because its apparent invisibility as technique and as meaning in a social formation appeals to an ahistorical, disembodied, programmatic "gaze." In contrast, he describes the "glance" as anchored in history, in body, in desire, and in improvisation. The latter is preferable because it allows for an aesthetics of disruption. The terminology has become quite fashionable and can be found nearly anywhere. See also essential copy, perceptualism, social formation. Cf anchoring gaze. Jacques Lacan's use of the word "gaze" is more abstract and psychological, describing the fact that individuals are caught up in the scopic field of others (see scopic pulsion). The gaze is thus fundamentally different from the eye because the former is a network of relations while the latter is simply one point. Moreover, that one point is a scotoma, so individuals are blind to themselves. For Lacan, a "picture" -- especially one which uses traditional linear perspective -- is a kind of trap for the gaze, inasmuch as it puts the viewer into the hypothetical position of the eye, even as it is also inevitably social and psychological. He invented the phrase dompte-regard (as a play of sorts on trompe l'oeil) to describe this function of the picture as a gaze-tamer. Images which deform perspective, as in anamorphosis, fail to trap the gaze and thus are more revealing of desire. Not surprisingly, the famous skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors becomes, for Lacan, a phallus.

GEISTESGESCHICHTE: The history of ideas, or intellectual history. Wilhelm Dilthey argued that if the natural sciences explain events as the results of causal laws, cultural science should explain events in terms of the meanings and intentions that people give them. These meanings and intentions, however, are informed by historical and social change, particularly the total global outlook peculiar to a given period (see Weltanschauung). Geistesgeschichte made inroads into art history in Max Dvoràk's Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Dvoràk saw Medieval art as the visual manifestation of a particular attitude towards Christian spirituality, rather than simply as an effect of contemporary theology. I.e., theology did not cause changes in art; art and theology were both caused by the Weltanschauung. See Zeitgeist.

GENDER: J. P. Chaplin's Dictionary of Psychology lists "gender" simply as "sex -- male or female," while "gender identity" is given as "one's sense of being male or female." In contemporary artwriting, "gender" usually means the latter of these two. This is almost always given additional spin by allusion to the ideas of Michel Foucault (see Foucauldian), who described gender not as biological identity but as the result of various processes of socialization.

GENDER IDENTITY: See gender.

GENDER SYMMETRY: The presumption that for each characteristic of one gender there is some complementary opposite in the other gender. This line of reasoning is now disparaged because it lends itself easily to essentialism. E.g., if men are strong, women are weak. If men are competitors (see competition, report-talk), women are collaborators (see collaboration, partnership).

GENDERLECT: Gender-based differences in conversational style. The two basic genderlects are rapport-talk and report-talk. One wonders if the idea might be used to revise essentialist definitions of gender-based aesthetic sensibilities, as in matriarchal aesthetic.

GENERAL ECONOMY: A term of Bataillean origin, but most recently used by Steve McCaffery in North of Intention to indicate "the distribution and circulation of the numerous forces and intensities that saturate a text." It is thus basically a synonymn for the interrelations of content and context. See also economy, horizon of expectations.

GENERALIZATION: A common structure in informal logic: some members of a group have characteristic X; therefore, members of the group in general have characteristic X. Obviously, a valid generalization must be based on a representative sample that is of reasonable size and is free of bias.

GENERATIVE-TRANSFORMATIONAL: In Syntactic Structures and elsewhere, Noam Chomsky asked how anyone could understand a sentence they had never heard before and how they could generate new sentences which would be intelligible to others. He proposed the existence of a linguistic deep structure (see deep structure and surface structure) with a finite number of so-called "rewrite rules" which allowed competent speakers to predict or "generate" an infinite number of possibilities. Then he proposed a set of "transformational" rules allowing speakers to analyse and reorient sentences (e.g., changing a passive verb to an active one), which in turn facilitated the production of any number of new surface structures. A speaker's level of understanding of the generative-transformational properties of language, even if intuitive, determines his or her level of what Chomsky called "competence," while a particular utterance was a matter of "performance" (see language and parole). The idea has two potential applications in artwriting: the first is in asking whether variations on a given theme -- for example, the femme fatale of the late nineteenth century -- were intelligible because of a historically specific deep structure (in which case linguistics overlaps with Geistesgeschichte); and the second is the more abstract consideration of why (or whether) visual imagery is intelligible at all. (For food for thought on the latter point, see perceptualism.)

GENETIC FALLACY: The presumption that because a certain condition obtains today, it must always have been such, and vice versa. E.g., that people evolved from some kind of apes indicates that people are now higher apes. Similar structures lie behind many popular assertions about the nature of art. That art was once a matter of technical expertise or decoration is thought to be proof that it is so now. In an era of historical relativism, such statements smack of essentialism.

GENEVA SCHOOL: Influential literary school of thought which asserted that a text is the existential expression of an individual consciousness. Accordingly, Geneva school criticism is relatively uninterested in the text as a physical object and more interested in its affective properties. See also affective fallacy, phenomenology.

GENIUS: One of the more overworked conceptions in traditional artwriting, "genius" originally referred to an attendant spirit or tutelary deity of the sort seen sprinkling holy water in Assyrian reliefs. It has become synonymous with transcendant intellectual or creative power and as such is a cliché in basically Romantic descriptions of divinely inspired artists outside history (see pseudotranshistorical). In postmodernism, nothing is seen as outside history, and all conceptions of genius are discarded or at least made secondary to such things as the social formation. See also bohemianism, divine afflatus.

GENRE: See genres.

GENRE CRITICISM: Criticism which foregrounds genres.

GENRES: 1. The various categories of subject matter in the traditional academic hierarchy, in descending order of importance: history, megalography (representations intended to glorify or idealize excessively some event, person or thing), mythology, religion, portraiture (including the portrait historié, a portrait of an historical figure playing the role of a character from history, literature, mythology or theatre), genre (see sense 2, following), landscape, still-life, and rhopography (representations of trivial bric-à-brac, including such things as the remains of a meal, garbage on the floor, etc.). 2. A little confusingly, one of the genres is "genre," the depiction of everyday life, ordinary folk and common activities. Cf bourgeois drama, drame bourgeois, intrigue.

GENUS: See definitional rules.

GESAMTKUNSTWERK: German expression for complete or total artwork, usually associated with Richard Wagner's theatrical integrations of drama, music and spectacle. The idea is applied by analogy to any grandiose work in which a variety of arts contribute to a shared goal, as in the blended architecture, painting and sculpture of Gianlorenzo Bernini's Ecstacy of St. Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel.

GESTALT: German word meaning "configuration," "figure," or any whole pattern with characteristics different from its parts. E.g., the tune of a song is such a pattern because it does not appear in the individual notes. (Leonard Meyer is the strongest Gestalt writer on music.) Similarly, a sentence's meaning does not inhere in the individual words themselves but in the relations between those words. (H. J. Muller is the strongest literary figure in Gestalt literary criticism.) In art history, Gestalt figured prominently in discussions of Minimalism in the 1960s. It could be used in any number of contexts, however, since all it demands is that any individual element of a work be treated not as an absolute term or fixed meaning but as a relative one -- a variable whose meaning depends upon its relations with other elements in the overall configuration. E.g., the cat at the lower left of Hunt's The Awakening Conscience plays a very different role relative to the meaning of the work than does the cat at the foot of the bed in Manet's Olympia. Because certain relationships are filtered out by the context at hand (see meaning effect, structural semantics), a Gestalt approach evokes closure by definition. It is thus opposed to the open-endedness of deconstruction and its derivatives. See Gestalt factors, Gestalt psychology.

GESTALT FACTORS: Conditions which create the perceived effect of a unitary figure (closure) rather than a relation of parts. The most frequently mentioned are contiguity, contrast, proximity, and similarity. For example, eight vertical lines will read as four bars if they are arranged in pairs rather than evenly spaced. Such effects are routinely discussed in artwriting involving the psychology of perception and are, as a result, mostly a matter of visual patterns. However, the same principles can be applied to meaning, as in Gestalt above.

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY: The study of human behaviour and experience as a whole phenomenon. Consciousness, for example, cannot be studied analytically because the analysis would break it into parts which would cease to bear any resemblance to it.

GIFT: A sociological term relating to exchange rituals (e.g., potlatches) and the like in tribal culture. Georges Bataille borrowed the term from Marcel Mauss and gave it a characteristic spin in his discussion of expenditure.

GLANCE: See gaze and glance.

GLOBAL: General; comprehensive; embracing all factors within the field at hand.

GOLDEN SECTION: A mythical proportion which was once fashionable in discussions of compositions with pretensions to perfect harmony and eternal gracefulness. Unfortunately, it can be found just about anywhere one chooses to look for it. It is usually expressed as "(a:b as b:[a+b])" or "the subdivision of a line or any other figure, area, etc., such that the smaller part is to the larger part as the larger part is to the whole.

GOUACHE: See body colour.

GRAM: See grammatology.

GRAMMATOLOGY: Grammatology originally meant only the study of writing as the systematic presentation of meaning in graphic codes and representations (see I. J. Gelb, The Study of Writing). Since Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (see Derridean), grammatology has taken on a far more philosophical tone. Traditional discussions of language maintain that speech existed prior to writing. Derrida argues the opposite. While the smallest meaningful unit of speech would be the morpheme, the smallest unit of writing is the "gram," the mark or trace. The individual grams of a writing have no essential meaning resulting from an actual bond with the things they describe or indicate. Meaning simply arises from the differences between grams and the deferral of meaning that a reader must undertake in order to prevent false closure (see différance). Grammatology, thus conceived as the study of the open-endedness of the text, is a part of the larger program of deconstruction, which has become one of the more influential modes of contemporary critical discourse. Directly related ideas can be found in the work of Mieke Bal, Julia Kristeva, Gregory Ulmer, and many others.

GRAND AUTRE: See other.

GRAND RéCIT: French term for metanarrative.

GREATNESS: Most postmodern writers deny that there is any inherent characteristic of an artwork which ensures that it will last through the centuries as a significant moment in visual history. Certainly form cannot fill the bill because it provides no objective standard that is not compromised by a political construct (see also power). Some simply dismiss the idea of the masterpiece altogether, replacing pseudotranshistorical observations with historically grounded ones. Others retain the idea of greatness, but they try to describe it more matter-of-factly. One such is Stephen David Ross's A Theory of Art, which defines greatness simply as an enduring ability to generate further articulative responses. Because this ability can be produced by conditions of power, by genuine characteristics of the work, by historical accidents, or in any other number of other ways -- none of which are given priority -- and because articulative responses can include everything from refernces in coffee-table books to doctoral dissertations or further works of art, it seems an accurate description of what actually happens to works that have been granted special status by posterity.

GROUND: A basis for action, argument or belief. See groundlessness. For a second, specific sense, see sign.

GROUNDLESSNESS: Derrida's Truth in Painting uses the metaphor of an upturned boot in a painting by Van Gogh to confirm the groundlessness of logocentric assertions of essential meaning. See deconstruction.

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION: A tactic in informal logic: artist X knows artist Y well; artist Y is suspicious; therefore, artist X is suspicious. The tactic works in a valid argument only when the alleged association genuinely exists, when Y is demonstrably suspicious (or whatever), and when there are no relevant premises (such as unstated causal arguments) to differentiate X from Y. The tactic is rarely identified as such in art history, but it is very common, as when Neoplatonists are linked to Michelangelo or linguistic theorists are to postmodern artists.

GYNOCENTRIC: Anything which foregrounds a putatively essential feminine principle can be considered gynocentric. See feminism, gynocriticism, hymen, matriarchal aesthetic. Cf phallocentric.

GYNOCRITICISM: Elaine Showalter's term for the criticism and interpretation of works by women authors. See feminism, feminist criticism.

GYNOPHOBIA: Irrational fear of women. Cf misogyny.
© Copyright 1996 Robert J. Belton
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